RESOURCESearly Islamic period. The contributions to a conference held in Rome
in 1970 and published as Atti del Convegno Internationale sui Tema:
La Persia nel Medioevo (Rome, 1971) are uneven but more up to
date. Most recently B. Brentjes's Das alte Persien: Die iranische Welt
vor Mohammed (Vienna, 1978) is a survey of ancient history which
covers the Sasanians from pages 213 to 264, but it should be used
critically. The standard starting point for identifying material remains
from the Sasanian period is part V (the entire second volume)' of A. U.
Pope's monumental A Survey of Persian Art from Prehistoric Times
to the Present (London, 1938-39; repr. 1964-65), which includes
Iraqi monuments and artifacts. The entire eighth volume of Ars Is-
lamica (1941) is devoted to reviews of the contributions to Pope's
Survey. Of the two articles which deal specifically with the end of the
Sasanian period, J. c. Coyajee's "The House of Sasan: The Last Phase,"
lCGI35 (1942): 43-51, tends to be nationalistic and apologetic, while
B. Faravashi's "Les causes de la chute des Sassanides," in La Persia
nel Medioevo, pp. 477-84, is uncritical and imaginative.
Since the region of the upper-middle Tigris and the eastern J azira
was included in this study, works on the eastern part of the Byzantine
empire, especially on Byzantine Mesopotamia and the Byzantine-Sa-
sanian frontier, proved to be useful. However, the only general treat-
ment of this region during Late Antiquity is J. B. Segal's "The Mes-
opotamian Communities from Julian to the Rise of Islam," Proceedings
of the British Academy 41 (1955): 109-39, but it suffers from having
been put into a Cold War context. A good introduction to Byzantine
history in the Sasanian period is The Later Roman Empire 284-602
(Norman, 1964) by A.H.M. Jones. The Persian War of the Emperor
Maurice (582-602) (Washington, 1939) by M. J. Higgins, affords
entree to Sas ani an political history of the late sixth century. The in-
dispensable survey for the seventh century is the multivolume study,
To Byzantion ston hebdomon aiona (Athens, 1965 onwards), by A. N.
Stratos, which reached its fifth volume and the year A.D. 685 by 1974.
The first two volumes, which cover the years from 602 until 634, have
been translated into English as volume 1 by M. Ogilvie-Grant (Am-
sterdam, 1968) and identify all the primary sources for the Byzantine-
Persian war in the early seventh century. The third volume, from 634
until 641, which covers the Muslim conquest of Syria and Egypt, has
been translated into English as volume 2 by H. T. Hionides (Amster-
dam, 1972).
Recent treatments of the circumstances and consequences of the