ADMINISTRATIONreview, and the supply depots were all adapted to Muslim use in Iraq,
but with modifications that mainly reflect the tribal organization of
Muslim Arab society.
The Correspondence Department. Both the tax bureau and the mil-
itary department relied on written records, the former in Persian at
first and the latter in Arabic from the beginning. An administrative
system based on written documents requires the existence of a staff
of bureaucrats with the necessary literate skills to produce and to
understand them. But it is difficult to explain the survival and adap-
tation of Sasanian administrative institutions under Muslim rule in
terms of the survival and employment of a scribal or bureaucratic
"class." In the first place, administrative secretaries (Ar. kuttab) are
perhaps better described as the members of a semi-hereditary profes-
sion than of a class, and the image of scribes forming one of the four
classes of the late Sasanian period has more to do with the theory of
the state than with social realities. The employment of scribes for
administrative communication and documentation put them in the
service of governors, generals, tax collectors, and judges as assistants,
advisors, and private secretaries.^129 Although Arabic literature de-
scribes several bodies of tax and correspondence secretaries at the
Sasanian capital, there are unlikely to have been more than several
dozen at a single time, and their degree of specialization may be ques-
tioned, especially since we are told that civilian secretaries also went
on campaign.130 In practice, administrative functions appear to have
overlapped, and the same person might hold several offices at once.
Adding to the difficulty is the fact that although there are convincing
accounts of how Persian soldiers, landed notables, and captives or
their children contributed to the survival and use of Sasanian insti-
tutions among Muslims, there seems to be little hard evidence that
members of the central administrative bureaucracy at Mada'in either
survived the conquest or were employed by the Muslims in Iraq.
Second, the employment of scribes who wrote Arabic had already
begun in the Sasanian period. The sixth-century inscription at Umm
al-Jimal commemorating Ulayh ibn 'Ubayda called him the secretary
129 The position of local state secretary in provincial administration, which is men-
tioned in 448, seems analogous to that of the military scribe; see J. Corluy, "Historia
Sancti Mar Pethion Martyris," AnalectaBollandiana 7 (1888), 32. The term which
occurs in this text is transcribed as shahrdawtr, but this could easily be an orthographic
mistake in the Syriac script for shahrdiptr.
130 Jahshiyari, Wuzarii', p. 3.