THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN – A REGION IN FERMENT[He] left Persia and travelled to that part of Arabia adjacent to Persia. Set-
ting out from here he made forays and attacks not upon any Romans, but
upon the Saracens whom he encountered. He seized one of the islands
belonging to the Romans, which was named Jotabe and, ejecting the
Roman tax collectors, held the island himself and amassed considerable
wealth through collecting taxes. When he had seized other villages nearby,
Amorkesos wished to become an ally of the Romans and phylarch of the
Saracens under Roman rule on the borders of Arabia Petraea.
(Malchus, fr. 1, Blockley)The enterprising Amorkesos now sent Peter, ‘the bishop of his tribe’, to
put his case to the Emperor Leo, who was not only persuaded, but invited
Amorkesos to Constantinople, entertained him to dinner, presented him to
the senate and gave him the title of patricius, much to the disapproval of the
historian Malchus who tells the story. When Amorkesos left, the Emperor
Leo gave him gifts and public money from the treasury, and he in return
presented the emperor with ‘a very valuable icon of gold set with precious
stones’. The story shows very well the role played by Christianization in Byz-
antine diplomacy, as well as the techniques used to control border territories
and manage local groups. At the end of the fi fth century, however, Jotabe was
recaptured by the governor of Palestine.^21 Also in the fi fth century a certain
Aspebetos, a pagan and a Persian subject, converted to Christianity after his
son was healed by the monk Euthymius, and made Euthymius’ monastery the
centre of an ecclesiastical complex and tented settlement for Christian Arabs.
Euthymius then requested and obtained the appointment of a bishop from
the patriarch of Jerusalem, and with the patriarch’s consent, Aspebetos was
ordained bishop to care for these ‘encampments’.^22 ‘Saracens’ also appear in
Cyril of Scythopolis’s Life of St Sabas both as the grateful recipients of Sabas’s
charity and as potential raiders on Christian monks; in the latter story, set
in the wild area to the west of the Dead Sea, the prayers of the monks were
answered when a chasm opened up in the earth and swallowed up the ‘wicked
barbarians’.^23
The extent to which there was as yet an Arab self-defi nition is controver-
sial. The epigraphic evidence is sparse, but an earlier and famous inscription
from Nemara in southern Syria, dated to 328, and written in Arabic but in
the Nabataean Aramaic script, is one of a small number of examples where
Arabic is used. A certain Imru’ al Qays describes himself in it as ‘king of all
the Arabs’ (the reading is certain, if not the interpretation: the term could be
geographical rather than ethnic). The term ‘king’ is also found in relation to
the Lakhmids and Tanukh and the term ‘Arab’ was used by the Romans; for
instance, in Justinian’s Novel 102, which refers to the province of Arabia as
‘the region of the Arabs’. There are a few examples from the sixth century of
inscriptions in Arabic script, and the linguistic situation was clearly changing,
a development in which the Ghassanids may have played a role. Drawing
on this evidence and on the role of the Ghassanids in later Arab historical