The Middle East in Disintegration 9
Thus in the civilization of the Middle East at the beginning of
the seventh century A.D. it was difficult to find a single unifying
factor. Two great military empires, the Later Roman or Byzantine
and the Persian, had contended for centuries for mastery over the
region, the Byzantines holding the Levant lands but failing to
make a lasting conquest of Mesopotamia, while during the sixth
century the Persians had made several serious inroads into Syria,
once destroying its capital of Antioch and in 614 capturing
Jerusalem and burning its churches. Despite these wars, commerce
and industry were far from inactive. There was a sufficient surplus
of wealth to make possible the founding of many new churches,
especially in the reign of Justinian (527-65), to whom we owe the
rebuilding of Cons tantine's Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem,
as well as Hagia Sophia at Constantinople. The towns, of which
Jerash in Transjordan and Palmyra are the best extant examples,
together with many lesser sites in Syria, presented a picture of busy
life, though the archaeologist, looking below the surface, finds
much of the apparent opulence to have been Ersatz.1 While landed
proprietors, the wealthy religious houses, and merchants pros-
pered, the urban and rural masses were oppressed by heavy taxa-
tion and corrupt officials, and had no sense of loyalty to the regime.
The Christian Church, in becoming an established institution, had
itself become as stratified as official society; and while the monas-
teries did a valuable service for posterity in keeping alive some part
of the tradition of Greek science and scholarship that would other-
wise have been irreparably lost, there was no longer that sense of
brotherhood in the Church which had characterized primitive
Christianity as it was to characterize primitive Islam. Moreover
the Church had ceased to be universal and undivided: but the
nationalism betokened by the breaking away of the Monophysite
churches was manifested only in opposition to the centralizing
and Hellenizing tendency of the bureaucracy and the oecumenical
church, it did not make a positive patriotic appeal to their ad-
herents: there was nothing that could be called an Egyptian or
Syrian nation, only a congeries of individuals at the mercy of any
determined external force. Successive emperors after the Council
of Chalcedon were fully aware of the political danger to the
Empire of the estrangement of the Levant provinces, and sought to
1 Lankester Harding, Official Guide to Jerash (Transjordan Dept. of Anti-
quities, 1944), 8.