Misplaced Pages

#498501

99-572: S , or for lowercase, s , is the nineteenth letter of the Latin alphabet , used in the English alphabet , the alphabets of other western European languages and other latin alphabets worldwide. Its name in English is ess (pronounced / ˈ ɛ s / ), plural esses . Northwest Semitic šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (as in ' sh ip'). It originated most likely as

198-411: A multigraph . Multigraphs include digraphs of two letters (e.g. English ch , sh , th ), and trigraphs of three letters (e.g. English tch ). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H , Greek eta ⟨Η⟩ , and Cyrillic en ⟨Н⟩ are homoglyphs , but represent different phonemes. Conversely,

297-513: A lowercase form (also called minuscule ). Upper- and lowercase letters represent the same sound, but serve different functions in writing. Capital letters are most often used at the beginning of a sentence, as the first letter of a proper name or title, or in headers or inscriptions. They may also serve other functions, such as in the German language where all nouns begin with capital letters. The terms uppercase and lowercase originated in

396-422: A pictogram of a tooth ( שנא ) and represented the phoneme /ʃ/ via the acrophonic principle. Ancient Greek did not have a /ʃ/ "sh" phoneme, so the derived Greek letter Sigma ( Σ ) came to represent the voiceless alveolar sibilant /s/ . While the letter shape Σ continues Phoenician šîn , its name sigma is taken from the letter Samekh , while the shape and position of samekh but name of šîn

495-549: A variety of modern uses in mathematics, science, and engineering . People and objects are sometimes named after letters, for one of these reasons: The word letter entered Middle English c.  1200 , borrowed from the Old French letre . It eventually displaced the previous Old English term bōcstæf ' bookstaff '. Letter ultimately descends from the Latin littera , which may have been derived from

594-499: A voiceless alveolar sibilant /s/ . It also commonly represents a voiced alveolar sibilant /z/ , as in 'rose' and 'bands'. Due to yod-coalescence , it may also represent a voiceless palato-alveolar fricative /ʃ/ , as in 'sugar', or a voiced palato-alveolar fricative /ʒ/ , as in 'measure'. Final ⟨s⟩ is the usual mark for plural nouns . It is the regular ending of English third person present tense verbs . In some words of French origin, ⟨s⟩

693-488: A citadel. Former imperial capitals such as Cologne and Trier lived on in diminished form as administrative centres of the Franks . In Britain most towns and cities had been in decline, apart from a brief period of recovery during the fourth century, well before the withdrawal of Roman governors and garrisons but the process might well have stretched well into the fifth century. Historians emphasizing urban continuities with

792-412: A general decline in urban populations. As a whole, the period of late antiquity was accompanied by an overall population decline in almost all Europe, and a reversion to more of a subsistence economy. Long-distance markets disappeared, and there was a reversion to a greater degree of local production and consumption, rather than webs of commerce and specialized production. Concurrently, the continuity of

891-469: A partial revival of classicism). Nearly all of these more abstracted conventions could be observed in the glittering mosaics of the era, which during this period moved from being decoration derivative from painting used on floors (and walls likely to become wet) to a major vehicle of religious art in churches. The glazed surfaces of the tesserae sparkled in the light and illuminated the basilica churches. Unlike their fresco predecessors, much more emphasis

990-520: A period of dynamic religious experimentation and spirituality with many syncretic sects, some formed centuries earlier, such as Gnosticism or Neoplatonism and the Chaldaean oracles , some novel, such as hermeticism . Culminating in the reforms advocated by Apollonius of Tyana being adopted by Aurelian and formulated by Flavius Claudius Julianus to create an organized but short-lived pagan state religion that ensured its underground survival into

1089-576: A population of 800,000 in the beginning of the period to a population of 30,000 by the end of the period, the most precipitous drop coming with the breaking of the aqueducts during the Gothic War . A similar though less marked decline in urban population occurred later in Constantinople, which was gaining population until the outbreak of the Plague of Justinian in 541. In Europe there was also

SECTION 10

#1732765344499

1188-521: A proliferation of various ascetic or semi-ascetic practices. Holy Fools and Stylites counted among the more extreme forms but through such personalities like John Chrysostom , Jerome , Augustine or Gregory the Great monastic attitudes penetrated other areas of Christian life. Late antiquity marks the decline of Roman state religion , circumscribed in degrees by edicts likely inspired by Christian advisors such as Eusebius to 4th-century emperors, and

