Ethnography After Antiquity

In our quest to read all of the books of Anthony Kaldellis, we tackled Ethnography After Antiquity: Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature. A detailed analysis of how ethnography disappeared or changed after Late Antiquity and then experienced a return of sorts in the 14th and 15th centuries, Kaldellis raises a number of questions and critiques of problematic notions like the "Byzantine Commonwealth" or attempts by some scholars to accuse Byzantine authors of not facing geopolitical reality due to their classicizing language or ethnonyms. For our purposes, it helps to understand why Byzantine sources are silent about Christian Nubia and Ethiopia, since not only was there a vast distance between them but a decline of ethnographic digressions in Byzantine literate precluded more explicit ethnographic accounts. Even fellow Christians among Slavic peoples or Christians in former Roman territory in the Near East were not usually written about ethnographically after Late Antiquity, making it unlikely that we will find anything like digressions by Procopius on Nubia or Aksum in authors like Psellos or Skylitzes. Instead, what happened was changes in the nature of historical writing and references to the barbarian/non-Christian Other for imperial panegyric writings, imperial biographies, or, in the cases of military manuals, occasional references to others like the "Persians." The Other was often used by Byzantine authors to help define what Roman identity meant, which was primarily Roman rather than a religious one. This meant that Christian solidarity with Latins, Slavs who converted to Christian, or even the Bulgarians after their conversion was always outweighed by political concerns by the Byzantines. The loss of much of the empire's territory due to the Arab conquests led to another problem, since now Byzantine author truly wrote an ethnographic account of Islam until the 15th century. Coming to terms with Islam and the subsequent loss of territory raised a number of critical issues and although Byzantine intellectuals certainly knew much more about the Arabs and Muslim territories, coming to analyze it objectively remained difficult. By the last century and a half of its existence, ethnographic writings return and Byzantine authors have reconsidered the status of the Western "barbarians" due to their rising political, economic and intellectual status. This fascinating period, where some authors revive a Herodotean and even Hellenic identity, is the most fascinating one.