A NEW PERIODIZATION | 69sea, one lacks the sense of a whole divine reality waiting to be revealed
through history. It is to the Christian Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339) that we
owe the major advance. First he compiled a Chronicle in which the main
events in the story of the principal ancient peoples were set out in parallel
columns down to Constantine’s embrace of Christianity. Then he wrote a
history of the Church, to contextualize its intellectual and institutional evo-
lution against the background of the Roman Empire. In other words, Euse-
bius stood at the dawn of a new historiography in which the history of Rome
was intertwined with that of the one God’s self- revelation, while what had
hitherto been the historian’s staple, namely political narrative, was for the
first time systematically conjoined with cultural and especially religious de-
velopments.^32 Greek, Latin, and Syriac continuators of Eusebius carried the
new genre of “ecclesiastical history” on into modern times.^33
This Christian narrative overlaps somewhat with the account of the sixth-
century Arabian background to the Qurʾanic revelation provided by Mu-
hammad Ibn Ishāq (d. 767) in his biography of the Prophet—he is the earli-
est Arabic historian of whose work substantial parts survive. And Ibn Ishāq’s
book was drawn on in turn by the greatest of all Arabic historians, Tabarī (d.
923), when he compiled his History of the prophets and kings. (Ibn Ishāq and
Tabarī are here chosen as two outstandingly significant exemplars of a rich
tradition of Arabic historical writing about pre- Islam, about which no more
can be said here.^34 ) Like Ibn Ishāq, Tabarī began his narrative in Biblical times
far past; but he did this only in order to provide a full account of monotheist
prophecy designed to culminate with Muhammad, and then continue down
to his own day.
Putting all this together, we may create a contemporary narrative of the
First Millennium from a clearly monotheist standpoint. That there were such
forerunners cannot be a matter of indifference to us. We need not adopt their
teleologies, which are conspicuous; but the tools and fashions of our own
historiography lose nothing by being checked against the impressions enter-
tained by informed contemporaries. Still more encouraging, though, is the
fact that Syriac Church historiography, from its distinctive standpoint nei-
ther East Roman nor caliphal yet aware of both, produced works that drew
on both the ecclesiastical and the Muslim versions of monotheist history. For
example Elias bar Shenaya, Church of the East metropolitan of Nisibis (d.
1046), drew explicitly in his Chronicle on both Eusebius and Tabarī so as to
sketch the whole First Millennium from his vantage point at the exact center
of the Fertile Crescent, the old Abrahamic road that had linked the two em-
32 Momigliano, On pagans [3:29] 39.
33 See Momigliano, Classical foundations [2:110] 132–52, for a brief survey.
34 M. Springberg- Hinsen, Die Zeit vor dem Islam in arabischen Universalgeschichten des 9. bis 12.
Jahrhunderts (Würzburg 1989).