1287-423: A separate phoneme, most likely /ʃ/ "sh" (transliterated as ś ). The early Latin alphabet adopted sigma, but not san, as Old Latin did not have a /ʃ/ "sh" phoneme. The shape of Latin S arises from Greek Σ by dropping one out of the four strokes of that letter. The (angular) S-shape composed of three strokes existed as a variant of the four-stroke letter Σ already in the epigraphy of Western Greek alphabets , and

1386-525: A shade exotic," observes H. R. Loyn , "owing their reason for being more to the military and administrative needs of Rome than to any economic virtue". The other institutional power centre, the Roman villa , did not survive in Britain either. Gildas lamented the destruction of the twenty-eight cities of Britain; though not all in his list can be identified with known Roman sites, Loyn finds no reason to doubt

1485-515: A vehicle for the last group of powerful pagans to resist Christianity, as in the late 4th century Symmachi–Nicomachi diptych . Extravagant hoards of silver plate are especially common from the 4th century, including the Mildenhall Treasure , Esquiline Treasure , Hoxne Hoard , and the imperial Missorium of Theodosius I . In the field of literature, late antiquity is known for the declining use of classical Greek and Latin , and

1584-582: Is Baiyara (perhaps modern Montoro ), mentioned as founded by Reccared in the 15th-century geographical account, Kitab al-Rawd al-Mitar . The arrival of a highly urbanized Islamic culture in the decade following 711 ensured the survival of cities in the Hispaniae into the Middle Ages. Beyond the Mediterranean world, the cities of Gaul withdrew within a constricted line of defense around

1683-456: Is considered to be a separate letter from ⟨n⟩ , though this distinction is not usually recognised in English dictionaries. In computer systems, each has its own code point , U+006E n LATIN SMALL LETTER N and U+00F1 ñ LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE , respectively. Letters may also function as numerals with assigned numerical values, for example with Roman numerals . Greek and Latin letters have

1782-515: Is continued in the xi . Within Greek, the name of sigma was influenced by its association with the Greek word σίζω (earlier *sigj- ), "to hiss". The original name of the letter "Sigma" may have been san , but due to the early history of the Greek epichoric alphabets , "san" came to be identified as a separate letter, Ϻ . Herodotus reported that "san" was the name given by the Dorians to

1881-605: Is debated . Constantine confirmed the legalization of the religion through the so-called Edict of Milan in 313, jointly issued with his rival in the East, Licinius (r. 308–324). By the late 4th century, Emperor Theodosius the Great had made Christianity the State religion, thereby transforming the Classical Roman world, which Peter Brown characterized as "rustling with the presence of many divine spirits ." Constantine I

1980-400: Is indicated by the existence of precomposed characters for use with computer systems (for example, ⟨á⟩ , ⟨à⟩ , ⟨ä⟩ , ⟨â⟩ , ⟨ã⟩ .) In the following table, letters from multiple different writing systems are shown, to demonstrate the variety of letters used throughout the world. Late Antiquity Late antiquity

2079-738: Is occasionally reduced to three strokes ( ᛋ ) from the later 5th century, and appears regularly with three strokes in Younger Futhark . The ⟨sh⟩ digraph for English /ʃ/ arose in Middle English (alongside ⟨sch⟩ ), replacing the Old English ⟨sc⟩ digraph. Similarly, Old High German ⟨sc⟩ was replaced by ⟨sch⟩ in Early Modern High German orthography. The minuscule form ſ, called

SECTION 20

#1732765344499

2178-448: Is silent, as in 'isle' or 'debris'. The letter ⟨s⟩ is the seventh most common letter in English and the third-most common consonant after ⟨t⟩ and ⟨n⟩ . It is the most common letter for the first letter of a word in the English language. In German , ⟨s⟩ represents: When doubled ( ⟨ss⟩ ), it represents a voiceless alveolar sibilant /s/ , as in 'müssen'. In

2277-728: Is sometimes defined as spanning from the end of classical antiquity to the local start of the Middle Ages , from around the late 3rd century up to the 7th or 8th century in Europe and adjacent areas bordering the Mediterranean Basin depending on location. The popularisation of this periodization in English has generally been credited to historian Peter Brown , who proposed a period between 150 and 750 AD. The Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity defines it as "the period between approximately 250 and 750 AD". Precise boundaries for

2376-520: Is the end of the polis model. While there was a decline of urban life in late antiquity (especially in the West) the epoch brought with it new forms of political participation in the urban spaces as well. Especially the role of crowds and masses in cities has increased, leading to new levels of tension. In the cities the strained economies of Roman over-expansion arrested growth. Almost all new public building in late antiquity came directly or indirectly from

