Chapter 1
ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY
AND PRACTICE
THE ORGANIZATION OF ADMINISTRATION
The Late Sasanian Monarchy
The debt that Islamic government owed to Sasanian administration
tends to be exaggerated. Culturally conscious Persians such as the
anonymous author of the Kitiib at-tiij claimed that the rules of admin-
istration used by Muslims had been borrowed from the Sasanians.^1
Arabic literature tends to heighten the impression that Islamic insti-
tutions were of Sasanian origin by anachronistically describing the
Sasanians in contemporary ninth and tenth-century terms. In order to
extract valid conclusions from such a mass of tendentious details, it
is important to understand the nature of the Sasanian system and the
theories that supported it on the eve of the Islamic conquest, as well
as the process by which the principles and procedures of Sas ani an
statecraft were adapted by early Muslim administrators.
The Sasanian empire had achieved the greatest degree of centrali-
zation during the last century of its existence. The late Sasanian ad-
ministrative bureaus at the capital at Mada'in, on the Tigris river in
central Iraq, seem to have been organized in a fourfold system. Income
was handled by a bureau of taxes and was used mainly to furnish the
army with mounts, arms, provisions, and pay which were stored at
military depots and distributed by means of a muster roll by military
scribes. The scribes in the chancellery dealt with administrative and
foreign correspondence and a fourth department was responsible for
sealing and registering official documents.^2
Imperial administration combined vertical hierarchic organization
with a horizontal separation of powers at the provincial level. Under
1 Kitab at-ta; fi akhlaq al-muluk (Cairo, 1914), p. 23.
2 Baiadhuri, Kitab futu~ al-buldan (Leiden, 1886), p. 246; Jahshiyari, Kitab al-wuz-
ara' wa l-kuttab (Leipzig, 1926), pp. 3-4; Tabari, Ta'rtkh ar-rusul wa l-muluk (Leiden,
1879), I, 964, 1030; Tha'alibl, Ghurar akhbar muluk ai-furs wa siyaruhum, ed. and
tr. H. Zotenberg, Histoire des rois des Perses (Paris, 1900), p. 610; Ya'qiibl, Ta'rtkh
(Leiden, 1883), I, 186-87.