80 | CHAPTER 3
That Elias, an experienced ecclesiastical writer preeminent in the Church
of the East of his day, was also thoroughly embedded in the Arab world is
already apparent from his provision of a parallel Arabic as well as Syriac ver-
sion of his chronicle, and his deployment from 622 CE of the hijra dating
system. Up to that point he used Olympiads (!) and the Seleucid era; Jacob
of Edessa had employed a mixture of eras; Evagrius had favored the Antio-
chene era and regnal years. The era of the Incarnation had been invented by
Dionysius Exiguus at Rome in 525, but was not widely disseminated even in
the West before the eighth century.^90 One can imagine Elias turning with
relief to the Muslim dates, which had rapidly been accepted over such an ex-
panse of the earth’s surface.
For pre- Islamic history, though, the Arabs could offer no dating system of
their own, and only very partial historiographical content focused on the
background to Muhammad. Here, Elias’s models were exclusively Christian,
notably Eusebius. Little Church of the East historical writing has survived
from before Elias’s time,^91 and he himself was perfectly happy to adopt the
miaphysite Jacob of Edessa’s Chronicle as a model, including its Olympiads.^92
Jacob in turn was based on Eusebius’s Chronicle. Elias begins with Adam, and
covers all the ancient empires. But where Eusebius loses interest in Iran after
the Achaemenids, and ignores the Sasanians completely, Elias (like Jacob of
Edessa, again) records the Sasanian emperors just after their Roman col-
leagues, and eventually the caliphs too, for whom one of his sources (ac-
knowledged, as is Elias’s custom) turns out to be the great Tabarī. In space,
the perspective is no longer Mediterranean, as was Eusebius’s on the coast at
Caesarea, but embraces the wider horizons to be explored in the next chap-
ter. In time, Elias’s chronicle highlights the First Millennium. The first part of
the work confines itself to lists of Biblical figures, dynasts, and bishops, along
with passages of chronological computation. Next comes a lacuna that ap-
137–59; H. Teule, “The Syriac Renaissance,” in H. G. B. Teule and others (eds), The Syriac Renaissance
(Leuven 2010) 3–5, 24, situating Elias symbolically at the turn of the millennium and the beginning of
the era of absolute Muslim cultural dominance.
90 G. Declercq, Anno Domini (Turnhout 2000) 44–48, 97–101, 149–79 (my thanks to Anthony
Kaldellis for this reference). On the hijra era and its possible encouragement of AD dating (attributed by
Declercq 177–79 merely to confusion induced by too many regnal systems, which however went on being
used alongside AD: 179–88), see below, pp. 84–85. Andrew Palmer informs me that the era of the Incar-
nation may not have been employed in Christian Syria before the onset of European missionizing.
91 Note though the tenth- century Arabic Chronicle of Seert, mainly on the Church of the East but
mentioning events in Iranian, Roman, and Arab history too, probably (in its original state) from Christ
to at least the late ninth century: J. Howard- Johnston, Witnesses to a world crisis (Oxford 2010) 324–31.
On Hunayn ibn Ishāq’s lost world history, see S. Griffith, “Syrian Christian intellectuals in the world of
Islam,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 7 (2007) 59.
92 Pinggéra, in Wallraff (ed.), Julius Africanus [3:63] 282; W. Witakowski, “The Chronicle of Jacob
of Edessa,” in B. ter Haar Romeny (ed.), Jacob of Edessa and the Syriac culture of his day (Leiden 2008)
37, 44.