This article provides a detailed overview of the corpus of papyri discovered in the 1950s in a ca... more This article provides a detailed overview of the corpus of papyri discovered in the 1950s in a cave by the Monastery of Kastellion, known in Arabic as Khirbet Mird, in the Judean Desert between Bethlehem and the Dead Sea. The papyri are written in Greek, Aramaic, and Arabic, and they span the Late Antique and early Islamic periods (ca 500-800 CE). The article also attempts to explain why Christian and Muslim documents ended up in the same collection and to illustrate how these texts might contribute to our knowledge about the Monastery of Kastellion and our understanding of the administration of early Islamic Palestine. Three documents are edited for the first time in order to demonstrate the diversity of this corpus.
The Byzantine-Arab Chronicle of 741 of the two texts is often obscure, but this seems to be due l... more The Byzantine-Arab Chronicle of 741 of the two texts is often obscure, but this seems to be due less to the linguistic (in)competence of the authors than to their desire to condense the common source, a process they often carry out to such extremes. that the original sense is difficult to grasp. §1. Reccared died having completed the 15th year of his reign. 3 §2. Era 639 4 (601): After Reccared his son Liuva, born of a humble mother, was set over the Goths and remained in the rule for two 5 years. 6 §3. Era 641 (603): Witteric claimed for himself for 7 years the rule that he had tyranically seized from Liuva, and because he lived by the sword he perished by the sword. For the death of the innocent Liuva, Reccared's son, did not go unavenged in him; indeed he (Witteric) was slain between the courses of a meal by his own men. 7 §4. Era 642 (604): Phocas, 56th [emperor] of the Romans, was set in power in a tyrannical manner and he remained in it for 8 years. • The Persians left their own homes and achieved successes against the Romans. Having driven back the Romans, they subjected Syria, Arabia: and Egypt. 8 §5. Era 648 (610): Gundemar was set in power over the Goths after Witteric for two years. 9 §6. Era 649 (611): Heraclius was crowned emperor, 57th 10 of th Romans.11 He had plotted a rebellion against Phocas from Africa out oL by "cf." before the reference. Dubler, "La cr6nica ar.ibigo-bizantina de 741/' 298-321, gives correspondences with other chronicles when the same event is narrated,' even when there is not the slightest resemblance in the details of the two accounts.-Although this approach has its merits 1 it can give a misleading impression, and I_ shall only give correspondences with other works (chiefly Syriac CS) when there is' some similarity between their respective notices. 3 Cf. Isidore of Seville, History, §56; Reccared I reigned 586-601. 4 This is the Spanish era, which counts from 1 January 38 BC for reasons not altogether clear. 5 Where I write a number in full, it is because it appears that way in the text.
This article traces the whereabouts of a small number of Arabic documents from the early Islamic ... more This article traces the whereabouts of a small number of Arabic documents from the early Islamic period that were written on papyri excavated in Nessana (Israel). Most of the papyri unearthed at this Negev village went to the Morgan Library in New York, but these few Arabic texts remained in Jerusalem, where they were mostly forgotten until recently. Two of them are edited and translated here for the first time, and a third is republished with a revised reading. * I am very grateful to Pnina Schor and Gideon Avni at the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and Hannah Cotton, Emeritus Professor of Classics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for their help with locating the papyri presented here, and to Zvi Greenhut, head of the IAA's Publications Department, for approving my request to publish them. Note that P.Ness. is the standard abbreviation for the Nessana papyri published in Casson and Hettich 1950 (P.Ness. 1-13) and Kraemer 1958 (P.Ness. 14-195), though earlier they were sometimes referred to as P.Colt. after the name of their excavator.
Arabic translation of Robert G. Hoyland, “Arab Kings, Arab Tribes and the Beginnings of Arab Hist... more Arabic translation of Robert G. Hoyland, “Arab Kings, Arab Tribes and the Beginnings of Arab Historical Memory in Late Roman Epigraphy” in H. Cotton, R. Hoyland, J. Price and D. Wasserstein eds, From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East (Cambridge, CUP, 2009), 371-97.
