The Justinianic Pandemic in the Iberian Peninsula

Human Ecology · 2025-08-01

The chronological and geospatial dynamics of fineware ceramic imports to Late Roman Hispania

Journal of Roman Archaeology · 2025-06-01

Abstract This article maps and analyzes the presence and non-presence of four classes of fineware ceramics in Late Roman Spain. It begins by mapping each of the classes spatially, before comparing their relative frequency in 15 specially constructed regions. It shows the inverse relationship between the presence of African Red Slip Ware and its local Spanish imitators; it then posits possible routes for Gallic imports and demonstrates that eastern Mediterranean imports were primarily restricted to the coast. It then analyzes the chronological pattern of ARSW imports across five horizons, showing a decrease in the number of sites that received these African imports in the mid-5th c. (60%) and the mid-6th c. (40%), especially inland and in the Guadalquivir Valley. The late 5th and early 6th c. was a period of stability and even expansion. By the late 6th c., however, few residents of post-Roman Spain had access to Roman-style dinnerware.

Living with Risk in the Late Roman World

History Reviews of New Books · 2025-09-19

Isidore of Seville's composite anecdote about Corinthian bronze and the editing of the classical past

Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies · 2025-01-13

Eastern Mediterranean Fineware Imports to the Iberian Peninsula, 300–700 ce , and the Economic Impact of the Justinianic Pandemic

Journal of late antiquity · 2024 · 2 citations

• Geography
• Ancient history
• History

Abstract: Recent excavations in Spain and Portugal have recovered abundant fineware ceramics imported from the eastern Mediterranean and dating to the period after the fall of the western Roman Empire. The date of the latest sherds has been interpreted as showing the survival of trans-Mediterranean trade into the seventh century. However, archaeologists have tended to minimize a collapse in the volume of these imports around 550 ce. This article seeks to adjudicate between a survivalist interpretation (based on the continuity of some trade) and a catastrophist interpretation (based on decreased volume of trade). It analyzes the import volume and geographic distribution of ceramics at over 4,000 Iberian sites, 202 of which contain late Roman fineware imported from the eastern Mediterranean. The data suggest a steady increase in imports beginning by 450 ce, followed by a rapid drop in both import volume and network participation around 550 ce, with no observed recovery. This drop's magnitude has not yet been fully analyzed, and recent excavations in the eastern Mediterranean have allowed it to be fixed with greater chronological precision. Four causes are considered, three (warfare, shifting fiscal obligations, and changing tastes) that have been already proposed, and a fourth (pandemic disease) that has not.

Indirect Evidence for the Social Impact of the Justinianic Pandemic: Episcopal Burial and Conciliar Legislation in Visigothic Hispania

Journal of late antiquity · 2018-01-01 · 11 citations

The Justinianic Plague, the first documented pandemic outbreak of the bubonic plague, struck the Mediterranean region in the 540s ce. Despite some surviving narrative accounts, however, there is little direct written evidence for its impact in much of the Mediterranean world. This is especially true for Visigothic Hispania. However, certain texts that are not explicit accounts of the plague may hint at its impact. One such text is the fourth canon of the Council of Valencia, held in 546. This canon reflects episcopal concerns about what to do when a bishop dies "a sudden death." According to it, the bishop should not be buried at once but "placed with great care in a coffin apart from the others." Comparative philology, the archaeology of sixth-century Valencia, and recent paleogenetic investigation into the bacterium that causes the disease all combine to suggest that within the broader context of episcopal funerary displays, the "sudden death" referred to is the plague and that the canon is a response to changes in burial customs—especially the newfound prevalence of mass inhumation—caused by the first wave of the pandemic.

