Byzantium And Islam Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Byzantium And Islam - Essay Example .   Byzantium attained its political height through Justinian, who re-conquered the old Western empire parts.   Successive attacks from various peoples, including Latin Christians, made Byzantium weak, finally falling to the Ottoman Turks (1454) (Perry, Chase, Jacob, & Jacob, 2008 pg. 29). As the 7th century began, vast territories that extended from Egypt to Syria and across North African territories were under the rule of Byzantine Empire from Constantinople (modern Istanbul), its capital. Critical to the power and wealth of the empire, these southern territories long influenced by the Greco-Roman traditions held Orthodox, Syriac and Coptic, Christians, Jewish communities, among other many religions (Ratliff & Evans, 2012 pg. 36). Great pilgrimage centers engrossed the faithful followers from as far away as Scandinavia in the west and Yemen in the east. Major trade routes extended down the Red Sea to eastward past Jordan to Indian lands in the south, bringing ivories and silks to the imperial territories. Key cities made wealthy by commerce protracted along inland trade routes Constantinople north and along the coastline of Mediterranean sea. Commerce carried ideas and images freely through the region. In the same 7th century, the newly founded faith of Islam began from Medina and Mecca along the Red Sea trade way and reached westward to the Byzantium Empire’s southern provinces. Religious and political authority was conveyed from the long conventional Christian Byzantine to the newly founded Umayyad and well along Abbasid Muslim dynasties. These new powers capitalized on the advantage of existing region traditions in developing their compelling religious and secular visual identities. This exhibition shadows the Byzantine Empire southern provinces artistic traditions from the 7th century to the 9th, as they were changed from being fundamental to the Byzantine tradition and beliefs to being a critical Islamic world part (Ratliff & Evans, 2012 pg. 6 1). Byzantium preserved key foundations of the Greco-Roman practices and tradition.   Under Justinian's order, Byzantine scholars collected and organized Roman law in the Corpus Juris Civilis, which had four parts.   Influenced by the Greek historians, Byzantines including Anna Comnena, Procopius, and Michael Psellus offered rational, comprehensible, if not always objective, versions of historical occasions.   Byzantine religious philosophers studied Greek philosophy but they subordinated philosophical activity to theology enterprise. Byzantium developed a rich architectural, artistic, and musical tradition influenced by some pre-existing ones.   Drawing from Hebrew and Greco-Roman practice and theory, Byzantine musicians formed a tonal system that greatly influenced the Western music course, and Kontakion hymnody derivative of early Christianity models.   Byzantine art largely concerned itself with exalting the empire and serving spiritual purposes.   The iconoclastic c ontroversy made artists to find new methods of approaching the issue of representing the human nature, but despite that, Byzantine artists never reconnoitered realism in deep as their Western complements did.   Ravenna became the focus of much early artistic engagements.   Buildings such as Theodoric's church of St. Apollinare, Galla Placidia's mausoleum, and San