ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY AND PRACTICEthe awareness of the importance of such usages and their propaganda
value increased towards the end of the seventh century, the Marwani
reaction to the Islamizing tendencies on the coins of their opponents
culminated in the appearance of an entirely new Arab-Islamic coinage
and a more complete appreciation of symbolism (or the lack of it) on
coins. Late Sasanian epigraphic administrative seals may have provided
a precedent for these epigraphic coins. Epigraphic seals have two or
three lines in a field surrounded by a circular marginal inscription and
bear a remarkable organizational resemblance to Islamic epigraphic
reform coins (see fig. 2d-g).
The Administrative Bureaucracy
The Tax Department. It is easier to compare Sasanian and Islamic
administrative theories than it is to determine how many of the details
of Sasanian administrative practice were actually employed by Mus-
lims in Iraq. Administrative continuity was encouraged by the tendency
for the same families to remain in state service over several generations,
by the fact that an Arabic epistolary style for official purposes had
already been worked out in the Sasanian chancellory, by the survival
and employment of Sasanian scribes, and of local Arabs, by the-ex-
istence of handbooks for administration in the Islamic period that
described the procedures that had been followed under the Sasanians,
and by the way native Arabs and Persian mawalz (Ar.) and landlords
who were involved in Islamic administration expected continuity. Even
so, there is very little direct evidence that administrative procedures
under the Muslims were essentially what they had been under the
Sasanians. More often the evidence is circumstantial. What seems to
have happened was that Sasanian procedures ~ere followed at lower
levels of the administration by those officials who survived from the
previous regime while they began to be followed only gradually at the
highest levels. This was due to the influence of these officials and to
the handbooks themselves. The process was inaugurated by a circle
of bilingual Persian and Arab administrators at Basra, where the main
institutional forms of Sasanian civil and military administration were
adapted by the newly formed Islamic state.
Under the Sasanians, the records for income derived from taxes and
for expenditures for the army and other kinds of expenses were kept
separately. As Jahshiyari described the system, there were two financial
bureaus: the tax bureau (Ar. dzwan al-kharaj) and a department that
handled gifts and the payment of troops (Ar. dtwan an-nafaqat). The