Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

328 12. land, labour and settlement
focused away from villages, either towards towns or towards the luxurious
and isolated rural dwellings of the rich.
Despite gaps in the available evidence, it seems clear that there was something
of a contrast between rural settlement in the east and in the west. In
the east, settlement appears to have been dominated by the compact village,
with little evidence of dispersed farmsteads through the countryside,
including little evidence for luxurious country dwellings of the aristocracy,
while in the west dispersed settlement was common, and there is considerable
written and archaeological evidence for aristocratic rural houses.
The papyri of Egypt show conclusively that country life in the Nile
valley revolved around the village. A similar picture emerges from saints’
Lives from Asia Minor, such as the Life of Nicholas of Sion, describing events
in south-western coastal Lycia in the mid sixth century, and that of
Theodore of Sykeon, from central Anatolia near Ankara, covering the
period around a.d. 600. 23 Villages, not dispersed settlements, are the backdrop
to both saints’ lives, and both men deal with people who are very often
described as being from a particular village.
Archaeological work in the eastern Mediterranean, particularly in the
provinces of the near east, has revealed hundreds of late antique villages
(see Fig. 7), with large and elaborately decorated churches of the fifth and
sixth century, and with fine houses that suggest that not only peasants but
also the owners of sizeable (but not immense) estates preferred to live
within village communities rather than in isolation on their land. 24 Eastern
surveys have also failed to reveal much evidence for luxurious rural dwellings,
whether in villages or isolated in the countryside. This suggests that
landlords of very large estates in the eastern Mediterranean, who certainly
existed and who in the west would have maintained both an urban and a
rural residence, preferred to live within the cities or in suburban houses, like
the spectacular villas of Daphne just outside Antioch, with their rich mosaic
floors. 25
Villages in the eastern provinces, of course, varied greatly in size and
importance, from tiny settlements to large agglomerations which are technically
‘villages’ only because they did not have the administrative status to
make them Roman civitates or poleis. 26 Modern scholars have, indeed, sometimes
been both confused and confusing in writing of these villages as the
‘cities’ of the Negev or the ‘villes mortes’ of Syria. The confusion is,
however, an understandable one. Some of these villages were sizeable, like
Kaper Pera, north of Apamea, which boasted five churches (see Fig. 8) and
23 Egypt: Bagnall, Egypt 110–47; Keenan (1984). For Theodore, see p. 317 above, n. 4; for Nicholas:
The Life of Saint Nicholas of Sion ed. and trans. I. Sˇevčenko and N. Patterson Sˇevčenko, 1984.
24 Villages are, however, much less apparent in the surveys carried out in Greece, where dispersed
settlement seems to have been common. For larger houses in (or just outside) villages: several examples
in the north Syrian uplands, Tchalenko, Villages pl. cxxv,cxli; and in the Hauran, Villeneuve (1985)
113–16. 25 Levi (1947). 26 Dagron (1979); Kaplan (1992) 90–5.
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