Notitia Dignitatum redated to AD450?

[Nathan Ross]

lack of the larger academic background

Yes, for that I suppose we'll have to keep waiting for the publication of the papers from this conference back in 2019, which seems to represent the current state of scholarly thinking. However, I notice that Kaldellis and Kruse have used the same cover image as the conference organisers, so could have crept in ahead of them!

I also wonder how the new date will throw many assumptions about the work as a whole (perhaps many of them current in 2019) into crisis. Most people, I think, have been assuming that the entire eastern half is sort of date-stamped AD395, and any little details that seem to escape that limit have been seen as anomalies. Now the whole things is a lot more open.

heavily dependant upon the military history of the period and rarely seems to net in larger areas of concern

The book does keep to a very narrow area - it's more of a single-issue thesis than a survey of the entire subject. 

Initially I was resistant to the new date as so many aspects of the eastern section seem so very old: the Tetrarchic or even Severan-seeming unit lists for the eastern limitanei, with all those cohorts and alae, or even the Magister per Orientem, and the units based on the Danube in the same places that they appear in Diocletianic inscriptions.

I suppose the Perge inscription, with all those rank titles that seem to date back to the Principiate, does suggest that aspects of very old military practice could survive in the eastern empire, particularly on the fringes, potentially right through to the 6th century.

Then again, I don't see anything in K & K's book that would count against the eastern ND being just as much an anachronistic muddle as the west: the balkan field army lists could have been updated to c.450, while big chunks of the rest of it (the eastern-front army lists in particular, maybe) remain marooned in the distant past.