PEOPLEadministrators and absentee landlords; and on estates scattered through
the countryside from Anbar to Furat and from Hulwan to Hira as
minor landed notables. They were organized in a graded, hierarchical
class system: the royal family followed by the high nobles, the sha-
hiirija, and at least two grades of dahiiqtn. At the bottom was the
peasantry, some of whom were of Persian origin but who probably
had been Aramaicized. At least, it is reasonable to suppose that in the
early seventh century only the most recent arrivals were still Persian.
DISLOCATIONS DUE TO THE CONQUEST: DEATH AND
FLIGHT
The Islamic conquest seriously altered the nature of the Persian
presence in seventh-century Iraq, but a proper evaluation of its effects
must be preceded by a consideration of two pre-Islamic developments.
The general impression of the depopulation of the districts east of the
Tigris and the formation of new urban concentrations around the
garrison cities of Basra and Kufa in lower Iraq affected Persians as
well as non-Persians in Iraq. But the depopulation of the districts east
of the Tigris, along the Diyala river and the Nahrawan canal system,
seems to have begun before the conquest and to have been the con-
sequence of the Byzantine-Persian war in the reign of Khusraw 11
Parviz. According to Robert Adams, " ... a comparison of Sassanian
with Early Islamic settlement makes clear that a substantial retraction
occurred before the Islamic period both in the extent and density of
occupation," in this part of Iraq.58 Some fifty-eight percent of the
settled part of the Diyala region was not reoccupied soon after the fall
of the Sasanians, and at most the settlement in this region in the early
Islamic period ,amounted to only sixty-four percent of what it had
been before tbe end of the Sasanian period.^59 Nor did the location of
the sites in the early Islamic period necessarily correspond to late
Sasanian sites in the same region. Again, according to Adams:
... terminal Sassanian and early Islamic settlements in these areas
often neatly alternated with one another along the same canal branches.
Since in most cases the early Islamic sites were newly settled after
Sassanian times, this suggests that the Sassanian abandonment was
associated with a social upheaval sufficient to break off the tradition
58 Adams, Land Behind Baghdad, p. 74.
59 Ibid., pp. 81, 99.