In recent decades, there has been a resurgence of research on criminal justice during the classical Islamic period. Rapid urbanization and a need for state control unsettled rudimentary judicial structures. In stark contrast to the legal framework envisioned by jurists, criminal magistrates acted on administrative precepts coupled with their own discretion. Modern historians have attempted to overcome the lack of surviving case records and immateriality of extant legal treatises with new approaches that compare and contrast legal and literary texts using other sources, such as papyri. However, the roots of this dual legal system, dating back to the late eighth century under the Abbasids, remain a mystery. These caliphs transferred jurisdiction of penal law from judges to their elite corps, the shur?a, who had become both criminal magistrates and the police force. Some scholars, such as Joseph Schacht and Emile Tyan, have touched on this development, positing that it was indicative of the absolutist nature of the Abbasids, but this view reduces the complex political and legal factors inherent in this phenomenon. Surprisingly, answers may be found in a parallel development in the Roman Empire. During the Severan period (193-235), Roman emperors gave exclusive jurisdiction over punitive matters from the jury courts to inquisitorial tribunals known by modern scholars as cognito courts, which were run by state magistrates. These were not dictated by laws or edicts but by each judge’s discretionary authority. Similarly, increasing Roman citizenship, populations, and state intervention in cases that had been previously private prompted these changes. My paper argues that the parallel nature, functions, and origins of the cognito courts and the shur?a demonstrate that the legal transformations of the classical Islamic and Roman world were more analogous than previously thought. I will be utilizing a wide array of sources, such as literary texts, political sources, legal treatises, and papyri records, as well as secondary scholarship on Roman criminal law. Modern Roman historians, such as Peter Garnsey and William Turpin, as well as Abbasid-era authors such as Ibn al-Muqaffa? (d. 749-750), Ab? Yus?f (d. 798), and Mu?ammad Shayb?n? (d. 805), will be central to my argument. An interdisciplinary approach yields a greater comprehension of not only the global trajectories of criminal law but also the broader legal dynamics that occur with expanding populations and a tightening of imperial control.

This paper traces the impact of Roman-Byzantine loot on Umayyad art through close analysis of two seventh- and eighth-century tents: one described in al-Tabari’s chronicles of the early Arab-Muslim conquests, and the other painted on the walls of an early eighth-century bathhouse in Jordan. In the aftermath of a battle between Arab-Muslim and Byzantine forces in the year 644, an Arab woman known as Umm Abdallah bint Yazid al-Kalbiyya received a tent as loot. The tent had previously belonged to a Byzantine commander named Maurianos (al-Mawriyan al-Rumi), whom Umm ?Abdall?h had helped defeat. Although Umm Abdallah won her tent almost twenty years before the Umayyad family secured their hold on the caliphate, the anecdote reveals the kind of objects that were acquired as loot during the Arab-Muslim conquests of Roman-Byzantine territories that continued well into the Umayyad era. No depictions of Umm Abdallah’s tent survive, but this textual tent has a visual counterpart in the form of a tent depicted among the murals of a bathhouse decorated for the prince al-Walid ibn Yazid before he ascended to the throne in 743. The use of Roman-Byzantine pictorial conventions throughout the murals, like Umm Abdallah’s tent, indexed the successful Umayyad appropriation of Roman-Byzantine materials and images. When considered in light of early Arabic anecdotes describing Roman-Byzantine imperial tents and other loot acquired during the Arab-Muslim conquests, Umm Abdallah’s prize tent and al-Walid’s painted tent at Qusayr ‘Amra demonstrate the important roles that Roman-Byzantine loot played in the formation of Umayyad imperial visual culture.

It may come as no surprise to find shared images in the lofty philosophical, medical, or astronomical musings of the Romans and the Arabs; as is well known, both of their traditions drew from the same ancient Mediterranean sources, and especially from the Greeks. It is more difficult to explain the striking resemblances between some lowlier, more earthy images of Roman and medieval Arabic literature, such as those found in association with the humble person of the donkey. This paper will focus especially on stories about donkeys and humans interacting, stories about people imitating the voices of donkeys, and on stories about people having sex with donkeys. In exploring how these stories play on philosophical conceptions of man-as-microcosm on one hand, and on popular beliefs about the evil eye on the other hand, I will show that the boundaries between elite and popular literature often blurred in both the Roman and the medieval Arabic examples, and that shared features between both suggest hitherto unsuspected regions of shared cultural beliefs of the people of the Roman empire and those of the medieval Islamic empires. My analysis will include the Priapea, Apuleius’s Golden Ass (or Metamorphoses), al-Jahiz’s Kitab al-Hayawan, the epistles of the Ikhwan al-Safa’, Sufi poetry, and prophetic hadith, among other sources. I will conclude by musing on the origins of certain donkey images found in later European literature, and by pondering their similarity to both Roman and Arabic donkey stories, will find the lines between “East” and “West” hopelessly blurred.

This paper presents a targeted survey of Roman and Byzantine hydraulic infrastructure as it survived in cities of the Umayyad Levant. While the baths and saqiyas of the desert castles, as at Qusayr Amra, have been comparatively well known since the early twentieth century, new archaeology over the last thirty years has revealed the remarkable range and texture of water in urban settlements of the Levant after the Islamic conquests. This paper demarcates a spectrum of infrastructural outcomes which revolved, it is argued, around the administrative position of the city in question, as well as upon the role of cities writ large as loci for tax collection. For instance: sea-side Caesarea Maritima lost its position as Roman Palestina Prima’s provincial capital after the siege of 640, and while archaeological evidence suggests that its Roman aqueducts were in disrepair after the sixth century, their supplies were gradually replaced by new wells and cisterns in the vicinity of new houses and alongside revamped public areas, including the mosque built atop the former Temple / Church Platform at the city’s center. On the other hand, a system of street-side fountains at Jerash built in the Roman period were maintained for public areas (including churches) until the earthquake of 749 CE, even as a downtown bath complex was demolished and replaced by a congregational mosque. At Ramla or Resafa, newly created aqueducts and pointed-arch vaulted cisterns reveal both technological continuities and new syntheses repurposed for the evolving social environment.