Handbook of Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity, 135–700 CE by Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Yehudah Cohn, and Fergus Millar (review)

Journal of late antiquity · 2014-09-01

Reviewed by: Handbook of Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity, 135–700 CE by Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Yehudah Cohn, and Fergus Millar Ra‘anan Boustan and Henry Gruber Handbook of Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity, 135–700 ce Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Yehudah Cohn, and Fergus Millar Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012. Pp. xxv + 162. ISBN 0197265227. This accessible and well-structured handbook aims to guide the classically trained historian through the wealth of Jewish literature from Late Antiquity that scholars working primarily in Greek and Latin often overlook. The Handbook was designed to serve as a companion to the volume of state-of-the-field essays that emerged from a conference held at the British Academy in 2008 on “Rabbinic Texts and the History of Late-Roman Palestine.” The origins in the British Academy conference are still visible in its overriding emphasis on rabbinic literature. This is unfortunate because, while the book presents itself as a comprehensive guide to the full range of sources produced by and for Jews in the period from 135–700 ce, it largely neglects the abundant materials that elucidate Jewish life in Late Antiquity outside the orbit of the rabbinic movement. The Handbook is divided into three main sections: prefatory materials, a historical introduction, and eight thematically organized body chapters. The third section, which forms the book’s core, details the range of surviving Jewish literary materials from Late Antiquity and the available scholarly resources for accessing them. The book concludes with a rather sparse two-page subject index. In a foreword, the distinguished scholar of ancient Judaism, Philip Alexander, frames the book as a less specialist alternative to Gunter Stemberger’s still fundamental Introduction to the Talmud and Mishnah (Edinburgh, 1996). The prefatory section also provides a handy guide to the online collections of text-editions, manuscripts, reference works, and bibliographies currently available to scholars interested in Jewish literature from late antiquity. This section is capped by a convenient glossary of Hebrew and Aramaic technical terms that would otherwise puzzle the intended reader. The introduction lays out the historical contexts within which the major works of late antique Jewish literature were produced. This literature was composed in Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic and derives almost exclusively from Roman Palestine and Sasanian Iraq. The authors observe the curious fact that the Jewish communities of the western Mediterranean did not produce an indigenous literature—or, if they did, it was not transmitted through recognizably Jewish channels. Moreover, the rabbis, for their part, studiously avoided Greek genres and forms, such as biography or historical writing, despite the high degree of Hellenization within rabbinic circles. Thus, virtually no Jewish work in Greek, from either Palestine or the Diaspora, survives from Late [End Page 360] Antiquity. The authors speculate that this lacuna resulted from a conscious decision on the part of Jewish scholars and writers to avoid Greek language and forms precisely in the period that saw the rapprochement between Christianity and the Roman Empire—and with it the successful absorption of much of the “pagan” classical tradition within Christian literary culture. The authors treat in more cursory fashion the less well documented and still poorly understood contexts of Jewish literary production in the Sasanian Empire, perhaps missing an opportunity to capture adequately the recent and exciting advances in this wing of the field. In addition, the authors note that rabbinic literature does not survive in manuscripts from Late Antiquity but is mediated almost exclusively through the scribal activity of medieval copyists, thereby raising the specter of pervasive anachronism. But, pointing to what they view as positive inscriptional evidence for rabbinic activity and authority as well as the historically accurate use of place names in rabbinic sources, they argue that rabbinic literature does indeed date from and reflect the social and political realities of the late antique world. The authors leave open the question of whether these sources originally took a written or oral form. While brief mention is made of the distinctive formal conventions of rabbinic writings, the Handbook does not aim to provide sustained guidance regarding the interpretative challenges presented by this literature. Rather, the user must—and should...

<i>Depraedor, depraedari</i>

Studies in Late Antiquity · 2005-01-01

This article examines depraedor, depraedari and depraedatio, depraedationis, a cluster of late antique Latin terms ultimately derived from the root noun praeda, or war booty. These words became common in the fourth and, especially, fifth centuries CE. Philological analysis, with particular focus on the chronicler Hydatius, shows that their meanings encompassed fraud and deception, theft and robbery, violent destruction, kidnap and ransom, and, most perniciously, the threat of sexual violence against Roman women. This cluster of actions forms the practice of “plunder.” The development of plundering language across the late Roman West, and its prevalence across the late Latin corpus, reflects a concomitant rise in predatory violence experienced by Roman civilians as their social order disintegrated. Before the fifth century, Romans in the civilian provinces had generally not been exposed to plundering violence. Their new material reality required a new language to express it, which they found in these flexible new terms. Focusing on plunder, and the repeated cycles of kidnap and ransom that structured this plundering society, reveals ways that the end of West Roman governmentality affected civilians, especially the women most often targeted for kidnap and ransom.