ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the question of continuity and change between pre-Islamic and early Islamic Syria and, more specifically, between the social political and social elites of these two cultures. It explores the whole of Bild al-Shm or greater Syria that is modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel/Palestine and province of Antioch. The chapter describes that the secular elites of late Byzantine Syria can be divided broadly divided into groups. At the top were the imperial officials in charge of government, the military and administering the imperial estates, Greek speaking and largely Chalcedonian in faith. It explores that there is little or no evidence in the archaeological record from the more fertile agricultural areas of late antique Syria and Palestine for the sort of villa civilisation typical of Italy and much of the late Roman West in the 4th and 5th centuries, that it to say, of the large, elite dwellings surrounded by their own estates and estate buildings.
