THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYAntioch and Apamea. For once we also have evidence from papyri from Nes-
sana in the south-west Negev, as well as archaeological evidence from urban
centres such as Rehovot in the central Negev,^4 Oboda and Elusa, which also
developed during this period, to set alongside the results of surveys. There
is plentiful evidence of viticulture and olive-growing, as well as material evi-
dence of elaborate irrigation methods for agriculture in this dry region, such
as dams, aqueducts, cisterns and the like. The comparison with modern tech-
niques for cultivating arid regions such as the Negev is very striking, although
conclusions can be premature. Interestingly, the towns of this period in the
Negev seem to have been more market and administrative centres for the
surrounding countryside, which was thickly dotted with villages, than urban
centres on the late classical model.
A similar pattern of settlement density can be traced in other ways. The
impressive number of mosaic pavements surviving from churches, syna-
gogues and other buildings from this period in Palestine demonstrate the
level of investment in buildings, even if not general prosperity. The large city
of Scythopolis (Bet Shean) shows no sign of declining until the city was hit
by earthquake, probably in 749 (Chapter 7), and a bilingual balance from the
city, inscribed in Greek and Arabic, seems to suggest that the local popula-
tion had found a modus vivendi with the new elite of the Umayyad period,
while a Greek inscription of 662 from Hammat Gader, on the east coast of
the Sea of Galilee, uses dating by both the regnal year of the caliph Mu‘awiya
and the era of the former Greek city and Roman colony of Gadara. Reliable
stratigraphy from excavation, which would yield better dating indicators, is
admittedly often lacking, and surface fi nds may prove misleading. Yet popu-
lation growth, development of towns and increased levels of cultivation and
irrigation have been widely noted, not only in the Negev, but also in northern
Syria and the Hauran. In contrast, there seems to have been a distinct falling
away in many cases from the seventh century onwards, when, besides the
effects of plague, the civil war under Phocas and the later invasions must also
have taken their toll, together with a degree of emigration to the west. Some
of the smaller and more remote of the many monasteries and hermitages in
the Judaean desert seem to have fallen out of use in the seventh century,
like the monastery of Khirbet ed-Deir, a cliff-side coenobium built in a linear
fashion like those at Choziba, Spelaion and Theoctistus, though the large cen-
tral ones survived into the Islamic period; a major factor in the reduction in
number was the eventual disruption under new conditions to the impressive
economic and market system which had previously enabled them to fl ourish
so spectacularly.^5 All this precludes any straightforward equation of military
investment with prosperity, and raises the question of how to explain the
demographic increase.
Many, though not all, scholars have seen a downturn setting in before the
seventh century.^6 This is still debated, and it is better not to imagine that there
was a single unifi ed late antique economy, even within the more prosperous
east. Opinions vary, for instance, as to how much the Sasanian occupation of