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, 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.
Definition and historiography The term Spätantike, literally "late antiquity", has been used by German-speaking historians since it was made popular by Alois Riegl in the early 20th century. It was given currency in English partly by Peter Brown's book The World of Late Antiquity (1971), which revised the Gibbon view of a stale and ossified Classical culture, in favour of a vibrant time of renewals and beginnings, and whose The Making of Late Antiquity offered a new paradigm of understanding the changes in Western culture of the time in order to confront Sir Richard Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages.
Meaning of the term "Late antiquity" is chronological and an interpretive term. Chronologically, it covers the centuries from the late Roman Empire to the early Middle Ages. Interpretively, it asks how the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds were transformed rather than simply when they ended. For this reason, historiographical work on "late antiquity" emphasizes not only dates but also themes (such as imperial reorganization, Christianization, changes in daily life, etc). The concept of late antiquity further helps explain the historical processes that cut through the conventional boundaries between "ancient" and "medieval" history, such as the transformation of the Roman Empire through the construction of larger armies and the formation of court-centered imperial government; the re-shaping (and not the end) of classical Greek and Latin education in schools, scholarship, law, and manuscript transmission; the effects of Christianization on local institutions, family sociology, calendar, the use of urban and rural space, etc; and the rise of bodies of late antique literature in numerous Near Eastern languages besides that of Greek and Latin (like Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Middle Persian, and Arabic). While late antiquity is therefore a broad label with a vast geographic scope, it is limited insofar as the beginning and the end of these transformations varied by region; the end of Roman rule in Britain, the formation and growth of the Sasanian Empire, and the rise of Christian Armenia and Ethiopia and the transformation of the religious and political worlds of the Arabian Peninsula followed different, albeit overlapping timelines. Ultimately, the exact geographical and chronological scope of "late antiquity" remains a matter of debate among contemporary scholars.
Decline, transformation, and rupture Older treatments of the centuries now called "late antiquity", especially European histories, emphasized themes of the "decline and fall" of Rome; the field of Roman history studies began with the publication of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the late eighteenth century. Under the older view, the second century represented the peak of ancient civilization and the Roman Empire, whereas the remainder of Rome's history was a slow decline, and ultimately collapse, under the weight of centuries of civil war, economic collapse, invasion and migration from barbarian groups, cultural degeneration and cultural discontinuity caused by the rise of Christianity. While some of these tropes, such as the final collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and the decline of long-distance trade was real, the transformation model advanced by Peter Brown has also served as a corrective: this period was not simply a collapse of classical education but, in fact, its remaking into a multi-cultural and multi-polar world between new Christian, rabbinic, Sasanian, Byzantine, and Islamic modes of thought and intellect. Whereas some regions experienced material and political ruptures, others continued on in changed and evolved forms. The conclusions that might be drawn about this era, therefore, change considerably depending on the type of the evidence, sources, genres of literature, institutions, or local region under consideration.
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