Volume 42, Number 11 · June 22, 1995
Before the Fall
By Averil Cameron
Egypt in Late Antiquity
by Roger S. Bagnall
Princeton University Press, 370 pp., $29.95
The Roman Near East, 31 BC–AD 337
by Fergus Millar
Harvard University Press, 587 pp., $45.00
In his account of Arabia, the life of Muhammad, and the rise of Islam in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon (who died two hundred years ago last year), debated two topics which are at the forefront of our own consciousness: the relations of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, and the supposed nature of Arabs in comparison with those of Greeks and Romans. In his characteristically urbane manner, he demurred at assumptions based on ethnic stereotypes, and thus, to put it in modern terms, at 'orientalizing' views of the peoples of the Near East. The perspicacity of Gibbon never fails to impress; indeed one of the features of each of the two books reviewed here is to deconstruct (and thereby refute) such Orientalizing conceptions.
Review, 3756 words
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