THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYmemory, Robert Hoyland has proposed an emergence of Arab identity in the
pre-Islamic period on the lines of the ethnogenesis theory applied in the case
of such groupings in the west (Chapter 2).^24 The Arabic sources also preserve
a memory of heroic pre-Islamic poetry and aristocratic lifestyles. Arabic was
becoming more widespread by the late sixth century, as seems to be indicated
in the extraordinary cache of sixth-century papyri found in a room of the Petra
Church at Petra in southern Jordan in 1993 (the very year when the fi rst edi-
tion of this book was published), which consists of local documents written
in Greek, as the accepted language of formal dealings, but evidently by people
used to using a form of pre-Islamic Arabic.^25 This discovery, which includes a
large number of texts dating from at least 513–592, has transformed not only
the history of Petra as known hitherto, but also that of landholding practice
and economic activity in the region, and of language use in the sixth century.
Most are private documents, and record land transactions or wills, with dona-
tions to local churches or monasteries, made by all kinds of local people, many
of whom bear civilian or military honorifi c titles, and who have Nabataean or
more commonly Greek names, or both: one document records the marriage
settlement of Theodoros, the son of Obadianos. The better-off among them
own more than 50 hectares of land and lease some out to be worked by oth-
ers, producing wheat, grapes and fruits. They used Arabic to name parts of
their property, and in some cases the names are very close to those in use in
the area today. These sensational papyri from Petra stand alongside the papyri
from Nessana in the Negev discovered in the 1930s; however, the latter also
contain literary material, including a Latin/Greek glossary of Virgil’s Aeneid,
and cover a later period, testifying to the continuance of a form of classical
literary culture even into the Islamic period.^26
Local cultures, language and HellenismThanks to the scholarship of the last two decades, the social, cultural and lin-
guistic history of the Near East in late antiquity, not to mention its religions,
can now be seen as immensely fl uid. The language situation alone is described
by Fergus Millar as an ‘interplay of Greek with Semitic languages, whether
Hebrew or various branches of Aramaic (Nabataean, Palmyrene, Jewish Ara-
maic, Syriac, Samaritan Aramaic, Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA)), with
Egyptian (hieroglyphic, demotic or Coptic), with the languages and scripts
of pre-Islamic Arabia, and fi nally with Arabic.’ In the same volume Robert
Hoyland tentatively includes this phenomenon within ‘an effl orescence of a
whole range of languages and scripts across the Roman Empire’.^27 Millar has
insisted forcefully on the dominance of Greek as the accepted public and
formal language of the eastern Roman empire (despite the continued use of
Latin in certain contexts),^28 but in the Near East this was also a period of
language formation, both oral and written, in which there was a wide range
of language use and experience, from resort to paid translations up to (though
probably not often) actual bilingualism.^29 But language and identity did not