Rome, Persia, and Arabia

Shaping the Middle East from Pompey to Muhammad

Greg Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780415728805
• eBook ISBN: 9781000740905
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Rome, Persia, and Arabia traces the enormous impact that the Great Powers of antiquity exerted on Arabia and the Arabs, between the arrival of Roman forces in the Middle East in 63 BC and the death of the Prophet Muhammad in AD 632.

Richly illustrated and covering a vast area from the fertile lands of South Arabia to the bleak deserts of Iraq and Syria, this book provides a detailed and captivating narrative of the way that the empires of antiquity affected the politics, culture, and religion of the Arabs. It examines Rome's first tentative contacts in the Syrian steppe and the controversial mission of Aelius Gallus to Yemen, and takes in the city states, kingdoms, and tribes caught up in the struggle for supremacy between Rome and Persia, including the city state of Hatra, one of the many archaeological sites in the Middle East that have suffered deliberate vandalism at the hands of the 'Islamic State'. The development of an Arab Christianity spanning the Middle East, the emergence of Arab fiefdoms at the edges of imperial power, and the crucial appearance of strong Arab leadership in the century before Islam provide a clear picture of the importance of pre-Islamic Arabia and the Arabs to understanding world and regional history.

Rome, Persia, and Arabia includes discussions of heritage destruction in the Middle East, the emergence of Islam, and modern research into the anthropology of ancient tribal societies and their relationship with the states around them. This comprehensive and wide-ranging book delivers an authoritative chronicle of a crucial but little known era in world history, and is for any reader with an interest in the ancient Middle East, Arabia, and the Roman and Persian empires.

1 Writing the History of (the) Pre-Islamic Arabs

Introduction

For a long time the study of the place that the Greeks and Romans called ‘Arabia’—a vast area stretching from the Peninsula up into the southern parts of modern Jordan, Syria, and Iraq—remained tucked away in obscurity at the edges of the classical world. Even though figures as famous as Alexander the Great and the Roman emperor Augustus were fascinated by Arabia and assembled ambitious expeditions to explore it, the region was of only minor interest to a discipline whose centres of gravity were located far away in the Mediterranean. For scholars of later periods the pre-Islamic age was sometimes overlooked, because the emergence of Islam, the conquests of the Middle East and North Africa, and the building of the caliphates seemed the most suitable topics on which to focus questions about Arab politics, religion, identity, and literary culture. In consequence, pre-Islamic Arabia remained in a disciplinary no-man’s land between the study of the classical world and that of the Islamic period—of some interest to both, but not really belonging to either. The results of this academic ambiguity are easy to see in any library catalogue. While Irfan Shahîd began his multi-volume project with Rome and the Arabs in 1984, providing an in-depth examination of the subject, it was not until 2001 that a concise single-volume historical work on pre-Islamic Arabia appeared in English.¹ Before 2007 no new single-volume work on Arab Christianity had been published since 1979, and to this day no up-to-date book exists in English on the topic.²

In the last two decades, however, the history of pre-Islamic Arabia has steadily emerged from obscurity, both in academia and, more generally, in the mainstream media. The attacks of 9/11, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring and its attendant crises from Tunisia to Syria, the Saudi-led war in Yemen, the actions of the so-called ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS), and the ongoing assault on cultural heritage across the Arab world have all focused intense scrutiny on the Middle East.³ There is now a veritable groundswell of work on the region covering every conceivable angle, including new concise histories of Iraq⁴ and Syria,⁵ as well as detailed works on the histories of Baghdad⁶ and Damascus.⁷ There is a proliferation of websites, mailing lists, newspaper articles, and books covering historical sites damaged in the turmoil that has consumed the region—places such as Palmyra⁸ and Aleppo,⁹ or the hundreds of other lesser-known locations of archaeological, historical, and cultural interest, many of which date from pre-Islamic antiquity.¹⁰ The efforts by groups such as ISIS to eradicate religious and cultural difference, through attacks on specific archaeological sites such as Palmyra and Hatra as well as savage attacks on religious communities, have called attention to the diversity of the ancient Middle East in both the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods.¹¹

The tragic course of events subsuming much of the Arab world has, in its own way, driven an appetite for further information about the Middle East and its complex history. Much of this information has come from the academy, both in terms of articles and specialised studies, as well as cultural preservation initiatives such as Shirin International or the American Schools of Oriental Research’s Cultural Heritage Initiatives.¹² Within the academy, however, a far older and quite separate course of events had long laid the necessary groundwork for a more subtle and inclusive understanding of the pre-Islamic Middle East.

