Interlocked within two maritime and two terrestrial settings, Egypt’s geopolitical position has been important for its historical development. This chapter focuses on internal developments in Egypt which, although related to its geopolitical position, were mostly influenced by the evolution of the Muslim polity. The discussion attempts to highlight Egypt’s uniqueness as well as the province’s integration within the broader political structure of the caliphate. While the question of integration can be approached from many different angles, my preference has been to focus on some longue durée trends that reflect both Egypt’s geography and the changes related to the emergence of Islam and the consolidation of its power.

In the introductory chapter, Kearns begins by looking closely at the Idalion Tablet, one of the surviving inscriptions from fifth-century BCE Idalion, on Cyprus, which lists land property in the territory of the town. She uses the inscription to introduce the main themes and arguments of the book. These include a focus on rural settlements and histories to complement studies of urbanism and attention to environmental changes and human experiences with climate through concepts of weathering and unruliness. To build a critical landscape archaeology, the chapter outlines approaches to ancient countrysides and human-environment relationships that push beyond narratives of societal collapse. Kearns also introduces the case study of Archaic Cyprus, a period of transformative social and environmental change, with which she will examine unruly landscapes. The chapter closes with a guide to the remaining chapters as well as a note on periodization.

For more than a millennium (ca. 330 BCE–eighth century CE) the Greek language was an important communicative tool in Egypt, both in written and in spoken form, leaving a firm imprint on Egypt’s documentary landscape. Beyond its communicative capacity, the Greek language in Egypt was important for its symbolic value. This is especially clear in its use in expressing power and social relations. As the language employed by the ruling power, Greek could symbolize the political order, which it did in Egypt under the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine regimes. Greek can also be considered as an identity marker, which helped to define borders between different social groups. The ability to read and write Greek was strongly connected to one’s social position and the concomitant opportunities for education. The significance of Greek in Egypt under Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine rule is therefore clear.

When the Arab armies conquered a territory of more than 13 million square miles extending between the Atlantic Ocean and present-day Afghanistan, they paved the way for the formation of new webs of transregional interaction. One of the most manifest traces of substratal cultural influences on the formation of the early Islamic imperial polity are the lexical borrowings that characterize Arabic documentary sources.1 These loanwords and foreign words2 not only reveal aspects of the historical development of Arabic but are also indicative of the wider formative environment of scribal practices in the early caliphate.

This study surveys the loan vocabulary in Arabic documentary evidence as an indicator of the social geography of the early Islamic empire.3 The question of intentionality or, in other words, the extent to which the use of loanwords in Arabic documents mirrors a conscious employment of foreign technical terminology will, however, remain beyond the scope of this contribution.

The quantity of “non-Muslim” sources available for the study of Egypt during the period under consideration is increasingly coming into sharper focus, in large part due to the publication of several important surveys and literature guides over the past two decades. Most prominent among these are Robert Hoyland’s Seeing Islam as Others Saw it, James Howard-Johnston’s Witnesses to a World Crisis, the initial volumes of Christian–Muslim Relations, and a host of articles by Harald Suermann, Tito Orlandi, Jos van Lent, and Adel Sidarus.1 Moreover, the plenary papers and bibliographies circulated at the quadrennial Coptic congresses, which are published in the congresses’ proceedings, are vital in exploring the breadth of available sources and keeping abreast of developments and publications across a wide range of disciplines focusing at least in part on (Christian) Egypt.2 (The Jewish community in Egypt is scantly documented in the literary and documentary sources of the period studied here.

This chapter adopts a more granular view to examine three places within the Vasilikos and Maroni region that illustrate the complexities of emergent rural landscapes. Three vignettes center on assemblages of environmental materials, site-level processes, and land use practices, from the copper mines and gypsum outcrops of the Vasilikos Valley to the littoral soils of the Maroni watershed.These landscapes mediated the shifting society-environment interactions taking shape alongside the associated growth of rural networks and the town of Amathus. The chapter presents the methodological integration of survey data, excavated materials, paleoenvironmental data, and geoarchaeological analyses that build a holistic picture of emerging vernacular landscapes and their historically contingent ambiguities and complexities.

Chapter 1 focuses on the social groups, the communicative constellations, and the media in which intentional history took shape. Texts in which the first-person plural, the collective ‘we’, was used, were particularly characteristic of this. In this way, they brought the historical events into a direct connection with the current audience. It is identical, as it were, with the past actors. These were his ancestors. The Greeks had countless poems and chants of this kind, which were found primarily in the epics of Homer and Hesiod. Especially among the elites who enjoyed such chants at their symposia, the idea prevailed that in this way their achievements would also be known in the future. As a result, the Greeks did not differentiate between mythical and (in our sense) historical events, and remembrance was also directed towards posterity. At the same time, the texts were firmly anchored in social and religious communication and thus part of life. This went so far that many citizens took part in performances of poetic works themselves (in choirs, for example), thus being themselves involved in the creation of intentional history.