Search Results

Adomnán of Iona's work on the holy places of Jerusalem and surrounding regions (De locis sanctis) has been used as a guide to seventh-century Palestine. In particular, its plans of monuments such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre have been used by archaeologists for information about buildings, while their form interests historians of cartography. However, these plans must be read with the book's several purposes in mind. They attempt to harmonize biblical data (and Adomnán's other literary sources) visually. In addition, they project elements of Iona's monastic liturgy into an alien liturgical space. The plans are not simply illustrations to clarify the text but constitute a distinct, parallel text of their own, with elements shown that Adomnán would not have asserted in writing. They indicate that, for Adomnán, there were different orders of verification for written texts and visual materials such as plans.

This chapter discusses the settlement evolution in the territory of Sagalassos (south-west Turkey) from the start of the Byzantine period until the thirteenth century when Sagalassos was ultimately abandoned and habitation moved to new locations in and around the modern village of Ağlasun. Problems regarding the archaeological recognition characterize the Byzantine material culture of the region. Recent excavations at Sagalassos together with focused ceramic studies and ongoing intensive surveys are changing this and providing insights into a history of habitation that is not uniform within the territory and that is sometimes at odds with processes occurring in Anatolia at large.

This chapter first summarizes the arguments concerning that date of Homer’s epics. It suggests that the Iliad must have been composed over an extended period during the seventh century BC, possibly between 680 and 640 BC. Homer would have been born around 700 BC, give or take a decade. The discussion then turns to speculations concerning Homer’s home territory. The prevailing assumption, which continues to apply today, was that he came from east of the Aegean. The chapter also considers Homer’s travels. As an epic singer, he naturally went from town to town, or from noble house to noble house, to find new audiences. He would have been attracted to gatherings; people who heard him and were impressed by his poems might have invited him to visit their own towns, and the more his reputation spread, the more such invitations he might have received.

This chapter presents some final thoughts about the Arab conquest of Egypt. The detailed discussion of Arab administration from the conquest of Egypt in the mid-seventh century into the eighth century demonstrates flexibility, sophistication, and involvement of Arab administrators in the running of the rich province of Egypt. The dossier of letters written to and by two Egyptian provincial administrators some three generations after the Arab takeover of the country that forms the core of the discussion in this book provides a detailed view into a level of the administration and at a period that so far remained quite impenetrable.

This chapter provides a semiological interpretation of the reading of miracle accounts in Jonas’s hagiography in seeking to understand the function that these accounts played within the texts. It argues that miracle accounts functioned differently with different texts and over time. It builds on the work of French historian Jean-Louis Derouet, who advanced a semiological interpretation of miracle accounts by contrasting them in two different hagiographical corpora from the seventh century. It categorizes miracles according to function, not type, following Pierre-André Sigal’s seminal methodological work on miracles in French saints’ Lives from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Sigal’s classification system of miracles is applied with Derouet’s semiological interpretation to provide a new reading of the miracle accounts in Jonas’s hagiography.

Short conclusion to the work and summary of main themes. When the Lives are studied as a complete dossier, they show complementary and interconnected themes and concerns. This Epilogue provides a summary of the context and motivation behind the writing of Jonas’s three saints’ Lives. Jonas’s hagiography shows the growing alliance between monasteries and secular authorities in the seventh century. This was a time of dynamic social, political, and religious change, processes that are reflected in many ways in Jonas’s own life and works.