This paper explores the content and context of a papyrus (no. 56) from Nessana (modern Nitzana) t... more This paper explores the content and context of a papyrus (no. 56) from Nessana (modern Nitzana) that contains a contract between a Christian cleric named Kyrin and a certain al-Aswad ibn ʿAdī. The document sets out the conditions for the release of Kyrin's son from al-Aswad for a payment of money and guarantees the absolute freedom thereafter of both the son and the father. 1 The text is bilingual inasmuch as two languages are involved, Arabic and Greek, but the Arabic is only a summary of the Greek text, not a translation of it. It is presumably the presence of al-Aswad ibn ʿAdī that has required the inclusion of an Arabic précis and, though his name is not religiously specific, there is a strong likelihood that al-Aswad belonged to the ranks of the new conquerors and was probably a Muslim.
This article looks at the routes by which knowledge of the Greco-Roman past was transmitted from ... more This article looks at the routes by which knowledge of the Greco-Roman past was transmitted from late antiquity by Christian communities living under Muslim rule. The process involved translation from Greek to Syriac and from Greek and Syriac to Arabic. Once in Arabic, the lingua franca of the Abbasid Middle East, this historical material could be used by Muslim scholars to work into their histories of the pre-Islamic Middle East. This article also shows that historical texts could easily cross interconfessional lines and that their transmission, although handled very differently to scientific texts, was still part of the broader transfer of late antique culture to the Islamic Empire that is commonly referred to as the Graeco-Arabic translation movement.
with an Appendix by Hannah Cotton Excavations in the village of Nessana, in southern Israel/Pales... more with an Appendix by Hannah Cotton Excavations in the village of Nessana, in southern Israel/Palestine, by the American Colt Expedition in the 1930s brought to light a corpus of papyri that comprise almost 200 documents as well as a number of literary and theological items. They were found in two caches in two separate churches, that of the Theotokos in the south of the village and that of Saints Sergius and Bacchus to the north. The texts span the sixth and seventh centuries and so are able to reveal to us aspects of the life of this community both before and after the Arab conquests. There are about 40 papyri pertaining to the Islamic period, dealing with taxation, compulsory service, farming, provisioning of the army, and personal matters. One of the papyri, numbered 77, was mislaid and so was not transported to America with the rest of the corpus. The Greek text (Fig. 2.1) on one side of it was published on the basis of a photograph, but the Arabic text (Fig. 2.2) that was on the other side was not published, though the editors do not explain why.2 Presumably it made its way to the Rockefeller Museum, where most ancient artifacts were stored at that time, and there slumbered in obscurity until it was rediscovered by Professor Hannah Cotton in the course of a cataloging exercise (see appendix below). The Arabic text comprises two letters, the signifijicance of which I shall fijirst discuss before proceeding to present their edition and translation. 1 I dedicate this paper afffectionately to Patricia whose enthusiastic and inspired teaching was what fijirst drew me to the fijield of Islamic history. I am very grateful to
Im Laufe des siebten Jahrhunderts eroberten muslimische Araber erfolgreich Länder und Völker von ... more Im Laufe des siebten Jahrhunderts eroberten muslimische Araber erfolgreich Länder und Völker von Marokko bis Afghanistan; sie gründeten Städte in ihren neu gewonnenen Gebieten, ließen sich in diesen nieder, bauten Herrschaftsstrukturen auf und schöpften Ressourcen aus dem Hinterland ab, sowohl materielle als auch menschliche. Das klingt nach eindeutig kolonialistischem Verhalten, aber es gibt gute Gründe, hier innezuhalten und diesen Punkt genauer zu bedenken. Zunächst besteht das grundsätzliche Problem der Anwendung moderner Begriffe auf vormoderne Gegebenheiten. So ist es in einer Welt, in der Staaten klar definierte Grenzen haben, offensichtlich, wenn eine Macht in das Reich einer anderen eindringt. Aber wie stellt sich dies in einer Welt dar, in der Grenzen fließend sind und sich verschieben oder sogar als inexistent angesehen werden? Zudem sind die besonderen Umstände des Nahen Ostens zur Zeit der Spätantike zu beachten, die geprägt war von den um die Vorherrschaft ringenden Imperien Roms und Persiens. Kann man die muslimisch-arabische Bezwingung dieser Reiche und die Besetzung/Ausbeutung ihrer Gebiete als Kolonialismus beschreiben? Und welches Bild machten sich die muslimischen Araber selbst von ihren Eroberungen? Was waren ihre Absichten, und sollten wir diese in unsere Beurteilung ihrer Herrschaft miteinbeziehen? Diese und andere Fragen werden in diesem Aufsatz behandelt. In the course of the seventh century Muslim Arabs successfully conquered lands and peoples from Morocco to Afghanistan; they founded cities in their newly acquired territories, settled 1 This article draws on material published in R. Hoyland, In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire, New York 2015; the reader will find there more discussion of the sources and issues presented below. However, the book does not consider at all the question stated in the title, which is discussed here from a purely academic standpoint, without any agenda.
