About

Robert G. Hoyland is a Professor of Late Antique and Early Islamic Middle Eastern History at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University. He studied Oriental Studies at Oxford University, where he completed a doctoral thesis on non-Muslim accounts of the rise of Islam, titled 'Seeing Islam as Others saw it' in 1997. His research has focused extensively on the emergence of Islamic civilization, which is also the subject of his book 'In God’s Path: the Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire' published in 2014. His scholarly interests span multiple avenues including pre-Islamic Arabia, epigraphy, papyrology, transmission of knowledge from the late antique Greco-Syriac world, and historiography. He has contributed to the understanding of early Arabic inscriptions, published seventh-century Arabic papyri from Nessana, and studied the transmission of knowledge through various historical texts. Hoyland has been involved in archaeological excavations across Syria, Yemen, Israel/Palestine, and Azerbaijan. Recently, his research has turned to social history, specifically examining the plight of the unfree in the early Islamic Middle East, focusing on those compelled to sell themselves or their families due to economic circumstances.

Research topics

• Archaeology
• History
• Ancient history
• Linguistics
• Art
• Philosophy
• Classics
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Humanities
• Religious studies
• Geography
• Literature
• Genealogy
• Law

Selected publications

• CHAPTER 1. THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE LIFE OF SALLARA AND HIS MOTHER ELISHBAH

  Gorgias Press eBooks · 2025-02-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Life of Sallara and his Mother Elishbah

  Gorgias Press eBooks · 2025-02-11

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Sallara and his mother Elishbah lived through turbulent times: the “last great war of antiquity” fought between Byzantium and Iran, as well as the astonishingly successful Muslim Arab invasions, which led to the collapse of the empire of Iran and the rise of the new Islamic empire. Yet this holy couple, bound by their love for each other and for God, continued unperturbed by these events in quiet devotion to their faith and their local community, performing healings, exorcisms and other wondrous deeds. The account of their lives, published here for the first time, focuses on their small patch of northern Mesopotamia, now in southeast Turkey, and in particular on the two monasteries of Mar Awgen and Mar Yohannan, of which Sallara was the abbot and which still stand today, and on the villages round about, for whose inhabitants the monasteries served both as employers and as providers of all manner of social and divine services. This book, as well as presenting an edition and translation of the Syriac text, will explore this local world and how it fared in the fast-changing Middle Eastern region to which it belonged.

  PublisherDOI

• The discovery of a Late Antique and Early Islamic monastery on Siniya Island, Umm Al Quwain

  Archaeopress Publishing Ltd eBooks · 2024-02-29 · 1 citations

  book-chapter

  Timothy Power, Michele Degli Esposti, Robert Hoyland, Rania Hussein Kannouma, The discovery of a Late Antique and Early Islamic monastery on Siniya Island, Umm Al Quwain, Advances in UAE Archaeology, pp. 307-330

  PublisherDOI

• A

  Open MIND · 2024-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

• 4 CAUCASIAN ELITES BETWEEN BYZANTIUM AND THE CALIPHATE IN THE EARLY ISLAMIC PERIOD

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2023-07-13 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Life of Theodotus of Amida

  Gorgias Press eBooks · 2023-04-24 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  The Life of Theodotus of Amida is that rare thing: a securely dated eye-witness account of life under Arab Muslim rule in the first century of Islam, and one of the few extant texts from seventh-century North Mesopotamia. It is imbued with local color and contemporary detail, revealing an intimate knowlredge of the terrain, its inhabitants and officialdom, as well as the precariousness of the lives of those living in the borderlands between the Byzantine and Islamic empires.

  PublisherDOI

• Pilgrimage

  2023-03-23

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract The chapter tells the long story of pilgrimage to the Holy Land—as practised in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—starting with Abraham, moving through the pages of the Old and New Testaments, through the Byzantine and early Islamic periods, and then through the era of the Crusades to the rediscovery of pilgrimage in the nineteenth century. The major focus in the post-biblical period is upon the practice and theology of pilgrimage within the Christian church—highlighting how, after a predominantly negative view towards such practice in the first three centuries ce, pilgrimage came into its own in the Constantinian period. Once the Holy Land came under Muslim rule, the impulse towards pilgrimage took a softer form; but this was powerfully re-awakened by the Crusaders and again in the nineteenth century as archaeologists, Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox—as well as Western political powers—all found themselves lured to the Holy Land for a variety of potentially conflicting reasons. Pilgrimage has thus been a vital part of the Holy Land’s unique history, causing it to be a much-trodden as well as a much-contested one. Yet despite all the differences of belief and practice—both amongst Christians and between them and Jewish or Muslim pilgrims—there has been much that united them: a real attachment to the Land, a highlighting of the particular historical reasons for their own particular attachment, and a common emphasis on the importance within religious faith of setting out on a journey.

  PublisherDOI

• PART ONE: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE LIFE OF THEODOTUS

  Gorgias Press eBooks · 2023-05-24

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Archaeological Survey of Sīnīya Island, Umm al-Quwain

  Études et Travaux · 2022 · 1 citations

  • Archaeology
  • Ancient history
  • Geography

  The preliminary results of a comprehensive survey of Sīnīya Island in the Khawr al-Bayḍāʾ of Umm al-Quwain are presented here. The onset of human occupation remains to be confirmed, with scarce evidence for limited activity in the late pre-Islamic period (LPI, c. 300 BC – AD 300). The first major phase of occupation dates to the seventh and eighth centuries (early Islamic period) when a monastery and settlement were established in the north-east of the island. Probably the peak occupation falls between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the stone-town of Old Umm al-Quwain 1 was built, followed by the eighteenth to early nineteenth century when the settlement moved to neighbouring Old Umm al-Quwain 2. The town was destroyed by the British in 1820 and moved to the facing tidal island, where Old Umm al-Quwain 3 (the modern city of the same name) developed. This resulted in an emptying of the landscape, and Sīnīya Island was little visited in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, except for the estate of the ruling Āl Muʿallā represented by the Mallāh Towers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Eutychius of Alexandria Vindicated: Muslim Sources and Christian Arabic Historiography in the Early Islamic Empire

  BRILL eBooks · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Ancient history
  • History
  • Classics
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sebastian P. Brock

  University of Oxford

  13 shared

• Hannah M. Cotton

  6 shared

• Venetia Porter

  3 shared

• Va Pertanto

  Institute for Advanced Study

  3 shared

• Andrew Palmer

  3 shared

• Marek Jankowiak

  3 shared

• Muriel Debié

  Institute for Advanced Study

  3 shared

• Riccardo In Parti- Colare

  Institute for Advanced Study

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Medieval History

  University of Cambridge

  1984

• M.A., Medieval History

  University of Cambridge

  1979

• B.A., Medieval History

  University of Cambridge

  1977