The Conclusion raises the question of how the study of the literature and visual cultural of non-Greek-speaking, non-Constantinopolitan communities in the East Roman empire should relate to Byzantine studies. It further asks how the literature and visual culture of these communities should be seen as relating to Byzantine studies after these communities came under Muslim political control. A cultural, “Big Tent,” understanding of Byzantium is advocated for, one which de-privileges the state and which recognizes the importance of Christianity and its literary and visual manifestations for defining Byzantium as an object of study. This exapanded view of Byzantium includes in Byzantine studies the broader eastern Mediterranean world, Greek-speaking and non-, Chalcedonian and non-, Christian and non-.

Historians of Judaism often call the first Islamic centuries the “gaonic period.” The term alludes to the gaonic yeshivot – scholastic academies in Abbasid and Buyid Baghdad, as well as in Palestine, whose leaders helped to canonize the Babylonian Talmud. However, this essay argues that these yeshivot were not commensurate across regions. I revisit the early history of the Palestinian yeshiva and conclude that it developed long after its Iraqi counterparts, likely sometime in the tenth century. The essay closes by considering briefly how this thesis might help us begin to better understand the Palestinian rabbinic culture that preceded the yeshiva–a distinct form of rabbinic Judaism that thrived in Byzantine and Umayyad Palestine during the fifth to eighth centuries, before giving way to a new brand of gaonic rabbinism imported from the Abbasid heartlands.

As the recovery of the rich history of the expansive Byzantine Commonwealth pushes forward, we must renew our emphasis on the sturdy multi- and cross-cultural foundation upon which it was constructed. Christian Caucasia was a charter member of the Byzantine Commonwealth, but its social fabric and cultural orientation remained locked on the Iranian world for centuries to come. The fundamentally Iranic, or Persianate, nature of Christian Caucasian society is a reminder of the intense cross-cultural connections of Rome-Byzantium and Iran across late antiquity and into the medieval period.

Pilgrims to Sinai in the fourth century witnessed a flourishing monastic presence at the traditional sites of God’s revelations to the Prophets Moses and Elias. Sinai was an extension of the Holy Land. As such, it was also a part of the Greek speaking world. This is borne out by inscriptions dating from the sixth century, when the Emperor Justinian ordered the construction of a basilica and surrounding fortress walls. And yet, if Greek was the language of the Sinai monks at that time, it was not exclusively so, for Sinai was the destination of monks and pilgrims from the whole of Christendom. The history of the centuries immediately following must be reconstructed from the surviving documentary evidence. Manuscripts, icons, and the writings of Saints Hesychius and Philotheus testify to continuity at Sinai. It is especially in the basilica of Sinai that we can sense this continuity even today.

By the late fifth century, Armenian writers had developed a local historiography including the idea of righteous kingship linked to and assisted by the new institution of the Christian episcopacy.This essay considers the Letter of Macarius and the royal establishment of Christianity from the perspective of several early Armenian historians.

If the Armenological scholarship of the past five decades is any indication, close and deep examination has tended to reveal shared concerns, broader cultural horizons, and a strong sense of Armenia’s connectedness to other traditions and places. This could be shown for virtually all periods of Armenian history, but this essay focuses on the seventh to tenth centuries. Exploring some points of convergence between Armenian and Byzantine artistic traditions, I ask three very specific questions: 1) Is there such a thing as an Armenian imperial image? 2) What if an Armenian church were constructed in the imperial palace at Constantinople? and 3) What if an early medieval Armenian icon panel was shown to have survived? These are all hypothetical scenarios, but they are not entirely fantastical; each finds at least some support in historical evidence. Moreover, all of them urge a broader, more complex, and more dynamic conceptualization of visual culture than most studies of Byzantine and Armenian art have allowed.

Ethiopia is home to a unique Christian culture dating back to Late Antiquity. Even after the Ethiosemitic language of Gəʿəz died out as a spoken language after the collapse of the kingdom of Aksum, it remained for centuries and, indeed, down to the present, as one of the mainstays of the Ethiopian Church. This ancient culture has been shaped by such historical factors as the kingdom of Aksum and its contact with the Roman Empire, relations between medieval Ethiopia and the Coptic Church of Egypt, and political events within Ethiopia. In the course of its long history, the Ethiopian Church has not only produced a vast literature of its own but has also preserved translations of literature now lost in its original language.

