Resources
MATERIALS
Problems and Possibilities
When this project was begun over ten years ago there were no guides
to follow. The first problem was to identify the usable materials. With
few exceptions modern scholarship tends to be confined by dynastic,
religious, and linguistic boundaries. For specialists in the Sasanian
period, early Islamic history is a Fortleben; for students of Islamic
history, the period just before Islam is a preparatio. The only contem-
porary scholar with substantial publications on both Sasanian and
Islamic Iran is Richard Frye; no one has published extensively on both
Sasanian and Islamic Iraq. Those who have studied more than one
religious tradition have usually done so for comparative purposes;
they have used the similarities they discovered to argue for the "in-
fluence" of one tradition on another, generally without showing how
it occurred.
What follows is a discussion showing how one can penetrate the
materials used for this study and how to put them to other uses. The
discussion is not intended to be exhaustive. Virtually everything per-
taining to the period under study is evidence of either continuity or
change. But some materials are more useful and some subjects more
significant than others. Much more can be done with these materials
than has been done here, and in this respect this study only represents
a beginning. These materials can be used for subjects other than con-
tinuity and change. Materials that often are concerned primarily with
other or broader regions have also been used for what they have to
say about Iraq. For instance, because Iraq was part of the Sasanian
empire, much of the literature on Sasanian Iran is a good source of
information, especially since much of the evidence used for generali-
zations about the Sasanian period pertains to Iraq. At the same time
it is important to remember that conditions in Sasanian Iraq were not
necessarily the same as those on the Iranian plateau.
Bibliographies
Nevertheless, one can start with works such as J. D. Pearson's A
Bibliography of Pre-Islamic Persia (London, 1975), which lists articles
as well as books concerning Sasanians, Magians, Manichaeans, and