To the Issue of Causes and Factors of Palestine’s Economic Development in the Early Byzantine Period: Problems of Reconstruction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52575/2687-0967-2025-52-3-578-591Keywords:
Byzantine Palestine, economy, climate change, trade networks, agricultural innovations, archaeology, interdisciplinary analysisAbstract
The article offers a view on the general model of economic development of the Palestinian region in the Byzantine era (4th to 7th centuries A.D.). A general reconstruction of the development model is carried out through a synthesis of climatic, archaeological, and socio-economic data based on an interdisciplinary approach. In the main part of the work, the author also analyzes competing historical concepts of the development of Byzantine Palestine (E. Huntington’s model, D. Bar’s theory, etc.), showing that the prosperity of the region was the result of a complex interaction between the climatic optimum, that took place in the late antique era, specificity of the state production infrastructure, specific demographic phenomena, and the economic shift that took place in the Mediterranean trade. Particular attention is paid to numerous climatic, as well as domestic and foreign policy «challenges», according to A. Toynbee, which caused the collapse of the established economic model in the 7th century. The author particularly emphasizes the complexity of the interaction between natural and anthropogenic factors in the development of the Byzantine economy at the regional level and draws attention to the successive rejection by historians and archaeologists of the monocausal model of the region's development in the early Byzantine period.
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