Rural identity in Arabia and Palaestina has received comparatively little attention from Byzantinists, despite the intensity of excavation at rural sites compared to other areas of the empire's former territories. This is a rather problematic omission in view of the region's later history as an area where we have explicit evidence of attempts by the Umayyads to formulate a public image distinct from that of their Roman predecessors and the region's diverse Christian population. As one of the earliest environments of Christian–Muslim interaction, this has placed Arabia-Palaestina centrally within debates about shifting identities in the wake of Islam. The recent popularity of studies devoted to assessing the impact of ‘Arabisation’ and ‘Islamisation’ as a component of a regional ‘identity-shift’ is a case in point.

Such frameworks, focused on identity and transformation, have proven invaluable for understanding how individuals sought to express their own sense of identity in response to a new political order. But they have proved less successful for understanding the question of identity in relation to the plethora of social groups that confronted the Arab armies in c. 632. While studies have generally been content to discuss notions of ‘Arabisation’ and the social impact of conversion to Islam, attempts to define how far such developments represented sharp discontinuity with existing regional conventions remain in their infancy.

The purpose of this chapter is to offer an examination of rural identity in Arabia-Palaestina prior to the Arab conquest. It will examine identities that were publicly conveyed by rural actors themselves in the contexts of their communities, primarily through epigraphy and papyri, rather than attempting to theorise hidden or private identities. This scope reflects a basic limitation of the data. Although we may rightly hypothesise that reality was more complex than the homogenised identities familiar from epigraphy, we currently possess no counter-body of data through which to construct a coherent alternative. Moreover, to casually and entirely dismiss the epigraphic conventions employed by rural patrons is to reduce Arabian-Palestinian rural experience to a simplistic dichotomy of privately lived versus publicly constructed identities that denies the coexistence of both within an individual's perception of self. While epigraphy does not necessarily reflect the diversity within a historical community, the act of commissioning an inscription represented an important part of the construction of rural identities and was an act of identity formation that rural patrons themselves actively participated in.