Settlement and Urbanization in Early Islamic Palestine, 7th-11th Centuries

Texts and Archaeology Contrasted

Hagit Nol

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000568998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume follows the changes that occurred in central Palestine during the longue duree between the 7th to the 11th centuries. That region offers a unique micro-history of the Islamicate world, providing the opportunity for intensive archaeological research and rich primary sources.

Through a careful comparison between the archaeological records and the textual evidence, a new history of Palestine and the Islamicate world emerges – one that is different than that woven from Arabic geographies and chronicles alone. The book highlights the importance of using a variety of sources when possible and examining each type of source in its own context. The volume spans ancient technologies and daily life, ancient agriculture, and the perception of place by ancient authors. It also explores the shift of settlements and harbors in central Palestine, as well as the gradual development of a new metropolis, al-Ramla.

Settlement and Urbanization in Early Islamic Palestine will be of particular interest to students and scholars of the history of Islam or the history of Palestine, or anyone working more generally in the methodology of historical research and integrating texts and archaeology.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003176169-1

A sequence of political events can be deduced from chronicles on Greater Syria and Egypt in the 7th–11th centuries. According to these, the region was conquered by Arabs in the first half of the 7th century. These Arabs were believers of a new Faith – Islam – and in the eastern Mediterranean their rule replaced the former Roman-Christian empire after hundreds of years of authority. The new power was led by the Umayyad family and based its capital in Damascus. In the year 750, the Abbasid dynasty took over and shifted the political center to Iraq and Baghdad. In the mid-9th century, the Tulunids operated as a regional authority under the Abbasids. The 10th century saw different groups struggling for power until the rise of the Fatimids, who then ruled for 200 years. Finally, the 12th century saw mainly wars between the Ayyubids and the Crusaders.

This sequence of events, if true, gives only a partial picture and lacks the economic, social, and cultural aspects of the region’s history. The main questions concern who lived in the region at that time and what influence the political changes had on their lives. More particularly, their income sources, trade networks, and technologies require some consideration, as well as their aesthetics, religion, and social organization. Some of these questions will be the focus of this study which concentrates on one case study in the Levant. By doing so, it aims to achieve an in-depth analysis of settlement types and occupation trends in one area of the Islamicate World (i.e. spaces ruled by Muslim elites or where Muslims are the majority)¹ and a micro-historical perspective. In other words, this research conducts social history but employs methods which are less common in that field.

Archaeology is the natural candidate to answer such questions. It comes with no surprise that several publications have already offered conclusions to similar questions on Greater Syria.² These studies introduce information derived from geographies and chronicles in Arabic, but mainly emphasize the data from archaeological excavations and surveys. Importantly, these studies assemble the interpretations and conclusions that excavation and survey teams have provided for archaeological sites and generally do not discuss the raw data afresh.

The methodology I used for this research differs from former studies in several ways. First, I analyze and interpret texts and archaeology separately and then contrast them. A strong result would be a correlation of the two source groups, while contradictions should raise doubts about the authenticity of the written source or the methodology of the archaeological research. Moreover, I use the narratives in the texts from a critical and even a skeptical perspective. The third innovative approach of this research is a contextual interpretation of the datasets, namely, a classification of artefacts, sites, and toponyms through a consistent list of categories on the one hand, and through their unique set of characteristics on the other. At the same time, I avoid early interpretations of the data, in contrast to interpretations suggested in other studies or by common sense.³ For example, I do not presume that any site with a bathhouse or a mosque is a ‘city’. Alternatively, I argue that settlement types must be analyzed through the characteristics which resemble and differentiate them from their neighbors, and that for doing so, wider contexts should be taken into account. A special emphasis is given to the division between ‘form’, ‘term’, and ‘function’ of objects, structures, and settlements.⁴ In that regard, my main use of texts is for terminological purposes.

The fourth distinctive method this research employs is a re-consideration of the archaeological data. Instead of employing the interpretation of excavators for sites and structures, I extract the raw data from the excavation reports. These data involve artefacts, raw materials, construction techniques, and spolia activities. Some of these might have been overlooked as insignificant earlier, some might have been interpreted in the context of the site alone, whereas regional overview and a larger quantity of specimens might change these views. This method led to a novel chronology of installations and construction techniques and to a new dating tool for early Islamic sites. Finally, through this case study, I treat theoretical questions that concern the archaeological method, such as the identification of cities, or the distinction between contexts of production, distribution, and consumption.