. This subject has been considerably enlivened by the influential and provocative publications of... more . This subject has been considerably enlivened by the influential and provocative publications of Fred Donner (Muhammad and the Believers, 2010) and Peter Webb (Imagining the Arabs, 2016). What follows is an attempt to respond to and engage with these publications and to offer some thoughts on how this debate might productively move forward.
This article provides a detailed overview of the corpus of papyri discovered in the 1950s in a ca... more This article provides a detailed overview of the corpus of papyri discovered in the 1950s in a cave by the Monastery of Kastellion, known in Arabic as Khirbet Mird, in the Judean Desert between Bethlehem and the Dead Sea. The papyri are written in Greek, Aramaic, and Arabic, and they span the Late Antique and early Islamic periods (ca 500-800 CE). The article also attempts to explain why Christian and Muslim documents ended up in the same collection and to illustrate how these texts might contribute to our knowledge about the Monastery of Kastellion and our understanding of the administration of early Islamic Palestine. Three documents are edited for the first time in order to demonstrate the diversity of this corpus.
The Byzantine-Arab Chronicle of 741 of the two texts is often obscure, but this seems to be due l... more The Byzantine-Arab Chronicle of 741 of the two texts is often obscure, but this seems to be due less to the linguistic (in)competence of the authors than to their desire to condense the common source, a process they often carry out to such extremes. that the original sense is difficult to grasp. §1. Reccared died having completed the 15th year of his reign. 3 §2. Era 639 4 (601): After Reccared his son Liuva, born of a humble mother, was set over the Goths and remained in the rule for two 5 years. 6 §3. Era 641 (603): Witteric claimed for himself for 7 years the rule that he had tyranically seized from Liuva, and because he lived by the sword he perished by the sword. For the death of the innocent Liuva, Reccared's son, did not go unavenged in him; indeed he (Witteric) was slain between the courses of a meal by his own men. 7 §4. Era 642 (604): Phocas, 56th [emperor] of the Romans, was set in power in a tyrannical manner and he remained in it for 8 years. • The Persians left their own homes and achieved successes against the Romans. Having driven back the Romans, they subjected Syria, Arabia: and Egypt. 8 §5. Era 648 (610): Gundemar was set in power over the Goths after Witteric for two years. 9 §6. Era 649 (611): Heraclius was crowned emperor, 57th 10 of th Romans.11 He had plotted a rebellion against Phocas from Africa out oL by "cf." before the reference. Dubler, "La cr6nica ar.ibigo-bizantina de 741/' 298-321, gives correspondences with other chronicles when the same event is narrated,' even when there is not the slightest resemblance in the details of the two accounts.-Although this approach has its merits 1 it can give a misleading impression, and I_ shall only give correspondences with other works (chiefly Syriac CS) when there is' some similarity between their respective notices. 3 Cf. Isidore of Seville, History, §56; Reccared I reigned 586-601. 4 This is the Spanish era, which counts from 1 January 38 BC for reasons not altogether clear. 5 Where I write a number in full, it is because it appears that way in the text.
This article traces the whereabouts of a small number of Arabic documents from the early Islamic ... more This article traces the whereabouts of a small number of Arabic documents from the early Islamic period that were written on papyri excavated in Nessana (Israel). Most of the papyri unearthed at this Negev village went to the Morgan Library in New York, but these few Arabic texts remained in Jerusalem, where they were mostly forgotten until recently. Two of them are edited and translated here for the first time, and a third is republished with a revised reading. * I am very grateful to Pnina Schor and Gideon Avni at the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and Hannah Cotton, Emeritus Professor of Classics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for their help with locating the papyri presented here, and to Zvi Greenhut, head of the IAA's Publications Department, for approving my request to publish them. Note that P.Ness. is the standard abbreviation for the Nessana papyri published in Casson and Hettich 1950 (P.Ness. 1-13) and Kraemer 1958 (P.Ness. 14-195), though earlier they were sometimes referred to as P.Colt. after the name of their excavator.