The pseudo-Arabic motifs found in middle Byzantine religious structures in Greece, especially at the tenth- to eleventh-century monastery complex of Hosios Loukas, document an awareness of Arab-Christian communities in the “Near East,” especially religious foundations of the Holy Land that were among the most revered centers of early monasticism. A variety of Christian portable objects inscribed with Arabic and pseudo-Arabic – including manuscripts, icons, and liturgical vessels and furnishings – offer possible vehicles for the dissemination of Arabic as a Christian language and for Arabic and pseudo-Arabic inscriptions as signs of ancient monastic authority. Networks of communication between the Byzantine Empire and regions of the south-eastern Mediterranean (that were under Islamic political hegemony) facilitated the movement of people, things, and ideas. Tracing the dissemination of the visual culture of Arab-Christianity generates a revised map of middle Byzantine artistic and cultural connections, challenging Constantinople’s status as the dominant model for middle Byzantine art and central source of Orthodox Christian authority and identity.

Ultimately in the end of the 6th century the Kingdom of Makuria was converted to Christianity and entered into the orbit of strong Byzantine cultural and civilizational influence

A hundred years of Byzantine influence set an indelible stamp on the Christian culture of Makuria, which flourished for close to 700 years, until the turn of the 13th century, as an “African version of Byzantium”. Greek was the official language of the Church as well as administration, strongly impacting Old Nubian, which was commonly written already by the mid 11th century. Byzantine iconography from before the iconoclasm remained the base of a flourishing local art, represented by wall paintings among others, created for an artistically sophisticated Makurian society, at the royal court as well as in the monasteries.

Great changes have taken place in the approach of historians to the topic since the publication of East of Byzantium (1980). Instead of centre-periphery or top-down models they now see the relations between Byzantium and the east in terms of connectivity, networks and horizontal ties. This is connected with the spread of late antiquity as a concept and includes a great expansion in Syriac studies. Late antiquity now embraces the emergence of Islam and looks towards Eurasia; another challenge is posed by the rise of global history. But these developments, with the new focus on the fall of the western empire, raise major problems of identity for Byzantium itself, and indeed for western Europe.

The Monastery of the Holy Virgin of Anba Bishoi in Sketis (nowadays known as Wadi al-Natrun, Egypt) was founded in the early sixth century. In the seventh century, a church was built that was decorated with artistically and iconographically important wall paintings. Probably at the end of the eighth century a group of Syriac monks from the region of Tikrit joined this Coptic community. It meant the beginning of a process of cultural interaction between Syriac Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox Christianity that would continue over the following five centuries and lead to the introduction of the unofficial name of the monastery as Dayr al-Suryan, under which it became renowned for its library. Not only this library became a testimony of the important position of the monastery as a centre of learning and culture, the church, dedicated to the Holy Virgin, also illustrates this in the mural paintings, stucco decoration, and woodwork that were produced during the period of Egyptian/Syriac cohabitation. The early tenth-century abbot Moses of Nisibis played a crucial role in the development of the monastery. The chapter gives an overview of this rich heritage and the gradual rediscovery of the paintings and text in the church of the Holy Virgin over the last twenty-five years.

In this chapter we explore the textual and material evidence for the transformation of the city of Antioch in northern Syria from the seventh through ninth centuries. Through observations of the environmental shocks, including the Justinianic Plague, which first arrived in AD 542, as well as the effects of a series of major earthquakes, we assess demographic changes that likely accompanied these events. Following this, we explore some possible reconstruction of the population of Antioch and its hinterland. In the early medieval period, a reassessment of the material evidence, read together with descriptions from medieval texts, demonstrates that a level economic and social activity, probably significantly exceeding previous estimates, persisted through the ‘Dark Ages’ of the seventh-ninth centuries.