A NEW PERIODIZATION | 79Islamic times.^83 Being an Iranian, Tabarī provides an exhaustive account of
the Sasanians (he was also aware that only Iranian and Jewish history was
well enough documented to provide the rudiments of a pre- hijra chronol-
ogy^84 ). Admittedly he cares as little for Rome as Eusebius does for Iran, pro-
viding only a fleeting account of its rulers from Augustus to Heraclius based
on Christian sources and focused almost exclusively on its involvement with
Syria- Palestine and the Gospel story. He substitutes a history of prophets for
Eusebius’s ecclesiastical history; and elsewhere, when his sacred heroes lived
on Roman soil (the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, S. George) he prefers Muslim
to Christian narratives.^85 But this is all in the cause of a monotheist perspec-
tive on history; and if there is one providential God there can, in the end, be
only one history of mankind. After Tabarī, biographical and local histo-
ries—or at the most universal histories with a more and more local focus the
nearer one got to the present—held the field.^86 Still, the History of the proph-
ets and kings continued to provide a reference- narrative for the Caliphate’s
early history.^87
It was in the tenth- century Syriac Christian world that prospects of pro-
ducing a comprehensive monotheist historical narrative were brightest. Most
East Romans did not want to fit Islam into their Eusebian narrative of Rome
as the sole empire willed by God. Muslim historians were less and less inter-
ested in the pre- Islamic world. But Syriac Christians under the Caliphate,
mostly miaphysite or Church of the East, could neither ignore Islam without
losing contact with reality, nor efface the pre- Islamic past without losing
their identity. This put them in a strong position—despite their Maccabean
obsession^88 with suffering and struggle—to see things as they actually were.
It is no coincidence that our best witness, the chronicler Elias bar Shenaya,
occupied—starting in the year 1008—the Church of the East episcopal
throne in Nisibis, a city situated exactly in the middle of the Fertile Crescent,
at the very center of the First Millennium world.^89
83 L. E. Goodman, Islamic humanism (New york 2003) 180–86.
84 Michael Whitby, “Tabari: The period before Jesus,” in H. Börm and J. Wiesehöfer (eds), Com-
mutatio et contentio (Düsseldorf 2010) 401.
85 Al- Tabarī, History of the prophets and kings (Taʾrīkh al- rusul wa’l- mulūk) [ed. M. J. de Goeje and
others (Leiden 1879–1901); tr. ed. E. yarshater (Albany 1985–)] 1.703–4, 740–44, 775–82, 795–812.
86 Robinson, Islamic historiography [3:70] 134–42, esp. 139; Goodman, Islamic humanism [3:83]
201–2. For a similar tendency among ecclesiastical historians in the medieval West, see Momigliano,
Classical foundations [2:110] 146–49.
87 F. M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic origins (Princeton 1998) 291–92.
88 Cf. M. Detoraki (ed.), Le martyre de Saint Aréthas (Paris 2007) 64–77.
89 Elias bar Shenaya, Chronicle [ed. and tr. (Latin) E. W. Brooks and J.- B. Chabot, Eliae metropoli-
tae Nisibeni opus chronologicum (Paris, Rome 1909–10)]; cf. Pinggéra, in Wallraff (ed.), Julius Africanus
[3:63] 273–83 (note 269, 273, 281 on the Church of the East’s view of itself as having always lived under
rulers with other beliefs); A. Borrut, “La circulation de l’information historique entre les sources arabo-
musulmanes et syriaques: Élie de Nisibe et ses sources,” in Debié (ed.), L’historiographie syriaque [3:63]