Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

602 21b. syria, palestine and mesopotamia
and early Islamic. 41 There is also a tendency among historians to see the
Byzantine period as a sort of plateau and the Persian and Arab invasions of
the early seventh century as marking a dramatic break in the social and economic
life of the area: 42 in reality, economic and social change probably
occurred over a much longer time-span. While it is sometimes possible to
be certain when buildings were constructed, it is much more difficult to
know when they fell into ruin or disuse. Furthermore, it is not always clear
what archaeological evidence tells us about economic prosperity: the building
of monasteries, for example, could be an indicator of economic expansion
as people endowed the church with their surplus wealth, or it could be
a sign that monasteries were expanding their lands at the expense of impoverished
or depopulated villages. Equally, the intrusion of poorly built structures
on to public open spaces like streets and squares, which seems to
happen in the sixth century in Antioch, Apamea, Scythopolis, Gerasa and
Madaba, among other sites, could show the general decay of urban life or,
conversely, that increased commercial pressures meant that every part of
the urban area had to be exploited to the full. 43 All generalizations about the
economic history of this period have to be treated with some caution.
The fifth and early sixth centuries were characterized by continued
building activities in major cities and the expansion of settlement into marginal
lands in mountainous and semi-arid zones. The planned city with its
broad, paved, usually colonnaded streets remained the ideal of urban builders.
When Justinian rebuilt Antioch after 540, Procopius describes how ‘he
laid it out with stoas and agoras, dividing all the blocks of houses by means
of streets and making water-channels, fountains and sewers, all of which
the city now boasts. He built theatres and baths for it, ornamenting it with
all the other buildings by which the prosperity of a city is wont to be
shown.’ 44 When Anastasius constructed the fortress of Dara, he equipped
it with ‘two public baths, churches, colonnades, warehouses for storing
grain and two cisterns for water’. In the archaeological record, the clearest
evidence for large-scale street layout in the period is emerging at
Scythopolis, capital of Palestine II, where the city-centre streets were
rebuilt and extended in the early decades of the sixth century. 45 There is
41 For example, both Orssaud using ceramic material from the limestone massif of northern Syria
and Watson using the material from Pella have recently emphasized that the pattern is one of continuity
and slow evolution and that there are no clear breaks between the early sixth and the mid eighth
century; see Orssaud (1992) and Watson (1992) and the table ronde ‘De la céramique Byzantine à la
céramique Omeyyade’ in Canivet and Rey-Coquais (1992) 195–212.
42 Tchalenko’s discussion in Villages of the economic life of the villages of the limestone massif is
based on the assumption that this society collapsed with the Muslim conquests. For a recent example
of the same attitudes, see Shereshevski (1991) 222–3; cf. the critique in Cameron (1994) 91–3; for a
helpful overview of the debate see Foss (1995).
43 Kennedy (1985); also Kennedy (1986a) and the recent discussion in Di Segni (1995). For building
and architecture see ch. 31 (Mango), pp. 918,71 below. 44 Procop. Buildings ii.10.2–25.
45 Tsafrir and Foerster (1994).
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