Late Antiquity: The Age Historians Added Between Rome and the Middle Ages

Late antiquity is the name historians give to roughly the third or fourth century through the seventh or eighth — the stretch that older schemes had nothing useful to say about, because they ran straight from "classical antiquity" to "the Middle Ages" across a single supposed break. The label is a twentieth-century addition to the vocabulary, and it exists to make four centuries of continuous, regionally uneven change visible as a subject in its own right rather than as the tail end of one period or the prelude to another.

What the label was invented to fix

The older sequence made the end of the western Roman imperial office carry an enormous amount of weight. Everything before it was ancient; everything after it was medieval. As the competing explanations for Rome's fall show, even the event at the centre of that scheme is disputed — and the scheme inherits every one of those disputes.

Worse, the framing only described one part of the map. In the same centuries, the eastern Mediterranean carried on with a functioning Roman state, an Iranian empire ran from Mesopotamia to Central Asia, a Red Sea kingdom minted its own coinage, and the religious landscape of the whole region was remade. Calling all of that "the end of antiquity" described almost none of it.

Late antiquity reframes the same years as transformation rather than termination. That does not mean nothing was lost — cities shrank, long-distance trade contracted in places, and violent conquest happened repeatedly. It means the period is studied for what it produced as well as what it ended.

The period is bigger than Rome

Three strands of evidence make the point, and all three are documented in standing remains.

The Roman east continued. Dumbarton Oaks, the research library and collection that has supported Byzantine studies since 1940, defines the field as the civilisation of the Byzantine Empire from the fourth to the fifteenth century, together with its interactions with neighbouring cultures. That is a single continuous span starting inside late antiquity. UNESCO's inscription for the Historic Areas of Istanbul names the sixth-century Hagia Sophia alongside the ancient Hippodrome of Constantine and the sixteenth-century Süleymaniye Mosque as masterpieces of a city associated with major political, religious and artistic events for more than two thousand years.

Iran was a co-equal power. UNESCO's Sassanid Archaeological Landscape of Fars Region covers eight archaeological sites in three areas of Fars Province — Firuzabad, Bishapur and Sarvestan — whose fortified structures, palaces and city plans date from the earliest and latest periods of the Sasanian Empire, described there as stretching across the region from 224 to 658 CE. The inscription includes the capital built by the dynasty's founder, Ardashir Papakan, and structures of his successor Shapur I, and notes that the landscape reflects Achaemenid and Parthian traditions and Roman art, and that this architecture in turn significantly influenced the Islamic era.

The Red Sea world was part of it. UNESCO dates the ruins of Aksum, near Ethiopia's northern border, to between the first and the thirteenth century AD, with monolithic obelisks, giant stelae, royal tombs and the remains of ancient castles, and describes the Kingdom of Aksum as the most powerful state between the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia. Long after its political decline in the tenth century, Ethiopian emperors continued to be crowned there.