Project Muse. - Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity

W hen the old antiquarian and polymath, Pliny, was registering the cities of the Near East in the fifth book of his Natural History in the middle of the first century CE, he remarked that in central Syria the great emporium at the Palmyra oasis lay between two powerful empires: inter duo imperia summa Romanorum Parthorumque (NH 5. 88). In other words, it lay between the Roman Empire and the Iranian Empire of the Parthians. Romes authority extended eastwards somewhat beyond Damascus, while the Parthians were in control as far west as the right bank of the Euphrates. But in the year 224 the Parthian Empire gave way to the empire of the Sassanians, who sought to revive the great Persian Empire of the Achaemenids. Only a century or so after that, Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople after himself. The city was, however, soon to be generally known as the New, or Second, Rome, or simply Rome, and consequently Yet, despite these colossal upheavals, the confrontation of superpowers that Pliny had so concisely formulated in the first century remained fundamentally unchanged. In the fourth century, as in the first, Palmyra, although now incorporated into a Byzantine province and home to a legionary detachment, still looked to two great empires, to the west and the east, one of Romans, or Byzantines, and the other of Iranians, now the Sassanian Persians.

Already in the third century the Sassanians had launched three devastating invasions to the west across Syria and Asia Minor. The havoc wrought by their armies left an open wound in the minds as well as the landscapes of the Romans at that time. To their military defeat was added the ultimate humiliation of the Persian capture of the Roman emperor Valerian in the summer of 260. When the Byzantine Romans took over the administration of the eastern Mediterranean lands, Persia remained as powerful a rival and threat as before, but with the conversion of Constantine to Christianity the confrontation of these two great powers was complicated by the establishment of a monotheist government in Byzantium in the face of the continuing dualism of Persian Zoroastrianism. The ambitions and animosities of both empires were accordingly reignited by religious zeal on both sides. Nature had long since dictated the main geographical area for Persias challenge to Rome, as Pliny had perceived. The territory at risk lay between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates River, which bounded the Sassanian realm, with its capital at Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia. This vulnerable territory in the Near East included greater Syria, Palestine, Transjordan, Anatolia, and the nascent Christian kingdom of Armenia.

The fifth century saw new and more subtle ways for the Byzantines and the Persians to challenge each other, and to win allies for their rulers and religions. The internal dissent that arose among Christians after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 greatly complicated the role of the Romans of Byzantium, although Chalcedonians and Monophysites certainly could, and occasionally did, join forces when necessary. But new opportunities for forging alliances arose in late antiquity. Both Byzantium and Persia found it increasingly effective to lend their support to client peoples in marginal areas, where the conflict between the superpowers could be played out more remotely. Alliances of this kind were quite unlike the old Roman imperial habit of propping up dependent, or so-called client, kings in tiny principalities. The sheikhs of the Jafnid clan, the so-called Ghassnids, allied themselves with the Byzantine emperor, who thereby acquired influence in Syria, Palestine, and northern Arabia according to the shifting settlements and families of the clan. The sheikhs of the Narids, traditionally known as Lakhmids, forged links with Persia that brought Sassanian influence directly into the Arabian peninsula.

Even so, there had been no open conflict between the two superpowers in these regions until the Arabs of imyar, in the southwestern part of Arabia, provided the catalyst that brought in the empires of Byzantium and Persia, as well as the lesser but nonetheless expanding empire of Ethiopia as well. A surge of imperialist ambition on both sides of the Red Sea proved to be explosive, and it serves to open up an unfamiliar but immensely revealing window on late antiquity generally.being, fueled by a new religion that we know today as Islam.

Between the beginning of the third century and about 270, the pagan king (negus) of Ethiopia controlled an army that occupied parts of southwestern Arabia.

The titulature of the negus in the fourth century is known to us from the extensive epigraphy of Aezanas, or Ezana, whose inscriptions allow us to follow his career in some detail. He began as a great pagan ruler, claiming to be the son of the god Ares, who was equated with the Ethiopian Marem, and he ended as a devout Christian ruler who proclaimed that he owed his kingship to God. We can watch the whole process of conversion played out in the texts of his long inscriptions. The arrival of Christianity did nothing, however, to lessen the irredentist claims of the negus, even as he transferred his allegiance from Ares (Marem) to the Christian God. Quite the contrary. Ecclesiastical legend, and it may be no more than this, attributes the Christianization of Axum to a certain Frumentius from Alexandria, although the actual date of the conversion of Aezanas is irrecoverable. The inscriptions of Aezanas at Axum proclaimed his grandeur in no less than two languages and three scriptsEthiopic script (left to right) and Sabaic (right to left) for Geez, and Greek letters for Greek. These thereby encompassed the cultures of both sides of the Red Sea.