Film
The Religious Landscape of Arabia
350 – 610 CE
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Pre-Islamic Arabia is usually imagined as an empty desert dotted with idols. By the sixth century it was one of the most religiously diverse regions of the ancient world.
This film maps that landscape across three centuries: the astral gods of the south, the sacred stones of the Hijaz, the Jewish communities of the oases, the monotheism the kings of Himyar adopted, two rival Christian traditions tied to rival empires, Zoroastrianism on the Gulf, and the independent seekers known as the ḥanīfs. Not an empty desert, but a peninsula alive with competing beliefs, and bound into the empires and trade routes of Late Antiquity.
Sources
- Christian Julien Robin, “Arabia and Ethiopia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity
- G. W. Bowersock, The Throne of Adulis (Oxford, 2013)
- Robert G. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs (Routledge, 2001)
- Iwona Gajda, Le royaume de Ḥimyar à l'époque monothéiste (Paris, 2009)
- Synodicon Orientale, ed. J.-B. Chabot
- J. Ryckmans, “Arabian Religion”
- The Digital Archive for the Study of Pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions (DASI)
Primary sources
- Sabaean and Himyarite inscriptions (DASI)
- Synodicon Orientale
- The Ezana stela, Aksum
Image sources
Images from Wikimedia Commons, the Walters Art Museum, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, under Creative Commons and public-domain licences. Full per-image credits appear at the end of the film.