The name ‘Palestine’ conceals many denotations. Palestine is, first, the land and homeland of the Palestinian nation. Second, it is the modern political domain of the Palestinian Authority and the territories occupied by Israel. Third, it is the name of the region governed by the British ‘Mandate’ until 1948. Moving back in history to early Islam and orienting the meaning of the term in this book, Palestine was an administrative territory which included the southern part of the later British domain. It comprised the settlements Caesarea, Jerusalem, Jericho, and Ascalon, as well as others between these. Historians of Islam occasionally disregard nation-states, or European colonies, and tend to consider only imagined historical territories such as ‘Arabia’ or ‘Andalusia’. However, the exact domain of these territories is unknown, borders were apparently absent, and the places they included changed over time. Archaeologists, on the other hand, excavate physical remains during geographically positioned excavations for which nation-states issued the licenses. One should not expect a correlation between a historical space and modern states. The historical space of Palestine in this study is part of historical Syria or al-Shām. In parallel, the physical domain is situated in central Israel which forms part, in my definition, of Israel/Palestine in the Levant.

The term ‘settlement’ also denotes different things. Its first interpretation is an inhabited location with some social identity, such as ‘city’ or ‘village’. For that sense, I will keep using the word ‘settlement’ or use ‘settlement type’ when appropriate. These terms differ from ‘site’ in archaeological contexts which can indeed mean a ‘settlement’ but may describe any spot of human activity (e.g. a cemetery, a terrace, or a well). The second meaning has a wider spatial context and includes a populated area and its cultivated lands (henceforth ‘settled area’). The third denotation is the act of spatial domination (henceforth ‘occupation’). The fourth interpretation consists of the act of land occupation for cultivation or for the exploitation of natural resources (henceforth ‘colonization’). Another relevant term in that context is ‘settlement patterns’. This emphasizes the spatial differences between settlement types or between settled areas and changes over time in consecutive occupation or colonization periods.

My inquiry into the settlement in historical Palestine and central Israel involves a list of questions and methods. The first main branch examines settlement patterns according to the archaeological evidence (Chapter 5). To that end, I shall date architectural elements from stratified contexts and then chart chronological changes within sites and in the region. In addition, types of sites are defined according to their artefacts, raw materials, installations, and chronology, along with interpretations of their economy, their relation to the landscape, and their contacts to other sites. In practice, the steps for establishing a site typology include reconstructing the landscape (Chapter 2), collecting raw data from the research area and classifying installations (Chapter 3), and interpreting the function of these installations (Chapter 4). In order to interpret the function of installations, and thus the economy of individuals and settlements, I first analyze the ancient terminology for several devices. Second, I employ a method of ‘ethno-archaeology’ in finding analogies in the use of similar devices in contemporary societies. For the reconstruction of the landscape and particularly the reconstruction of the natural water sources, I use aerial images, maps, and itineraries as late as the early 20th century. The second main branch of the research examines settlement patterns according to the texts, namely through narratives and terminology (Chapter 6). For the narratives, I examine the links between toponyms attributed to the research area. Regarding terminology, I analyze settlement types with the help of relevant terms in a wider dataset.

This study promotes not only an understanding of the economy and landscape of the research area, but it also provides a micro-history of colonization and urbanization processes in the Islamicate world. The written sources are ambiguous regarding the definition of cities, and yet, that settlement type is portrayed with confidence by modern scholars. I examine its relations with other settlement types and argue that a city is any settlement which can offer the whole range of services available within a region. As can be expected, a city is also occupied with trade. Unlike many of the geographical models, however, a city is not necessarily productive, big, or central to its surroundings. The settlement that is certainly big as well as central is the ‘metropolis’.

During the 9th and 10th centuries, an urbanization process took plac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Settlement during early Islam: history and historiography
• 3 The Research Area
• 4 The Big Data
• 5 Technologies and daily life
• 6 Settlement patterns through archaeological evidence
• 7 Settlement patterns through texts
• 8 Conclusions
• Index