2475-508: The Augustus . The later Roman Empire was in a sense a network of cities. Archaeology now supplements literary sources to document the transformation followed by collapse of cities in the Mediterranean Basin . Two diagnostic symptoms of decline—or as many historians prefer, 'transformation'—are subdivision, particularly of expansive formal spaces in both the domus and the public basilica , and encroachment, in which artisans' shops invade

2574-578: The Anglo-Saxon period depend largely on the post-Roman survival of Roman toponymy . Aside from a mere handful of its continuously inhabited sites, like York and London and possibly Canterbury , however, the rapidity and thoroughness with which its urban life collapsed with the dissolution of centralized bureaucracy calls into question the extent to which Roman Britain had ever become authentically urbanized: "in Roman Britain towns appeared

2673-461: The Arab invasions marked—through conquest and the disruption of Mediterranean trade routes—the cataclysmic end of late antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages . On the other hand, there is a more recent thesis, associated with scholars in the tradition of Peter Brown, in which Islam is seen to be a product of the late antique world, not foreign to it. This school suggests that its origin within

2772-654: The Byzantine military manuals achieving great renown and influence: the most famous of which is the Strategikon attributed to Emperor Maurice , written in the 6th century. One genre of literature among Christian writers in this period was the Hexaemeron , dedicated to the composition of commentaries, homilies, and treatises concerned with the exegesis of the Genesis creation narrative . The first example of this

2871-471: The De arithmetica , De musica , and De consolatione philosophiae of Boethius —both later key works in medieval education). The 4th and 5th centuries also saw an explosion of Christian literature , of which Greek writers such as Eusebius of Caesarea , Basil of Caesarea , Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom and Latin writers such as Ambrose of Milan , Jerome and Augustine of Hippo are only among

2970-657: The Greek East and Latin West became more pronounced. The Diocletianic Persecution of Christians in the early 4th century was ended by Galerius and under Constantine the Great , Christianity was made legal in the Empire. The 4th century Christianization of the Roman Empire was extended by the conversions of Tiridates the Great of Armenia , Mirian III of Iberia , and Ezana of Axum , who later invaded and ended

3069-568: The Kingdom of Kush . During the late 4th century reign of Theodosius I , Nicene Christianity was proclaimed the state church of the Roman Empire . The city of Constantinople became the permanent imperial residence in the East by the 5th century and superseded Rome as the largest city in the Late Roman Empire and the Mediterranean Basin . The longest Roman aqueduct system, the 250 km (160 mi)-long Aqueduct of Valens

S - Misplaced Pages Continue

3168-582: The Late Antique Little Ice Age ) and a disastrous pandemic (the Plague of Justinian in 541). The effects of these events in the social and political life are still under discussion. In the 7th century the disastrous Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 and the campaigns of Khosrow II and Heraclius facilitated the emergence of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula during the lifetime of Muhammad . Subsequent Muslim conquest of

3267-457: The Ostrogoths and Visigoths saw themselves as perpetuating the "Roman" tradition. While the usage "Late Antiquity" suggests that the social and cultural priorities of classical antiquity endured throughout Europe into the Middle Ages , the usage of "Early Middle Ages" or "Early Byzantine" emphasizes a break with the classical past, and the term " Migration Period " tends to de-emphasize

3366-460: The Republican senatorial class was replaced with the silk court vestments and jewelry associated with Byzantine imperial iconography. Also indicative of the times is the fact that the imperial cabinet of advisors came to be known as the consistorium , or those who would stand in courtly attendance upon their seated emperor, as distinct from the informal set of friends and advisors surrounding

3465-620: The later Roman Empire , as it was reorganized by Diocletian (r. 284–305), and the Early Middle Ages are stressed by writers who wish to emphasize that the seeds of medieval culture were already developing in the Christianized empire, and that they continued to do so in the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantine Empire at least until the coming of Islam . Concurrently, some migrating Germanic tribes such as

3564-460: The long s , developed in the early medieval period, within the Visigothic and Carolingian hands, with predecessors in the half-uncial and cursive scripts of Late Antiquity . It remained standard in western writing throughout the medieval period and was adopted in early printing with movable types. It existed alongside minuscule "round" or "short" s , which were at the time only used at

3663-597: The voiceless palato-alveolar fricative /ʃ/ in most dialects when syllable-final, and [ʒ] in European Portuguese Islão (Islam) or, in many sociolects of Brazilian Portuguese , esdrúxulo ( proparoxytone ). In some Andalusian dialects of Spanish, it merged with Peninsular Spanish ⟨c⟩ and ⟨z⟩ and is now pronounced /θ/ . In Hungarian , it represents /ʃ/ . In Turkmen , it represents /θ/ . In several Western Romance languages , like Spanish and French ,

