SEVEN

A LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMED

Cities

T

HE LANDSCAPE of high imperial Palestine was dominated b ythe
pagan city. It was there that wealth was concentrated, and there that
patterns of expenditure generated b ythe Greco-Roman ideolog yof
euergetism resulted in the production of monumental structures and public
writing.^1 These were rare outside the city, but where they existed they were
unambiguousl yderived from urban models—bathhouses and basilicas, marked
with inscriptions in Greek. In Syria, large villages had long been important,
and in the high empire, man yaspired to be cities of the standard Greco-Roman
type.^2 Smaller villages on the whole lacked monumental construction and pub-
lic writing, except occasionall yfor monumental grave complexes.
B ythe fifth and sixth centuries, the landscape had been transformed. The
cities remained important; indeed, some of them grew. Aelia Capitolina, a
backwater in the high empire, became, as Christian Jerusalem, a metropolis
with a population estimated at 50,000–80,000. Negligible desert settlements,
such as Sobata, Mampsis, and Nessana, grew and some of even became
cities—small (Elusa, the largest of the Negev settlements and the onl yone
among them that was unambiguousl ya cit y, is thought to have had a popula-
tion of about 10,000) and chaoticall ylaid out, but cities all the same.
Jerusalem and the Negev cities were unquestionabl yanomalous. The tre-
mendous growth of the former was obviousl ydue to its importance in Chris-
tian theology; it was second only to Constantinople as an ecclesiastical center.
The growth of the Negev cities is more problematic: recent surveys show that
the northern Negev as a whole was surprisingl ydensel yinhabited in the fifth
and sixth centuries, and probabl ylater. The well-known sites were all sur-
rounded b yvillages and farmsteads, and winepresses are extremel ycommon.
The area as a whole is comparable to the limestone massif of northern Syria,
another agriculturall ymarginal region that flourished under the later Roman
Empire at a time when the densit yof population in adjacent, rainier areas
was at its maximum.^3 The presence at Nessana, which was perhaps no more

(^1) See G. Woolf, “The Roman Urbanization of the East,” in S. Alcock, ed.,The Early Roman
Empire in the East(Oxford: Oxbow, 1997), pp. 1–14.
(^2) See Millar,Roman Near East, pp. 17–23.
(^3) See G. Tate,Les campagnes de la Syrie du NordI, Institut franc ̧ais d’arche ́ologie du proche-
orient, Bibliothe`que arche ́ologique et historique 133 (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1992).