The Late Antique World

A narrow, honestly thin transitional band between the classical and medieval worlds, currently holding two events by deliberate disclosure rather than a forced placement elsewhere: the eighth-century revolution that ended Umayyad rule and opened the early Abbasid Caliphate, placed here rather than under The Post-Classical and Medieval World because Peter Brown's influential Late Antiquity framework, later extended by Brown himself, runs to roughly 750 CE and treats that transition as one of the period's own closing events; and the gradual collapse of Classic Maya civilization, whose own defining era in this atlas (The Classic Maya Period, circa 250 to 900 CE) already carries this same SubLabel. Belongs here: an event whose primary significance sits in the two to three centuries either side of 700 CE, in a region or tradition where this atlas's own late-antique era entities place it. Does not belong here: an event more confidently dated well after 900 CE even in the same region, grouped under The Post-Classical and Medieval World.