The Past in the Present: Ancient Patterns in the Emergent Middle East

• Published in: Humanitas (Washington, D.C.) D.C.), 2020, Vol.33 (1), p.5-16
• Main Author: Gilmour, Andrew S.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Ancient civilizations; Centuries; Decision making; Foreign policy; Hypotheses; Influence; Leadership; Roman civilization; Zoroastrianism
• ISSN: 1066-7210
• DOI: 10.5840/humanitas2020331/21

The explanatory power of contemporary analytic approaches to the region such as security studies, political science, economics, or leadership studies is strong within bounded areas, but most of these disciplines refrain from attempting a systemic explanation of the entire region. The task of managing such uncertainty begins by testing competing hypotheses that can plausibly account for events observed in the region and that involve the consideration of empirical data in a historical-humanistic sense. If the region lacks a single discernible and stable distribution of power-military, economic, and ideological-that could give shape to a regional state system, one way to begin to map a range of plausible futures is to generate different conceptual frameworks that can be tested, over time, with empirical data. In the view of the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, the Western Roman Empire's collapse did not fully occur until the rise of Islam in the sixth and seventh centuries when the economic relationships of the Mediterranean world began to fracture, casting western Europe back to a more primitive agrarian economy.1 The migration in the fourth and fifth centuries of Germanic tribes into Roman territory-tribes that preserved many Roman institutions and trade relationships-was not as disruptive to the continuity of Roman civilization in the West as was the rise of Islam.