CONCLUSIONIn fiscal administration, the land tax continued to be based on a
rate schedule per unit of area for different kinds of crops and collected
in three installments each year, although the rates were raised, and
new crops were taxed. Taxes on state or crown lands remained pro-
portional to the yield and were considered to be rent; by the reign of
Mu'awiya, the Sasanian office in charge of crown property had been
revived. The terms of peace made at the time of the conquest were
based on the Sasanian method of assessing taxes as a total sum for
each town, village, or rural district. As under the Sasanians, the tribute
tax was divided up among the inhabitants themselves while the landed
notables guaranteed the taxes for their rural districts. The use of tax
registers and of local treasury buildings where the registers were kept
and where taxes were gathered to be forwarded to provincial capitals
was also maintained under the Muslims. At first the Muslim regime
not only accepted the existing Sasanian coins for the payment of taxes
but even reproduced the form, style, and iconography of late Sasanian
coins for their own use.
Sasanian methods and forms of organization began to be introduced
at the provincial level during the reign of Mu'awiya, when Ziyad was
viceroy for Iraq and the East. Ziyad is given credit for the establishment
of a department to register and seal documents (Ar. dfwan zimam) in
imitation of the Sasanians, for staffing the finance bureau at Basra
with non-Arabs who were familiar with the tax system, and for in-
troducing the epistolary style which had been used in the Sasanian
chancellery in his correspondence bureau, although the forms of an
Arabic epistolary and adminstrative style already existed and had been
worked out in the late Sasanian chancellery. As a result, the fourfold
administrative system of the Sasanians, in which income was handled
by a department of finance, expenditure was organized through a
military roll, correspondence was carried out by the chancellery, and
documents were authenticated for the first three departments by a
registry and sealing department, was reconstituted first by provincial
governors in Iraq, spread to imperial administration under the Mar-
wanis, and served as the basic framework around which subsequent
Islamic administrative forms were built.
REINFORCEMENTThe survival of the pre-Islamic population and its continued em-
ployment by the Islamic regime is sufficient to explain the incorpo-