3762-411: The "Good Shepherd", resembling the traditional iconography of Hermes. He was increasingly given Roman elite status, and shrouded in purple robes like the emperors with orb and scepter in hand — this new type of depiction is variously thought to be derived from either the iconography of Jupiter or of classical philosophers. As for luxury arts, manuscript illumination on vellum and parchment emerged from

3861-558: The 3rd century was a major step in the development of Christian spirituality. While it initially operated outside the episcopal authority of the Church, it would become hugely successful and by the 8th century it became one of the key Christian practices. Monasticism was not the only new Christian movement to appear in late antiquity, although it had perhaps the greatest influence and it achieved unprecedented geographical spread. It influenced many aspects of Christian religious life and led to

3960-578: The 5th century, with a few manuscripts of Roman literary classics like the Vergilius Vaticanus and the Vergilius Romanus , but increasingly Christian texts, of which Quedlinburg Itala fragment (420–430) is the oldest survivor. Carved ivory diptychs were used for secular subjects, as in the imperial and consular diptychs presented to friends, as well as religious ones, both Christian and pagan – they seem to have been especially

4059-704: The Balkans and Persian destructions in Anatolia in the 620s. City life continued in Syria, Jordan and Palestine into the 8th. In the later 6th century street construction was still undertaken in Caesarea Maritima in Palestine, and Edessa was able to deflect Chosroes I with massive payments in gold in 540 and 544, before it was overrun in 609. The stylistic changes characteristic of late antique art mark

S - Misplaced Pages Continue

4158-508: The Balkans, 'where inhabited centres contracted and regrouped around a defensible acropolis , or were abandoned in favour of such positions elsewhere." In the western Mediterranean, the only new cities known to be founded in Europe between the 5th and 8th centuries were the four or five Visigothic "victory cities". Reccopolis in the province of Guadalajara is one: the others were Victoriacum , founded by Leovigild , which may survive as

4257-689: The Byzantine age and beyond. Mahāyāna Buddhism developed in India and along the Silk Road in Central Asia , while Manichaeism , a Dualist faith, arose in Mesopotamia and spread both East and West, for a time contending with Christianity in the Roman Empire. Many of the new religions relied on the emergence of the parchment codex (bound book) over the papyrus volumen (scroll),

4356-681: The Early Middle Ages. The Roman Empire underwent considerable social, cultural and organizational changes starting with the reign of Diocletian , who began the custom of splitting the Empire into Eastern and Western portions ruled by multiple emperors simultaneously . The Sasanian Empire supplanted the Parthian Empire and began a new phase of the Roman–Persian Wars, the Roman–Sasanian Wars . The divisions between

4455-568: The Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople meant that the turning-point for the Greek East came later, in the 7th century, as the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine Empire centered around the Balkans , North Africa ( Egypt and Carthage ), and Asia Minor . The cities in the East were still lively stages for political participation and remained important for background for religious and political disputes. The degree and extent of discontinuity in

4554-684: The Great led to the fall of the Ostrogothic and Vandal Kingdoms, and their reincorporation into the Empire, when the city of Rome and much of Italy and North Africa returned to imperial control. Though most of Italy was soon part of the Kingdom of the Lombards , the Roman Exarchate of Ravenna endured, ensuring the so-called Byzantine Papacy . Justinian constructed the Hagia Sophia , a great example of Byzantine architecture , and

4653-593: The Greek diphthera 'writing tablet' via Etruscan . Until the 19th century, letter was also used interchangeably to refer to a speech segment . Before alphabets, phonograms , graphic symbols of sounds, were used. There were three kinds of phonograms: verbal, pictures for entire words, syllabic, which stood for articulations of words, and alphabetic, which represented signs or letters. The earliest examples of which are from Ancient Egypt and Ancient China, dating to c.  3000 BCE . The first consonantal alphabet emerged around c.  1800 BCE , representing

4752-649: The Levant and Persia overthrew the Sasanian Empire and permanently wrested two thirds of the Eastern Roman Empire's territory from Roman control, forming the Rashidun Caliphate . The Byzantine Empire under the Heraclian dynasty began the middle Byzantine period , and together with the establishment of the later 7th century Umayyad Caliphate , generally marks the end of late antiquity. One of

4851-492: The London printer John Bell (1745–1831) pioneered the change. His edition of Shakespeare, in 1785, was advertised with the claim that he "ventured to depart from the common mode by rejecting the long 'ſ' in favor of the round one, as being less liable to error....." The Times of London made the switch from the long to the short s with its issue of 10 September 1803. Encyclopædia Britannica 's 5th edition, completed in 1817,

