Religion, Language, and Community in the Roman Near East: Constantine to Muhammad by Fergus Millar (review)

Fergus Millar is a well-known historian of the Roman Near East who has long engaged with the question of language and identity among the various people subject to Roman rule. Based upon his 2010 Schweich Lectures at the British Academy, this book consists of what he describes as three different essays respectively on the Greek Christian world of late antiquity, Jews and Samaritans in that world, and finally Syrians (writers of Syriac to be more precise) and “Saracens” (and other peoples often identified by scholars as “Arabs”). The chapters are fit between a Prologue that provides a sketch of the shared biblical world of late antiquity and an Epilogue on the emergence of Islam and the question of Arab identity. Although some of Millar’s long term interests are apparent throughout, the book provides a survey of his more technical essays and articles written over the preceding decade, putting the significance of his work into a broader context and linking it to some of the more recent secondary literature.

Relying on both epigraphic and literary sources, Millar often asks more questions than he answers. He tends to be a minimalist in his approach to the sources, avoiding the kinds of inferences that lead to a series of connected positions about Greek and Aramaic bilingualism and corresponding Aramaic identity. For example, it is commonly thought that Aramaic was a lingua franca introduced for administrative purposes by the Achaemenids and that this persisted through the development of Greek bilingualism in the Hellenistic period until the spread of Arabic in the post-conquest period. A further part of this paradigm is that all along the margins of this Greek/Aramaic bilingual culture there were Arabs, which means people who identified themselves thus and spoke some form of Arabic. The Aramaic speakers in cities like Hatra or Dura, it is inferred, enjoyed their own local literary cultures, and all of this was lost, as was the local Aramaic literary culture of Edessa, with Christianization. In contrast, in Millar’s reading the Jews and the Samaritans stand out as exceptions to what was fundamentally an elite Greek literate culture across much of the Near East.

According to him, “the universal culture of the Greek world was shared in, and expressed by, both pagans and Christians in the Near East” (28), and Christianization tended to increase Greek’s ecumenical—in the more literal sense of the term—role. More than once he points out that the ecumenical councils from the fourth century onwards were held in Greek and that most signatories to the canons of these councils ascribed to them in Greek. The Aramaic substrate just beneath the veneer of Greek culture is, according to him, absent from the evidence. For example, from the fourth century “[w]e can find no literary expression of paganism written in any Semitic language, whether Syriac or any other” (22). Until deep into late antiquity, Greek sources lack any explicit reflection of the locally spoken Semitic languages. Palestine is an exception to this in that Jews and Samaritans expressed their identity in the Hebrew and Aramaic literature they produced, texts that were composed amidst the ongoing spread of Greek Christianity in Palestine. By the late fifth century, we can witness the emergence of a Syriac identity among the Syrian Orthodox. (Evidence for the Church of the East and Sassanian culture is excluded from the book.) Millar emphasizes that this Syriac identity was not a “product of pre-existing communal or ethnic divisions” (138). In the end he turns his attention briefly to the “Saracens” or “Tayyoye,” further asserting the continuing importance of Greek in interactions with these peoples on the frontiers of the Roman Empire.

At times one gets the sense that Millar is responding to old questions, ones that unfortunately remain relevant because there are certain textbook understandings of language and identity that persist about the Roman Near East.

It is difficult...