Rome, New Rome and Baghdad: Pathways of Late Antiquity
By Aziz Al-Azmeh
Carl Heinrich Becker Lecture (2008)
Excerpt: What I propose to do in this lecture is to discuss some salient features of Late Antiquity as a category in historical studies and then move on to the theme of Islam in Late Antiquity along the pathways indicated in my title: I will take up, successively, first a fairly late illustration of one particular feature of Late Antiquity in Baghdad, Constantinople, Rome and Paris: namely views of the heritage of Greek Antiquity. I will then move on to the second, crucial, part of this lecture, passing through Mecca and Damascus, and discussing the emergence of the Muslim religion in its late antique setting, attempting to set this particular move in the context of the Arab Empire. In this way, I shall present to you the elements of what would constitute a book on Islam in Late Antiquity.
The notion of Late Antiquity was to come into its own in a coherent manner in decades subsequent to Riegl and Becker. If the Sorbonne, under the impact of Henri-Iréné Marrou, a great reader of Augustine, introduced courses on l’antiquité tardive in 1966, a Google search today would reveal some 650,000 entries under the term. There is now in existence a Journal of Late Antiquity, and the University of California has an inter-campus group on Late Antiquity. Several academic centres devoted to the study of this period are now in existence. That this historiographic category, however imprecise in definition, and however controversial and given to internal inconsistency and controversy almost by virtue of its name, is mainly studied in the medium of the English language may well reflect the relative Anglo-Saxonisation of the academic world to which exception is often taken. Let us not forget that Anglophone scholarship also brought into wider circulation what is generally known as post-colonial historiography and social science – this is a trend with which I have little personal sympathy, but it has nevertheless produced the collateral advantage of opening up perspectives on ostensible marginality hitherto foreclosed by institutional habits.
Advertisement
But this strength of Anglophone scholarship in the study of Late Antiquity is also, and crucially, due to the inspiration of that other major reader of Augustine, Peter Brown, who inaugurated what Andrea Giardina, in a highly critical and much quoted reflection called the “Esplosione di Tardoantico”.
Inaugurating the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity last September, Peter Brown said he had, in the 1960s, to labour against “local certitudes”, against the artisanal certitudes of faculties of classics, and needed to commit what he called “the crime of thinking wide about the ancient world.” 13 In historiographic terms, this meant that he needed first of all to endow specific inflections to the period we have now come to call late antique – its temporal parameters and its substance are not frequently defined with precision, and have given rise to many a disagreement, but, much as I am tempted, I do not now have the time to go into this most interesting matter, except to say that I believe that although Late Antiquity has indeed become an academic discipline, it is not yet a coherent historiographic category.
Rome, New Rome and Baghdad: Pathways of Late Antiquity
By Aziz Al-Azmeh
Carl Heinrich Becker Lecture (2008)
Excerpt: What I propose to do in this lecture is to discuss some salient features of Late Antiquity as a category in historical studies and then move on to the theme of Islam in Late Antiquity along the pathways indicated in my title: I will take up, successively, first a fairly late illustration of one particular feature of Late Antiquity in Baghdad, Constantinople, Rome and Paris: namely views of the heritage of Greek Antiquity. I will then move on to the second, crucial, part of this lecture, passing through Mecca and Damascus, and discussing the emergence of the Muslim religion in its late antique setting, attempting to set this particular move in the context of the Arab Empire. In this way, I shall present to you the elements of what would constitute a book on Islam in Late Antiquity.
The notion of Late Antiquity was to come into its own in a coherent manner in decades subsequent to Riegl and Becker. If the Sorbonne, under the impact of Henri-Iréné Marrou, a great reader of Augustine, introduced courses on l’antiquité tardive in 1966, a Google search today would reveal some 650,000 entries under the term. There is now in existence a Journal of Late Antiquity, and the University of California has an inter-campus group on Late Antiquity. Several academic centres devoted to the study of this period are now in existence. That this historiographic category, however imprecise in definition, and however controversial and given to internal inconsistency and controversy almost by virtue of its name, is mainly studied in the medium of the English language may well reflect the relative Anglo-Saxonisation of the academic world to which exception is often taken. Let us not forget that Anglophone scholarship also brought into wider circulation what is generally known as post-colonial historiography and social science – this is a trend with which I have little personal sympathy, but it has nevertheless produced the collateral advantage of opening up perspectives on ostensible marginality hitherto foreclosed by institutional habits.
But this strength of Anglophone scholarship in the study of Late Antiquity is also, and crucially, due to the inspiration of that other major reader of Augustine, Peter Brown, who inaugurated what Andrea Giardina, in a highly critical and much quoted reflection called the “Esplosione di Tardoantico”.
Inaugurating the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity last September, Peter Brown said he had, in the 1960s, to labour against “local certitudes”, against the artisanal certitudes of faculties of classics, and needed to commit what he called “the crime of thinking wide about the ancient world.” 13 In historiographic terms, this meant that he needed first of all to endow specific inflections to the period we have now come to call late antique – its temporal parameters and its substance are not frequently defined with precision, and have given rise to many a disagreement, but, much as I am tempted, I do not now have the time to go into this most interesting matter, except to say that I believe that although Late Antiquity has indeed become an academic discipline, it is not yet a coherent historiographic category.
Click here to read this article from Perspectivia.net
Related Posts
Subscribe to Medievalverse