4950-785: The Phoenicians, Semitic workers in Egypt. Their script was originally written and read from right to left. From the Phoenician alphabet came the Etruscan and Greek alphabets. From there, the most widely used alphabet today emerged, Latin, which is written and read from left to right. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters, nineteen of which the Latin alphabet used, and the Greek alphabet, adapted c.  900 BCE , added four letters to those used in Phoenician. This Greek alphabet

5049-577: The Third Century the military, political and economic demands made by the Empire made the service in local government to be an onerous duty, often imposed as punishment. Harassed urban dwellers fled to the walled estates of the wealthy to avoid taxes, military service, famine and disease. In the Western Roman Empire especially, many cities destroyed by invasion or civil war in the 3rd century could not be rebuilt. Plague and famine hit

SECTION 50

#1732765344499

5148-618: The apocalypticism of Islamic theology and in the way the Quran seems to react to contemporary religious and cultural issues shared by the late antique world at large. Further indication that Arabia (and thus the environment in which Islam first developed) was a part of the late antique world is found in the close economic and military relations between Arabia, the Byzantine Empire and the Sassanian Empire. In recent years,

5247-450: The beauty and movement of the body, but rather, hints at the spiritual reality behind its subjects . Additionally, mirroring the rise of Christianity and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, painting and freestanding sculpture gradually fell from favor in the artistic community. Replacing them were greater interests in mosaics, architecture, and relief sculpture. As the soldier emperors such as Maximinus Thrax (r. 235–238) emerged from

5346-561: The building is not architecturally a basilica. In the former Western Roman Empire almost no great buildings were constructed from the 5th century. A most outstanding example is the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna constructed c.  530 at a cost of 26,000 gold solidi or 360 Roman pounds of gold. City life in the East, though negatively affected by the plague in the 6th–7th centuries, finally collapsed due to Slavic invasions in

5445-593: The chair in the apse reserved in secular structures for the magistrate—or the Emperor himself—as the representative here and now of Christ Pantocrator , the Ruler of All, his characteristic late antique icon . These ecclesiastical basilicas (e.g., St. John Lateran and St. Peter's in Rome) were themselves outdone by Justinian's Hagia Sophia , a staggering display of later Roman/Byzantine power and architectural taste, though

5544-610: The city of Vitoria , though a 12th-century (re)foundation for this city is given in contemporary sources; Lugo id est Luceo in the Asturias , referred to by Isidore of Seville , and Ologicus (perhaps Ologitis ), founded using Basque labour in 621 by Suinthila as a fortification against the Basques, modern Olite . All of these cities were founded for military purposes and at least Reccopolis, Victoriacum, and Ologicus in celebration of victory. A possible fifth Visigothic foundation

5643-438: The days of handset type for printing presses. Individual letter blocks were kept in specific compartments of drawers in a type case. Capital letters were stored in a higher drawer or upper case. In most alphabetic scripts, diacritics (or accents) are a routinely used. English is unusual in not using them except for loanwords from other languages or personal names (for example, naïve , Brontë ). The ubiquity of this usage

5742-431: The digraph ⟨sch⟩ , it represents a voiceless palato-alveolar fricative /ʃ/ , as in 'schon'. In most languages that use the Latin alphabet, ⟨s⟩ represents the voiceless alveolar or voiceless dental sibilant /s/ . In many Romance languages , it also represents the voiced alveolar or voiced dental sibilant /z/ , as in Portuguese mesa (table). In Portuguese , it may represent

5841-418: The disruptions in the former Western Roman Empire caused by the creation of Germanic kingdoms within her borders beginning with the foedus with the Goths in Aquitania in 418. The general decline of population, technological knowledge and standards of living in Europe during this period became the archetypal example of societal collapse for writers from the Renaissance . As a result of this decline, and

5940-566: The distinct forms of ⟨S⟩ , the Greek sigma ⟨Σ⟩ , and Cyrillic es ⟨С⟩ each represent analogous /s/ phonemes. Letters are associated with specific names, which may differ between languages and dialects. Z , for example, is usually called zed outside of the United States, where it is named zee . Both ultimately derive from the name of the parent Greek letter zeta ⟨Ζ⟩ . In alphabets, letters are arranged in alphabetical order , which also may vary by language. In Spanish, ⟨ñ⟩