Towards the end of the twentieth century there was an important shift in the way that scholars approached the study of the ancient world. Emerging as the discipline of ‘Late Antiquity’ (with the term, either capitalised or not, also used informally to denote, in general, the post-classical period) it brought to the fore a methodology that radically altered conventional ways of viewing the ancient Mediterranean. The traditional geographic and temporal boundaries that delineated the history of classical Greece and Rome were upended, and broader vistas were opened up for enquiry; ranging from Ireland to China, and examining an elastic timeframe anywhere from c. ad 200 to 800 or later, the study of late antiquity pulled the periphery—in the east, places like Arabia, Persia (Iran), Central Asia, Armenia, and the Caucasus—into the classical academic centre, creating a more expansive research area where Arabia and places like it became relevant to scholars of the Graeco-Roman world.¹³ The different lands of the Middle East came under renewed scrutiny and pre-Islamic Arabia, as something of an untapped research area, attracted the attention of a whole new range of scholars. The work of specialists of South Arabian inscriptions became of much broader interest to Roman historians, while experts in Old Arabic or anthropologists of tribal¹⁴ societies found themselves in more intense dialogue with experts on Greek epigraphy. This multifaceted effort, very much a product and feature of the late antique discipline, has delivered a vastly improved understanding of so many research areas that were previously not necessarily included in the classical discipline, including pre-Islamic Arabia. Despite the impediments to research in the Middle East, work continues apace to this day. A Saudi project is currently translating the numerous Graeco-Roman witnesses to pre-Islamic Arabian history into Arabic, while in 2015 the first-ever critical anthology of sources on pre-Islamic Arabia and the Arabs, Arabs and Empires before Islam, was published.¹⁵ Proof of the vitality of the field is provided by the fact that while Arabs and Empires was in press, a Franco-Saudi team working in Saudi Arabia published a clutch of new inscriptions that overturned one of the major parts of the book!¹⁶ Even in war-torn Yemen, ancient inscriptions are still being discovered.¹⁷ One of the most interesting of all the late antique research areas today is the study of early Islam (‘Paleo-Islam’) and its relationship to the sixth-century Middle East. In a reflection of the multidisciplinary basis of late antique studies, current projects on this topic foster a dialogue between scholars of early Islam and those studying the pre-Islamic period.¹⁸

Contemporary observers of the crises in the Middle East draw attention to the Sykes–icot Agreement and the decisions made at the end of the First World War that laid the foundation for the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire. These events did much to create the ‘old order’ in the Middle East which has now been so violently dismantled by the calamities in Syria and Iraq.¹⁹ As Christopher Phillips has recently shown, the behaviour of external state actors continues to shape and drive conflict in the region and impact the lives of its citizens.²⁰ Sykes–Picot is now over a century old, but, from a broader perspective, it was just one of many attempts throughout history by outsiders to influence the political and demographic map of the Middle East. In antiquity, older efforts by more distant ‘Great Powers’ also had a profound impact on the political, religious, and cultural boundaries of the region, and for those caught in the middle, the situation resembled an ancient form of ‘the Great Game’—the nineteenth-century struggle between the British empire and Tsarist Russia for influence in Central Asia.

Focusing on the Arab peoples of the ancient world, this book looks back to a period dating from the arrival of the Roman general Pompey in Syria (63 bc) to the birth of the Prophet Muhammad and the Muslim conquest of much of the Middle East (c. ad 570–650). The history of the Arabs during this time, viewed through the prism of their relationship with their neighbours, is of deep interest for understanding a more distant shaping of a region whose modern volatility echoes the violence and turmoil of its ancient past. The lengthy period between Pompey and Muhammad witnessed a complex struggle between Rome, Persia, and the kingdom of Himyar in Yemen for the political and religious loyalties of the peoples of the Middle East, including those recognised as ‘Arabs’, who lived in the numerous ‘Arabias’ known to Graeco-Roman writers. Arabs found themselves swept up in the political and religious cross-currents of the time, and became unavoidably drawn into imperial diplomatic initiatives, military campaigns, and interregional strife. Arab troops supported Roman, Himyarite, and Persian armies in their continual conflicts, and complex proxy wars were waged for the allegiance of groups of Arabs throughout the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. Persian kings campaigned along the eastern coast of Arabia, and eventually conquered Himyar, while Roman armies sought to extend imperial influence throughout the Red Sea. Both Jews and Christians were part of Arabia’s religious culture, and Roman ambassadors sought to convert the Himyarite kings to Christianity. Religious violence between Jews and Christians at Najran in the 520s produced a celebrated literary outpouring that, some argue, left an imprint in the Quran. Christian Arabs in what is now Syria and Jordan became benefactors of churches, erected Arabic inscriptions on Christian monuments, and assumed positions of great authority in Roman political life. All of this happened against the backdrop of the imperial supremacy of Rome and Persia—the Great Powers of the time—and the less imposing, but no less consequential, influence of the kingdom of Himyar.

Before turning to the arrival of Rome in the Middle East, it is necessary to address several important issues: the meaning and use of the terms ‘Arabs’ and ‘Arabia’, as well as ‘tribe’ and ‘state’; questions about sources; and the relevance of imperial power to the st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note to the reader
• 1 Writing the history of (the) Pre-Islamic Arabs
• 2 Between Rome and Parthia
• 3 Enemies, allies, and pretenders, AD 211–500
• 4 Arab statesmen in the sixth century
• 5 Legacy
• References
• Index