Archaeology Lecture: The Islamic-Byzantine Frontier: Interaction and Exchange Among Muslim and Christian Communities

Asa Eger, associate professor of early Islamic history at UNC Greensboro will discuss the physical and ideological aspects of the early interactions between Christianity and Islam, to add perspective to contemporary events, in this free webinar at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 14. Pre-registration is required. Please email Laurel Taylor (ltaylor@unca.edu), UNC Asheville senior lecturer in classics to receive the Zoom link.

This lecture is co-sponsored by UNC Asheville’s Department of Classics and Western North Carolina Chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Lecture Abstract

The retreat of the Byzantine army from Syria in around 650 CE, in advance of the approaching Arab armies, is one that has resounded emphatically in the works of both Islamic and Christian writers, and created an enduring motif: that of the Islamic-Byzantine frontier. For centuries, Byzantine and Islamic scholars have evocatively sketched a contested border: the annual raids between the two, the line of fortresses defending Islamic lands, the no-man’s land in between and the birth of jihad. In early representations of a Muslim-Christian encounter, accounts of the Islamic-Byzantine frontier are charged with significance for a future ‘clash of civilizations’ that often envisions a polarized world. In this lecture, Eger examines the physical and ideological aspects of this frontier. By highlighting the archaeological study of the real and material frontier, as well as acknowledging its ideological military and religious implications, he offers a more complex vision of this dividing line than has been traditionally disseminated and challenges prevailing notions of jihad.

Asa Eger Bio

Asa Eger is Associate Professor of Early Islamic History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. An archaeologist and historian, he has published numerous articles and two books. He has fifteen years field experience in the eastern Mediterranean, most recently completing excavations in Turkey at Tüpraş Field, identified as the eighth to twelfth century frontier site of Ḥiṣn al-Tinat. He has excavated and surveyed in the regions of Cilicia, Antioch, and Mar’ash in Turkey, and in Israel, Greece, and Cyprus. He has also worked on ceramic analysis from these and older museum collections. His books include the recently published The Spaces Between the Teeth: A Gazetteer of Towns on the Islamic-Byzantine Frontier and the monograph The Islamic-Byzantine Frontier: Interaction and Exchange Among Muslim and Christian Communities. Eger’s work follows themes of the transition from Byzantine to Islamic Near East as manifested within frontiers, landscape and settlement archaeology, and environmental history mainly in the central Islamic lands (Anatolia, Syro-Palestine, and northern Mesopotamia/al-Jazira).