6039-410: The emperors or imperial officials. Attempts were made to maintain what was already there. The supply of free grain and oil to 20% of the population of Rome remained intact the last decades of the 5th century. It was once thought that the elite and rich had withdrawn to the private luxuries of their numerous villas and town houses. Scholarly opinion has revised this. They monopolized the higher offices in

SECTION 60

#1732765344499

6138-425: The end of classical Roman art and the beginnings of medieval art . As a complicated period bridging between Roman art and later medieval styles (such as that of the Byzantines ), the late antique period saw a transition from the classical idealized realism tradition largely influenced by ancient Greek art to the more iconic, stylized art of the Middle Ages. Unlike classical art, late antique art does not emphasize

6237-414: The end of words. In most Western orthographies, the ſ gradually fell out of use during the second half of the 18th century, although it remained in occasional use into the 19th century. In Spain, the change was mainly accomplished between 1760 and 1766. In France, the change occurred between 1782 and 1793. Printers in the United States stopped using the long s between 1795 and 1810. In English orthography,

6336-399: The essential truth of his statement. Classical antiquity can generally be defined as an age of cities; the Greek polis and Roman municipium were locally organised, self-governing bodies of citizens governed by written constitutions. When Rome came to dominate the known world, local initiative and control were gradually subsumed by the ever-growing Imperial bureaucracy; by the Crisis of

6435-408: The expense of amphitheaters, temples, libraries, porticoes, gymnasia, concert and lecture halls, theaters and other amenities of public life. In any case, as Christianity took over, many of these buildings which were associated with pagan cults were neglected in favor of building churches and donating to the poor. The Christian basilica was copied from the civic structure with variations. The bishop took

6534-445: The far-away centralized administration (in concert with the great landowners ), and those who did not; although they were well-born and thoroughly educated, a classical education and the election by the Senate to magistracies was no longer the path to success. Room at the top of late antique society was more bureaucratic and involved increasingly intricate channels of access to the emperor; the plain toga that had identified all members of

6633-634: The final ⟨s⟩ is the usual mark of plural nouns . In the International Phonetic Alphabet , ⟨s⟩ represents the voiceless alveolar sibilant /s/ . [REDACTED] Letter (alphabet) A letter is a type of grapheme , the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes , the smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called

6732-399: The first outbreak of the centuries-long first plague pandemic took place. At Ctesiphon , the Sasanians completed the Taq Kasra , the colossal iwan of which is the largest single-span vault of unreinforced brickwork in the world and the triumph of Sasanian architecture . The middle of the 6th century was characterized by extreme climate events ( the volcanic winter of 535–536 and

6831-469: The former allowing for quicker access to key materials and easier portability than the fragile scroll, thus fueling the rise of synoptic exegesis , papyrology . Notable in this regard is the topic of the Fifty Bibles of Constantine . Within the recently legitimized Christian community of the 4th century, a division could be more distinctly seen between the laity and an increasingly celibate male leadership. These men presented themselves as removed from

6930-436: The imperial administration, but they were removed from military command by the late 3rd century. Their focus turned to preserving their vast wealth rather than fighting for it. The basilica , which had functioned as a law court or for imperial reception of foreign dignitaries, became the primary public building in the 4th century. Due to the stress on civic finances, cities spent money on walls, maintaining baths and markets at

7029-571: The late 7th and early 8th centuries. Finally, many slight letter additions and drops were made to the common alphabet used in the western world. Minor changes were made such as the removal of certain letters, such as thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩ , wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ , and eth ⟨Ð ð⟩ . A letter can have multiple variants, or allographs , related to variation in style of handwriting or printing . Some writing systems have two major types of allographs for each letter: an uppercase form (also called capital or majuscule ) and

7128-541: The medieval period. Justinian rebuilt his birthplace in Illyricum , as Justiniana Prima , more in a gesture of imperium than out of an urbanistic necessity; another "city", was reputed to have been founded, according to Procopius ' panegyric on Justinian's buildings, precisely at the spot where the general Belisarius touched shore in North Africa: the miraculous spring that gushed forth to give them water and

7227-458: The most important transformations in late antiquity was the formation and evolution of the Abrahamic religions : Christianity , Rabbinic Judaism and, eventually, Islam . A milestone in the spread of Christianity was the conversion of Emperor Constantine the Great (r. 306–337) in 312, as claimed by his Christian panegyrist Eusebius of Caesarea , although the sincerity of his conversion

7326-409: The most renowned representatives. On the other hand, authors such as Ammianus Marcellinus (4th century) and Procopius of Caesarea (6th century) were able to keep the tradition of classical Hellenistic historiography alive in the Byzantine empire. Due to several factors of the era, among them the political instability and the constant military threats, treatises on war became a popular genre with

