THE FIRST WORKSHOP of the Late Antiquity and Early Islam project, the concerns and objectives of which are discussed in the Introduction to this volume, was convened in London on 20-21 October 1989 and attended by about 50 scholars representing a broad range of interests and expertise on the history of the transition period from late antiquity to early Islam. Eight papers addressing various dimensions of the workshop theme, “Problems in the Literary Source Material”, were presented, and provided stimulating opportunities for fruitful crossdisciplinary discussions which comprised the bulk of the workshop proceedings (papers were precirculated, and were not read at the workshop). The encouragement of this sort of dialogue, across traditional disciplinary lines, was in fact one of our primary aims and marks, we hope, the beginning of a trend which we seek to further in the continuing work of the LAEI project.

The eight papers presented at the workshop are here published in full. It was not considered feasible to include abstracts or summaries of the discussions, important though these were. Their influence, however, will be evident in many places throughout this volume, and in the Introduction the editors have sought to take account of the points which repeatedly arose over the two days of our meeting and seemed to be of particular significance.

This book comprises the first volume of The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, which will provide a venue for the publication of the proceedings of the various LAEI workshops. The second volume, on “Land Use and Settlement Patterns”, will contain the papers of the second workshop, convened by the project under the auspices of Dr. Geoffrey King at the School of Oriental and African Studies on 25- 27 April 1991, and is being edited for publication as this volume goes to press. A third workshop, on the topic of “States, Resources, and Armies”, is planned for October 1992, and a fourth will consider questions of communal identity in October 1993.