Late antique historiography represents an original continuation of classical historiography: it is marked by both traditionalism and innovation. Originally practiced in Greek and Latin, the genre was adopted and modified by the new languages that enrich the late antique landscape, such as Syriac, Armenian and Arabic. The changing cultural and religious environment of the years 300 to 800 A.D. gave rise to new questions about time, reality, and language that would shape historical thinking in the Mediterranean for centuries to come.
This website is dedicated to this fascinating genre in all its variety. It includes a database offering a complete inventory of all late ancient works of history, editions of fragmentary texts, and detailed studies on specific histories and related texts. It covers works in Latin, Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, Coptic and, to a lesser extent, Hebrew, Aramaic and Middle-Persian.
The database was composed by the Research Group Late Antique Historiography, led by Peter Van Nuffelen and including ancient historians, classicists as well as oriental philologists. This website also offers information on the team, the various research projects they conducted, and the conferences and events they organized. Finally, the website also contains a list of publications on late antique historiography resulting from the various research projects.
The Research Group was generously supported by the European Research Council, the Research Foundation – Flanders, and Ghent University Research Fund.