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This chapter proposes the First Millennium as an alternative or parallel periodization, arguing that it has the basic advantage of embracing the “long” late Antiquity advocated by Peter Brown: the formation of Christianity and the birth of Islam. Instead of viewing the centuries after 250 as primarily an Age of Empires, the chapter foregrounds pre-600 the two major monotheistic traditions, rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, as they move toward a mature form still readily recognizable today. It then adds Islam, gradually emergent from soon after 600. All three of these major, seminal developments are unique to their period, without parallel in any other. Aside from these three major monotheisms, the chapter shows that Greek philosophy, Roman law, Mazdaism, and Manicheism attained intellectual and institutional maturation in the First Millennium.

This chapter considers the years around 1000 as a viewing point from which to consolidate the argument that emphasizes the First Millennium's distinctiveness. It explores four themes broached earlier in the book, associating each one with a particular city. They are: Tūs, which stands for Iran; Basra, which stands for the encyclopedic erudition of the Brethren of Purity at the end of the tenth century, drawing on the whole heritage of the First Millennium to offer a way of salvation to the Muslim soul; Baghdad, which stands for the Abbasid capital's learned circles and their openness to reasoned argument and Aristotelian logic to facilitate debate between members of the many different faiths espoused by its inhabitants; and Pisa, which stands for the eleventh-century reemergence of Latin Europe, still in the shadow of Islam but bursting already with aggressive energy and a new cultural self-confidence.

This chapter examines several other major learned or religious traditions that flourished during the First Millennium, with particular emphasis on their maturation through exegesis of and commentary on authoritative texts. It first considers Roman law, a tradition rooted in pre-First Millennium, non-monotheistic Antiquity, before discussing rabbinic Judaism, patristic Christianity, and Islam. The goal is to consolidate the argument that the First Millennium was the source not only of the three great texts that have most deeply molded Eurasian civilization (the Christian Bible, the Justinianic code, and the Qur'āan), but also of the exegetical traditions through which these often recalcitrant books were transformed into usable public doctrine.

This book examines history and thought “before and after Muhammad” by offering a new perspective on the debate about “the West and the Rest,” about America's destiny and Europe's identity. One party explains how Europe and eventually North America—the North Atlantic world—left the rest in the dust from about 1500. The other side argues that Asia—China, Japan, and the Islamic trio of Mughals, Safavids, and Ottomans—remained largely free of European encroachment until the mid-1700s, but then either collapsed for internal reasons, or else were gradually undermined by colonial powers' superior technological, economic, and military power. In seeking to overhaul the foundations of this debate, especially as regards the role of Islam and the Islamic world, the book reformulates the history of the First Millennium, by the end of which Islam had matured sufficiently to be compared with patristic Christianity, in order to fit Islam into it. The book draws primarily on Edward Gibbon's account of East Rome and Islam.

In this chapter, the results of a large-scale programme of glass chemical data collation and analysis are presented to argue that glass recycling in the Roman period was far more extensive than has been realized to date. Over 6,000 samples of glass from published analyses since 1999 are interrogated in order to produce a long-term and large-scale data set for recycling evidence. In addition, literary evidence, and data from shipwrecks and other archaeological sites are summarized and considered, and basic modelling is used to suggest the sorts of patterns we should be looking for in compositional data for glass. It is argued that the quantity of Roman glass that was recycled has been underestimated due to several factors, including a lack of consideration of ‘like with like’ mixing, a lack of consideration of the formation processes of the archaeological record, and analytical sampling bias towards colourless vessel glass.

This chapter advances historical ecology as one of a number of approaches to new studies of the first millennium BC. It provides guidelines on how a research team might organize a historical ecological project (in this case, a study of Atlantic Europe during the first millennium BC).