Late antiquity

Late antiquity is a period of Eurasian, , 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.