7425-449: The new style, shows the contrast especially clearly. In nearly all artistic media, simpler shapes were adopted and once natural designs were abstracted. Additionally hierarchy of scale overtook the preeminence of perspective and other classical models for representing spatial organization. From c.  300 Early Christian art began to create new public forms, which now included sculpture , previously distrusted by Christians as it

7524-501: The period are a continuing matter of debate. In the West, its end was earlier, with the start of the Early Middle Ages typically placed in the 6th century, or even earlier on the edges of the Western Roman Empire . The term Spätantike , literally "late antiquity", has been used by German-speaking historians since its popularization by Alois Riegl in the early 20th century. It was given currency in English partly by

7623-472: The period of late antiquity has become a major focus in the fields of Quranic studies and Islamic origins. The late antique period also saw a wholesale transformation of the political and social basis of life in and around the Roman Empire . The Roman citizen elite in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, under the pressure of taxation and the ruinous cost of presenting spectacular public entertainments in

7722-738: The provinces in the 3rd century, they brought with them their own regional influences and artistic tastes. For example, artists jettisoned the classical portrayal of the human body for one that was more rigid and frontal. This is markedly evident in the combined porphyry Portrait of the Four Tetrarchs in Venice . With these stubby figures clutching each other and their swords, all individualism , naturalism , Roman verism , and Greek idealism diminish. The Arch of Constantine in Rome, which re-used earlier classicising reliefs together with ones in

7821-449: The public thoroughfare, a transformation that was to result in the souk (marketplace). Burials within the urban precincts mark another stage in dissolution of traditional urbanistic discipline, overpowered by the attraction of saintly shrines and relics. In Roman Britain , the typical 4th- and 5th-century layer of dark earth within cities seems to be a result of increased gardening in formerly urban spaces. The city of Rome went from

7920-482: The relative scarcity of historical records from Europe in particular, the period from roughly the early fifth century until the Carolingian Renaissance (or later still) was referred to as the " Dark Ages ". This term has mostly been abandoned as a name for a historiographical epoch, being replaced by "Late Antiquity" in the periodization of the late Western Roman Empire, the early Byzantine Empire and

8019-465: The rise of Islam, two main theses prevail. On the one hand, there is the traditional view, as espoused by most historians prior to the second half of the twentieth century (and after) and by Muslim scholars. This view, the so-called "out of Arabia"-thesis, holds that Islam as a phenomenon was a new, alien element in the late antique world. Related to this is the Pirenne Thesis , according to which

8118-491: The rise of literary cultures in Syriac , Armenian , Georgian , Ethiopic , Arabic , and Coptic . It also marks a shift in literary style, with a preference for encyclopedic works in a dense and allusive style, consisting of summaries of earlier works (anthologies, epitomes) often dressed up in elaborate allegorical garb (e.g., De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae [The Marriage of Mercury and Philology] of Martianus Capella and

8217-723: The rural population that straightway abandoned their ploughshares for civilised life within the new walls, lend a certain taste of unreality to the project. In mainland Greece, the inhabitants of Sparta , Argos and Corinth abandoned their cities for fortified sites in nearby high places; the fortified heights of Acrocorinth are typical of Byzantine urban sites in Greece. In Italy, populations that had clustered within reach of Roman roads began to withdraw from them, as potential avenues of intrusion, and to rebuild in typically constricted fashion round an isolated fortified promontory, or rocca ; Cameron notes similar movement of populations in

8316-570: The same letter called "Sigma" by the Ionians . The Western Greek alphabet used in Cumae was adopted by the Etruscans and Latins in the 7th century BC, and over the following centuries, it developed into a range of Old Italic alphabets , including the Etruscan alphabet and the early Latin alphabet . In Etruscan , the value /s/ of Greek sigma (𐌔) was maintained, while san (𐌑) represented

8415-593: The shared cultural horizon of the late antique world explains the character of Islam and its development. Such historians point to similarities with other late antique religions and philosophies—especially Christianity—in the prominent role and manifestations of piety in Islam, in Islamic asceticism and the role of "holy persons", in the pattern of universalist, homogeneous monotheism tied to worldly and military power, in early Islamic engagement with Greek schools of thought, in

8514-565: The smaller cities of the Greek East is a moot subject among historians. The urban continuity of Constantinople is the outstanding example of the Mediterranean world; of the two great cities of lesser rank, Antioch was devastated by the Persian sack of 540, followed by the plague of Justinian (542 onwards) and completed by earthquake, while Alexandria survived its Islamic transformation, to suffer incremental decline in favour of Cairo in

