The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule: A Historical and Archaeological Study

Darwin Press
Robert Schick
ISBN: 0878500812
price: $99.95  

This is a study of the historical and archaeological evidence for the social history of the Christians in Palestine during the transition from Byzantine Christian rule to Arab Islamic rule in the seventh, eighth, and early ninth centuries A.D. It combines historical information from a wide variety of Arabic, Greek, and Syriac written sources with the results of archaeological excavations of hundreds of churches, monasteries, and other Christian sites in modern-day Israel/Palestine and Jordan to examine what happened to the Christian communities during the momentous events of the period.
The first part of the book consists of nine interpretive chapters that examine the situation in the first years of the seventh century, the Sasanian invasion and occupation between A.D. 614 and 628, the Byzantine recovery between 628 and the mid-630s, the Islamic conquest of the 630s, the early Islamic period up to 813, churches in the Early Islamic period, Muslims and conversion to Islam, Muslim policies towards Christians, and iconoclasm. The second half of the book presents evidence for the presence of Christians and Muslims from a corpus of over five hundred historical and archaeological sites.