Early Islamic Syria

Debates in Archaeology

by Alan Walmsley

After more than a century of neglect, a profound revolution is occurring in the way archaeology addresses and interprets developments in the social history of early Islamic Syria-Palestine. This concise book offers an innovative assessment of social and economic developments in Syria-Palestine shortly before, and in the two centuries after, the Islamic expansion (the later sixth to the early ninth century AD), drawing on a wide range of new evidence from recent archaeological work. Alan Walmsley challenges conventional explanations for social change with the arrival of Islam, arguing for considerable cultural and economic continuity rather than devastation and unrelenting decline. Much new, and increasingly non-elite, architectural evidence and an ever-growing corpus of material culture indicate that Syria-Palestine entered a new age of social richness in the early Islamic period, even if the gains were chronologically and regionally uneven.

Genres: History, Middle East, Islam

Paperback

First published April 1, 2007

Reviews

[Alealea]

One of the most interesting book I read while studying urban history.
For anyone looking to change popular misbelief about Islamic expansion to concrete observation, this book is water in the desert.

[Merve]

read it for the plot...





the plot was the counter-argument to my dissertation topic lol

[Anatolikon]

Has some intriguing ideas but is so light on the Roman context that it fails to properly argue for the continuity into Islamic times which Walmsley posits.