8613-411: The three and four strokes variants existed alongside one another in the classical Etruscan alphabet. In other Italic alphabets ( Venetic , Lepontic ), the letter could be represented as a zig-zagging line of any number between three and six strokes. The Italic letter was also adopted into Elder Futhark , as Sowilō ( ᛊ ), and appears with four to eight strokes in the earliest runic inscriptions, but

8712-485: The traditional cursus honorum , had found under the Antonines that security could be obtained only by combining their established roles in the local town with new ones as servants and representatives of a distant emperor and his traveling court. After Constantine centralized the government in his new capital of Constantinople (dedicated in 330), the late antique upper classes were divided among those who had access to

8811-406: The traditional Roman motivations of public and private life marked by pride, ambition and kinship solidarity, and differing from the married pagan leadership. Unlike later strictures on priestly celibacy , celibacy in late antique Christianity sometimes took the form of abstinence from sexual relations after marriage, and it came to be the expected norm for urban clergy . Celibate and detached,

8910-541: The upper clergy became an elite equal in prestige to urban notables, the potentes or dynatoi . Islam appeared in the 7th century, spurring Arab armies to invade the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanian Empire of Persia , destroying the latter. After conquering all of North Africa and Visigothic Spain , the Islamic invasion was halted by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in modern France . On

9009-476: The urban class in greater proportion, and thus the people who knew how to keep civic services running. Perhaps the greatest blow came in the wake of the extreme weather events of 535–536 and subsequent Plague of Justinian , when the remaining trade networks ensured the Plague spread to the remaining commercial cities. The impact of this outbreak of plague has recently been disputed. The end of classical antiquity

9108-542: The writings of Peter Brown , whose survey The World of Late Antiquity (1971) revised the Gibbon view of a stale and ossified Classical culture, in favour of a vibrant time of renewals and beginnings, and whose The Making of Late Antiquity offered a new paradigm of understanding the changes in Western culture of the time in order to confront Sir Richard Southern 's The Making of the Middle Ages . The continuities between

9207-702: Was a key figure in many important events in Christian history , as he convened and attended the first ecumenical council of bishops at Nicaea in 325, subsidized the building of churches and sanctuaries such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem , and involved himself in questions such as the timing of Christ's resurrection and its relation to the Passover . The birth of Christian monasticism

9306-592: Was constructed to supply it with water, and the tallest Roman triumphal columns were erected there. Migrations of Germanic , Hunnic , and Slavic tribes disrupted Roman rule from the late 4th century onwards, culminating first in the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 and subsequent Sack of Rome by the Vandals in 455, part of the eventual collapse of the Empire in the West itself by 476. The Western Empire

9405-567: Was placed on demonstrating a symbolic fact rather than on rendering a realistic scene. As time progressed during the late antique period, art become more concerned with biblical themes and influenced by interactions of Christianity with the Roman state. Within this Christian subcategory of Roman art, dramatic changes were also taking place in the Depiction of Jesus . Jesus Christ had been more commonly depicted as an itinerant philosopher, teacher or as

9504-571: Was replaced by the so-called barbarian kingdoms , with the Arian Christian Ostrogothic Kingdom ruling Rome from Ravenna . The resultant cultural fusion of Greco-Roman , Germanic, and Christian traditions formed the foundations of the subsequent culture of Europe . In the 6th century, Roman imperial rule continued in the East, and the Byzantine-Sasanian wars continued. The campaigns of Justinian

9603-571: Was so important in pagan worship. Sarcophagi carved in relief had already become highly elaborate, and Christian versions adopted new styles, showing a series of different tightly packed scenes rather than one overall image (usually derived from Greek history painting ) as was the norm. Soon the scenes were split into two registers, as in the Dogmatic Sarcophagus or the Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus (the last of these exemplifying

9702-456: Was the first to assign letters not only to consonant sounds, but also to vowels . The Roman Empire further developed and refined the Latin alphabet, beginning around 500 BCE. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the development of lowercase letters began to emerge in Roman writing. At this point, paragraphs, uppercase and lowercase letters, and the concept of sentences and clauses still had not emerged; these final bits of development emerged in

9801-552: Was the last edition to use the long s . In German orthography , long s was retained in Fraktur ( Schwabacher ) type as well as in standard cursive ( Sütterlin ) well into the 20th century, until official use of that typeface was abolished in 1941. The ligature of ſs (or ſz ) was retained; however, it gave rise to the Eszett ⟨ ß ⟩ in contemporary German orthography. In English , ⟨s⟩ represents

#498501