THIS VOLUME REPRESENTS not only the first publication in the series Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, but also the proceedings of the first in the series of workshops on particular themes which, it is hoped, will give shape to the series and to the project from which it derives. In part, therefore, it serves the purpose of defining the range and scope of the problems to be addressed by the project, while necessarily being selective and limited in its own coverage. It may thus be useful to begin with some account of the concerns, methods , and objectives of the project as a whole, and of the aims within it of this volume and of the series itself.

The project entitled Late Antiquity and Early Islam, of which the present series is the publishing vehicle, was born out of a colloquium held in London in 1986, when it became very clear that while there was clearly an increasing amount of research being undertaken on the passing of late antiquity, the emergence and early development of Islam, and the patterns of change and continuity that characterized the history of the Near East from the death of the emperor Justinian in 565 until the ‘Abbāsid revolution in the mid-eighth century, this work was in general proceeding in a highly compartmentalized and segmented fashion . Over the past decades individual works of scholarship in this field have increasingly tended to be defined by boundaries reflecting the limits imposed both by the individual author's general perspective (Byzantine, eastern church, Arab- Islamic, or Jewish studies) or specialized discipline (history, archaeology, religious studies, to name but a few), and by particularist considerations dictated by the political frontiers of the modern states of the Near East. This is not to assert the obviously erroneous claim that researchers in one field have not been aware that important and even vital insights might be forthcoming from the fruits of investigations in some other field or in an adjacent region. Such awareness has been evident for some time, and individual efforts to bridge the gaps among the various fields have indeed been made. But the accelerating pace of research within one's own field, the framing of more sophisticated modes of inquiry, and the more sharply defined conclusions which arise from them, have at the same time made it more difficult for researchers to keep abreast of all the developments of potential importance to them.