THE QUESTION OF CONTINUITYillustrated copy of the Middle Persian text still existed in the tenth
century. Neither the Middle Persian text nor Ibn al-Muqaffa"s trans-
lation survive today, although the latter was used and quoted by several
later Arabic-writing authors whose works have survived. A close com-
parison of late Sasanian and early Islamic conditions in Iraq as de-
scribed in Arabic literature reveals significant differences between these
two periods in spite of anachronisms; and this encourages the use of
Arabic literature itself for comparative purposes. The works of earlier
eighth-century Arabic-writing authors such as Abii Mikhnaf (689-
775)19 and al-Mada'ini (753-830), who were natives of Iraq, provide
valuable information about conditions in early Islamic Iraq. Their
works, too, survive mostly in the form of citations and quotations by
later authors, so the information they provide may be identified as
such. With the exception of a few crucial issues, the extensive textual
criticism used to evaluate these materials will not be recorded here.
The material that has been chosen for presentation reflects implicit
judgments and a good deal of common sense in identifying the "most
likely" accounts. If one accepts in general what is reported in Arabic
literature, the emerging picture is sufficiently coherent.
The other way of dealing with this material is external. Although
the information provided in Arabic literature should not be ignored,
it should be weighed against the information contained in contem-
porary non-Arabic accounts. The best argument is one based on un-
deniably authentic, contemporary materials from the sixth, seventh,
and eighth centuries. For Iraq such materials consist of coins, admin-
istrative seals and seal impressions, inscriptions, buildings, magical
incantations written on bowls, letters, biographies, chronicles, and
religious literature written in Persian, Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, and
Arabic. The use of all available materials makes possible a multivalent
evaluation of each of them. Since Arabic literature tends to be con-
cerned with the history of Muslims, these materials also provide in-
formation about the non-Muslim population. Above all, the infor-
mation contained within the Arabic literary tradition is most convincing
when it can be verified by earlier Middle Persian, Syriac, and Greek
materials. For instance, the contemporary account of warfare along
the Byzantine-Sasanian frontier during the sixth century, which was
composed by Prokopios in Greek, contains material that was included
19 For the rehabilitation of Abu Mikhnaf as a reliable source of information about
Iraq, see U. Sezgin, Abu Mibnaf: Ein Beitrag zur Historiography der Umaiyadischen
Zeit (Leiden, 1971).