Arabic translation of Robert G. Hoyland, “Arab Kings, Arab Tribes and the Beginnings of Arab Hist... more Arabic translation of Robert G. Hoyland, “Arab Kings, Arab Tribes and the Beginnings of Arab Historical Memory in Late Roman Epigraphy” in H. Cotton, R. Hoyland, J. Price and D. Wasserstein eds, From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East (Cambridge, CUP, 2009), 371-97.
This paper explores the content and context of a papyrus (no. 56) from Nessana (modern Nitzana) t... more This paper explores the content and context of a papyrus (no. 56) from Nessana (modern Nitzana) that contains a contract between a Christian cleric named Kyrin and a certain al-Aswad ibn ʿAdī. The document sets out the conditions for the release of Kyrin's son from al-Aswad for a payment of money and guarantees the absolute freedom thereafter of both the son and the father. 1 The text is bilingual inasmuch as two languages are involved, Arabic and Greek, but the Arabic is only a summary of the Greek text, not a translation of it. It is presumably the presence of al-Aswad ibn ʿAdī that has required the inclusion of an Arabic précis and, though his name is not religiously specific, there is a strong likelihood that al-Aswad belonged to the ranks of the new conquerors and was probably a Muslim.
This article looks at the routes by which knowledge of the Greco-Roman past was transmitted from ... more This article looks at the routes by which knowledge of the Greco-Roman past was transmitted from late antiquity by Christian communities living under Muslim rule. The process involved translation from Greek to Syriac and from Greek and Syriac to Arabic. Once in Arabic, the lingua franca of the Abbasid Middle East, this historical material could be used by Muslim scholars to work into their histories of the pre-Islamic Middle East. This article also shows that historical texts could easily cross interconfessional lines and that their transmission, although handled very differently to scientific texts, was still part of the broader transfer of late antique culture to the Islamic Empire that is commonly referred to as the Graeco-Arabic translation movement.
with an Appendix by Hannah Cotton Excavations in the village of Nessana, in southern Israel/Pales... more with an Appendix by Hannah Cotton Excavations in the village of Nessana, in southern Israel/Palestine, by the American Colt Expedition in the 1930s brought to light a corpus of papyri that comprise almost 200 documents as well as a number of literary and theological items. They were found in two caches in two separate churches, that of the Theotokos in the south of the village and that of Saints Sergius and Bacchus to the north. The texts span the sixth and seventh centuries and so are able to reveal to us aspects of the life of this community both before and after the Arab conquests. There are about 40 papyri pertaining to the Islamic period, dealing with taxation, compulsory service, farming, provisioning of the army, and personal matters. One of the papyri, numbered 77, was mislaid and so was not transported to America with the rest of the corpus. The Greek text (Fig. 2.1) on one side of it was published on the basis of a photograph, but the Arabic text (Fig. 2.2) that was on the other side was not published, though the editors do not explain why.2 Presumably it made its way to the Rockefeller Museum, where most ancient artifacts were stored at that time, and there slumbered in obscurity until it was rediscovered by Professor Hannah Cotton in the course of a cataloging exercise (see appendix below). The Arabic text comprises two letters, the signifijicance of which I shall fijirst discuss before proceeding to present their edition and translation. 1 I dedicate this paper afffectionately to Patricia whose enthusiastic and inspired teaching was what fijirst drew me to the fijield of Islamic history. I am very grateful to
Im Laufe des siebten Jahrhunderts eroberten muslimische Araber erfolgreich Länder und Völker von ... more Im Laufe des siebten Jahrhunderts eroberten muslimische Araber erfolgreich Länder und Völker von Marokko bis Afghanistan; sie gründeten Städte in ihren neu gewonnenen Gebieten, ließen sich in diesen nieder, bauten Herrschaftsstrukturen auf und schöpften Ressourcen aus dem Hinterland ab, sowohl materielle als auch menschliche. Das klingt nach eindeutig kolonialistischem Verhalten, aber es gibt gute Gründe, hier innezuhalten und diesen Punkt genauer zu bedenken. Zunächst besteht das grundsätzliche Problem der Anwendung moderner Begriffe auf vormoderne Gegebenheiten. So ist es in einer Welt, in der Staaten klar definierte Grenzen haben, offensichtlich, wenn eine Macht in das Reich einer anderen eindringt. Aber wie stellt sich dies in einer Welt dar, in der Grenzen fließend sind und sich verschieben oder sogar als inexistent angesehen werden? Zudem sind die besonderen Umstände des Nahen Ostens zur Zeit der Spätantike zu beachten, die geprägt war von den um die Vorherrschaft ringenden Imperien Roms und Persiens. Kann man die muslimisch-arabische Bezwingung dieser Reiche und die Besetzung/Ausbeutung ihrer Gebiete als Kolonialismus beschreiben? Und welches Bild machten sich die muslimischen Araber selbst von ihren Eroberungen? Was waren ihre Absichten, und sollten wir diese in unsere Beurteilung ihrer Herrschaft miteinbeziehen? Diese und andere Fragen werden in diesem Aufsatz behandelt. In the course of the seventh century Muslim Arabs successfully conquered lands and peoples from Morocco to Afghanistan; they founded cities in their newly acquired territories, settled 1 This article draws on material published in R. Hoyland, In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire, New York 2015; the reader will find there more discussion of the sources and issues presented below. However, the book does not consider at all the question stated in the title, which is discussed here from a purely academic standpoint, without any agenda.
