THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYArabs in the Near East before IslamThe Arab federates were not merely military allies of the great powers (Chap-
ter 9); they also acted as local patrons and infl uenced both religious and eco-
nomic life. At Resafa again, a meeting point for semi-nomadic Arab pastoral-
ists, a building traditionally identifi ed as a praetorium, though decorated ‘within
the standard repertoire of fi fth- and sixth-century church decoration’, bears
an inscription commemorating al-Mundhir, phylarch 570–81, with a standard
Greek acclamation familiar from many inscriptions and graffi ti: ‘the fortune
of al-Mundhir is victorious’, or ‘Long live al-Mundhir!’^19
This al-Mundhir usefully held off attacks from the Arab allies of the Per-
sians until he fell in 581 to long-standing imperial suspicion; it is interesting to
fi nd that an earlier stand-off between him and the emperor in Constantinople
had been settled in 575 by an exchange of oaths at the tomb of St Sergius.^20 A
complex balance existed in these regions between pastoral Arabs and monas-
tic communities. We have already seen that there is a reference to a ‘church’ of
al-Mundhir in the letter signed by 137 heads of anti-Chalcedonian monaster-
ies. Such Arab infl uence could also make itself felt very directly, as when in
the fi fth century another Arab leader called, in Greek, Amorkesos (formerly
subject to the Persians), had gained control of the island of Jotabe, possibly
in the Gulf of Aqaba:
Figure 8.1 The so-called ‘praetorium’ at Resafa