Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

360 13. specialized production and exchange
buildings of Constantinople), but much was almost certainly produced and
sold commercially. 21
This period also saw the rise of a substantial potting industry in Asia
Minor that produced a fine tableware now known as Phocaean red-slip
ware, which is found throughout the Aegean and the Near East. As usual,
despite their obvious importance, local and regional networks of exchange
are at present more difficult to document than the more spectacular overseas
trade; but, as in the Near East, the excavated towns of the Aegean
produce large numbers of copper coins from throughout the sixth century,
and indeed into the early seventh century. 22
The economic history of the provinces of Aegean Greece and Asia
Minor is very similar in the fourth to the sixth century to that of the near
eastern provinces in the same period. The difference comes later, with far
more evident signs of decline in the seventh century than can be found in
the Near East. Rural settlements virtually disappear from the archaeological
maps – perhaps, as in Italy, through a combination of falling population
and the decreasing availability of the manufactured articles that reveal the
presence of people to the archaeologist. In towns, too, there is evidence of
both contraction of settlement and a loss of obvious indicators of prosperity
(coins, churches, datable buildings, etc.). 23
Possibly the seventh-century Byzantine world was not dissimilar to contemporary
Italy, but, whereas in Italy the slide down to the simple economy
of the seventh century had been slow and gradual (beginning perhaps in
the third century, or even earlier), in the Aegean the drop came very suddenly,
after a period of marked prosperity in the fifth and sixth century. On
the evidence currently available, seventh-century Byzantium and seventhcentury
Italy look very different from the contemporary (and by this time
Arab) Near East, where there is much more evidence of continued economic
complexity and prosperity.
In the seventh century the gradual process by which economic sophistication
had moved southwards and then eastwards was complete: in
around a.d. 700 only the provinces of the Arab-held Near East had an
economy similar in its complexity and sophistication to that of the Roman
period. Although this is the end of one story, the subject of this volume,
it is also, of course, the beginning of another. For by the late seventh
century and the early eighth, we find the first signs of economic growth in
some of the provinces that had been so badly hit earlier on – with, for
21 Marble: Sodini (1989).
22 Phocaean red-slip ware: Hayes (1972) 323–70; Hayes (1980) lix–lxi; Abadie-Reynal (1989). Coins:
Morrison (1986).
23 Rural settlement in Greece (there have been no extensive field-surveys in Turkey): Alcock (1985).
Towns: Foss (1975); Foss (1979) 103–15; Müller-Wiener (1986); Frant (1988) 82–94; Brandes (1989).
Coins: Morrison (1986). Unsurprisingly, there is much more early medieval coinage and sophisticated
pottery in Constantinople than elsewhere: Harrison (1986); Hayes (1992).
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