Before and After Muhammad The First Millennium Refocused

66 | CHAPTER 3 First Millennium cultural traditions: Prophetic, scriptural, and exegetical phases GREEK PHILOSOPHy (ARISTOTELIAN ...

A NEW PERIODIZATION | 67 MANICHEISM ISLAM R O M A N L AW MAZDAISM 10th century Latest evidence for Mani- cheans in Caliphate. c. ...

68 | CHAPTER 3 From this rough tabulation emerges an especially intensive exegetical ac- tivity in the major spheres of Greek ph ...

A NEW PERIODIZATION | 69 sea, one lacks the sense of a whole divine reality waiting to be revealed through history. It is to the ...

70 | CHAPTER 3 pires of Iran and Rome and now joined the caliphal capitals of Damascus and Baghdad. Eusebius was not simply the ...

A NEW PERIODIZATION | 71 composed in 40 BCE, to the birth of a child who will usher in a golden age.^40 And in the inscription o ...

72 | CHAPTER 3 Perhaps at this date or later, the Syriac poet- theologian Ephrem of Nisibis (d. 373) elaborated similar conceits ...

A NEW PERIODIZATION | 73 (regnal or otherwise) of each people’s history, assigning primacy to the era of Abraham (Abraham’s birt ...

74 | CHAPTER 3 Chronicle ends on a high point, with Constantine’s twentieth anniversary celebrations in 325. In one sense, Euseb ...

A NEW PERIODIZATION | 75 But if Eusebius’s link between the Church and a Rome now defeated not triumphant meant for some that th ...

76 | CHAPTER 3 Muslim historians, by contrast, enjoyed the privilege of making a fresh start. yet when we turn to Ibn Ishāq in t ...

A NEW PERIODIZATION | 77 touching on many of the religious currents in the sixth- century Near East, and sketching portraits of ...

78 | CHAPTER 3 to see Islam as entirely self- sufficient. Already Ibn Hishām excised from his abridged edition whole tracts of I ...

A NEW PERIODIZATION | 79 Islamic times.^83 Being an Iranian, Tabarī provides an exhaustive account of the Sasanians (he was also ...

80 | CHAPTER 3 That Elias, an experienced ecclesiastical writer preeminent in the Church of the East of his day, was also thorou ...

A NEW PERIODIZATION | 81 parently does not indicate loss of text. (The sole surviving manuscript, in the British Library, may be ...

82 | CHAPTER 3 can be risked is some indication of the common denominators of their re- spective maturations, along with that of ...

A NEW PERIODIZATION | 83 yet if we try to facilitate this comparative effort by defining the period gener- ously, the obvious co ...

84 | CHAPTER 3 for purposes of coherent exposition and teaching. The historian will ideally be in a position to survey history a ...

A NEW PERIODIZATION | 85 Millennium is based may also have owed something to the rise of Islam. It did not catch on in the Latin ...