Cross-culturation with Classical Hellenism in Late Antique Arabia

Abstract

Recent scholarship has claimed that the Arabian Peninsula did not form part of Late Antiquity. Such a view hinders the cross-cultural exchanges between the Peninsula and the adjacent regions and suggests that such isolation prompted the emerging Muslim clans to adopt foreign cultures as means to legitimize their power as they expanded outside of Arabia. This chapter challenges the myth of this disconnection between Arabia and the other major powers of the late antique world during the formative period of Islam, revealing local survivals up to the Umayyads. This analysis is done through the lens of Hellenism – one of the many languages that mediated the framework and contextual background within late antique art – and which provides a synthesis of central themes that demonstrate the continuity of cultural outputs from the fourth–fifth centuries into the eighth century CE.