Concept

Late antiquity

Overview

Late antiquity is a period of Eurasian, Mediterranean, and Near Eastern history conventionally placed between the third and seventh centuries CE. It describes the transformation of the world from classical antiquity after the crisis of the third century of the Roman Empire, the reorganization of Roman imperial government under Diocletian and Constantine, the rise of the Sasanian Empire to the Roman East, the formation of post-Roman kingdoms in the western provinces, the spread of Christianity and the institutionalization of rabbinic Judaism, and the emergence of Islam and the early caliphates. Late antiquity, therefore, is an era of overlapping and interconnected regional transformations taking place at different speeds, and it includes the erosion of some ancient institutions and the beginning of medieval ones.

The concept of late antiquity arose as an alternative to older accounts that treated the period mainly as one of decline from the classical Roman Empire. Today, historians view late antiquity as a period of both disruption and continuity. The imperial government of the Western Roman Empire disappeared and many cities and economies were disrupted by war, plague, and fragmentation, but at the same time, classical education survived and was re-shaped in new contexts, Roman law was codified, Christian and rabbinic traditions took durable institutional and textual forms, the eastern Roman Empire persisted from Constantinople, and Sasanian Iran emerged as the major alternative power until the Arab conquests. Instead of just being a history of the later Roman Empire and the rise of the Byzantines, late antiquity also includes the Sasanian world, the Red Sea and Arabian Peninsula, the Christian kingdoms and communities of the Caucasus and Ethiopia, the Syriac- and Coptic-speaking Near East, the Jewish communities of Roman Palestine and Babylonia, and the societies that emerged from the western Roman provinces.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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Hence arose the custom of common meals, but the separation of the citizens into different families from Egypt: for the reign of Sesostris is of much higher antiquity than that of Minos. As we ought to think that most other things were found out in a long, nay, even in a boundless time (reason teaching us that want would make us first invent that which was necessary, and, when that was obtained, then those things…
Aristotle, Politics
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There are four senses in which one thing can be said to be 'prior' to another. Primarily and most properly the term has reference to time: in this sense the word is used to indicate that one thing is older or more ancient than another, for the expressions 'older' and 'more ancient' imply greater length of time. Secondly, one thing is said to be 'prior' to another when the sequence of their being cannot be reversed…
Aristotle, The Categories
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The whole of the polity and economy of every country in Europe has been derived from the same sources. It was drawn from the old Germanic or Gothic custumary, from the feudal institutions which must be considered as an emanation from that custumary; and the whole has been improved and digested into system and discipline by the Roman law. From hence arose the several orders, with or without a monarch (which are…
Edmund Burke, Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke
States what Late antiquity is.
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Philosophers who discussed Late antiquity

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Eastern Christianity

Place in the tradition

Part of Ancient history.

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