Islam emerged amid flourishing Christian and Jewish cultures, yet students of Antiquity and the Middle Ages mostly ignore it. Despite intensive study of late Antiquity over the last fifty years, even
In this bold approach to late antiquity, Garth Fowden shows how, from the second-century peak of Rome's prosperity to the ninth-century onset of the Islamic Empire's decline, powerful beliefs in One G
From the stony desolation of Jordan's desert, it is but a step through a doorway into the bath house of the Qusayr 'Amra hunting lodge. Inside, multicolored frescoes depict scenes from courtly life an
Judaism, Christianity and Islam - the three scriptural monotheisms, still often studied separately - are here intertwined within a historical frame. The approach outlined in this lecture pivots around the Qur'an as it emerged in seventh-century Arabia on the peripheries of the two world-empires of Iran and Rome, and variously refracts rabbinic Judaism and patristic - especially Syriac - Christianity. The formation and exegesis of scriptural canons helps define the major religious communities and identities both before and after Muhammad. The latter part of the lecture concentrates on the interaction of these communities, and especially their scholars, in the Abbasid Baghdad of the ninth and tenth centuries, and on the theological and philosophical debates that flourished there. The lecture interrogates the newly fashionable concept of 'Abrahamic' religion and proposes a fresh historical periodization inclusive of both late antiquity and Islam, namely the First Millennium.
Sage, scientist, and sorcerer, Hermes Trismegistus was the culture-hero of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. A human (according to some) who had lived about the time of Moses, but now indisputably a god, h
From the stony desolation of Jordan's desert, it is but a step through a doorway into the bath house of the Qusayr 'Amra hunting lodge. Inside, multicolored frescoes depict scenes from courtly life an
Islam emerged amid flourishing Christian and Jewish cultures, yet students of Antiquity and the Middle Ages mostly ignore it. Despite intensive study of late Antiquity over the last fifty years, even
Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 241 H/855 AD), renowned for his profoundknowledge of hadiths—the reports of the Prophet’s sayings and deeds—is a majorfigure in the history of Islam. He was famous for living acco
