Conclusion
THE NATURE OF
CONTINUITY
IT is now possible to gather together the major themes which have
emerged in this discussion of late Sasanian and early Islamic Iraq and
to make some general statements concerning the nature of cultural
continuity and change. In a situation where changes resulted from
dislocations caused by flooding, conquest, invasion, immigration, and
religious conversion, there were two major forms of continuity: direct
survivals from the period before the conquest, and continuity through
transmission to the conquerors. Change likewise falls into two cate-
gories: the immediate short-term results of the conquest, and the more
permanent changes introduced by the way certain aspects of life in
pre-Islamic Arabia were institutionalized in Islam and brought by
Muslim Arab conquerors to Iraq. Continuity and change are combined
by the way certain developments and trends that began in the late
Sas ani an period extended across the entire period but were intensified
and crystallized by the Islamic conquest.
LINEAR CONTINUITY
Linear continuity is the simplest kind. It means the direct survival
of attitudes and behavior because of the physical survival of people.
To a certain extent, this was a matter of cultural or institutional inertia.
There was a remarkable tendency for people to continue to do things
in familiar patterns even while the situation was changing around
them. The survival of the Aramaean peasantry meant that agriculture
and irrigation were conducted in the same way and that their contin-
uing linguistic vitality left its mark on local place names. As a result,
the tendency for those who settled on the land to be Aramaicized
continued into the Islamic period.
The Persian population survived in the towns and on the land by
coming to terms with the Muslims. Persian patterns of settlement in
Iraq were preserved by the dahaqtn who continued to live in towns
as absentee landlords or on their estates in the countryside, where they
were responsible for the survival of the Sasanian administrative and