. This subject has been considerably enlivened by the influential and provocative publications of... more . This subject has been considerably enlivened by the influential and provocative publications of Fred Donner (Muhammad and the Believers, 2010) and Peter Webb (Imagining the Arabs, 2016). What follows is an attempt to respond to and engage with these publications and to offer some thoughts on how this debate might productively move forward.
The Life of Theodotus of Amida is that rare thing: a securely dated eye-witness account of life u... more The Life of Theodotus of Amida is that rare thing: a securely dated eye-witness account of life under Arab Muslim rule in the first century of Islam, and one of the few extant texts from seventh-century North Mesopotamia. It is imbued with local color and contemporary detail, revealing an intimate knowledge of the terrain, its inhabitants and officialdom, as well as the precariousness of the lives of those living in the borderlands between the Byzantine and Islamic empires.
This book deals with the transmission of knowledge about pre-Islamic Iran to Muslim authors (incl... more This book deals with the transmission of knowledge about pre-Islamic Iran to Muslim authors (including Firdawsi) and the nature of Sasanian historical writing (was there a 'Book of Lords'/Khwaday-namag?)
Among all the different theories that currently explore the religious milieu of Late Antiquity to... more Among all the different theories that currently explore the religious milieu of Late Antiquity to elucidate the origins of the Islamic religion, there is a group of scholars supporting that Jewish Christianity must have played a role in its formation, reviving the question of a potential link between Early Islam and the beliefs and practices of those followers of Jesus that maintained or adopted certain Jewish beliefs and practices, either Jews that believed in the messianism and/or the prophecy of Jesus, groups whose existence and nature is still a matter of debate. In any case, the question is still subject of passionate debate among specialists.
This volume collects the papers of a two-day colloquium held in Washington DC in October 2015 about the question of Jewish Christianity and Early Islam and highlights the vitality of this field of studies. The contributions included here cover a broad range of topics, and they offer new ideas, interpretations and understandings of the question.
We do not have very much evidence of how or when the exploitation of iron and steel on any scale ... more We do not have very much evidence of how or when the exploitation of iron and steel on any scale began, or of how the technology behind it developed, nor do we have a very clear understanding of what iron and steel meant to earlier societies. Nevertheless it was clear to researchers, even a hundred years or more ago, that this technology developed along rather different lines in different regions of western, central and eastern Eurasia. The study of early iron and steel has undoubtedly been hampered by a modern dual perception of this metal as being first a utilitarian, mass-produced commodity, which, secondly, is transformed in the ground into rusty lumps which do not tend to stimulate our interest, or bring out quite the same sense of awe as do well preserved gold, silver or even copper alloy objects from earlier times. This has led to an assumption that iron technology, unless proved otherwise, was carried out at rather a rudimentary level until relatively recently.
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Papers by Robert Hoyland
This volume collects the papers of a two-day colloquium held in Washington DC in October 2015 about the question of Jewish Christianity and Early Islam and highlights the vitality of this field of studies. The contributions included here cover a broad range of topics, and they offer new ideas, interpretations and understandings of the question.