Syria and Palestine in the Byzantine Empire

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

While it makes sense to study the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Jordan and the region of Turkey known as Hatay around the city of Antakya—ancient Antioch) as one entity, the events of the twentieth century have made it difficult for scholars conducting fieldwork in Syria and Lebanon to then gain permission to work in Israel and the Palestinian territories and vice versa. Therefore, when approaching the subject of Syria and Palestine in the Byzantine Empire, it is important to remember that this approach tends to be from two perspectives; those who concentrate more on Syria/Lebanon and those who work more in Israel and the Palestinian Territories and/or Jordan. There are also arguments for including some of the eastern provinces of Anatolia (contemporary Turkey) within this category as they were also viewed as part of Greater Syria during the Byzantine period. However, within the context of this bibliography the decision has been made to include Antioch and the Hatay region, which have always been culturally allied to Syria, but to exclude northern regions such as Osrhoene, which form part of the related, but distinct, Mesopotamian culture. The rationale for this is that while all such designations are somewhat arbitrary, the decision was made in this case to leave aside a region that had its own distinct language, culture, and religious beliefs that do not map precisely onto those of greater Syria. While there are some survey volumes, all in the field acknowledge that contemporary politics makes it impossible for scholars to gain an overview of the material culture of the region, although it is possible to do this from an historical standpoint. Therefore in the bibliography below you will find that the material tends to offer a perspective on either the north or the south of the region in question, but it is relatively difficult to find academic studies that are able to do the entire region justice by including material that is finely balanced to encompass the entirety of Byzantine Syria and Palestine. The Levant has always stood at the crossroads of various world empires, and this was no less the case in the Byzantine period. When Constantine moved the axis of the Roman Empire eastwards toward his new capital city on the Bosphorus, it could have been expected that Syria and Palestine would become more closely integrated into this new formulation of the Roman Empire. However, the cultural, linguistic, and religious fault lines that historically ran through the region meant that the ‘Eastern Roman Empire’ encompassed a wide range of religious practices under the umbrella of imperial rule and this diversity extended to questions of early Christian theology and ritual practice. While those in urban areas were likely to hear homilies and attend theological debates that adhered to the standard beliefs of the Constantinopolitan ecclesiastical hierarchy, out in the provinces there was a wider range of opinions being expressed by itinerant preachers who addressed villagers, herders, and even the bedu in their native Aramaic and Syriac dialects. Therefore this bibliography is intended to highlight to the reader the fact that Byzantine Syria and Palestine was the heartland of the Christological controversies that fractured the oikoumene (this term designated ‘the inhabited world’ for the ancient Greeks but later came to be equated specifically with the Christian world) long before other more famous controversies. Finally the periodization of historical epochs is always complex and open to varying interpretations, but that for the purpose of this bibliography we will take the usual date of 324 ce and the foundation of Constantinople as the beginning of this period but be less dogmatic about the end of the epoch. Instead of accepting that the Battle of Yarmuk in 636 ce was the end of Byzantium in Syria, we will say instead that it meant the end of Byzantine rule but that Byzantine culture was to survive for some time longer.