ADMINISTRATIONand khariij land are available from the time of Mu'awiya, when the
concept of state property was also extended to the Hijaz, where re-
claimed lands, older public lands, and endowments were identified as
~awiifi land. The revival of Sasanian practices is also reflected by
Ziyad's appointment of 'Abd ar-RaQ-man ibn Tubba' al-Himyari: to
be in charge of his land grants at Basra.^147 Only by the time of 'Abd
al-Malik (685-705) and al-Walld I (705-15) was there a central de-
partment at Damascus to handle the income from state lands and
urban property (Ar. dtwiin al-mustaghalliit).148 Thus, by the end of
the seventh century the treatment of the common property of the
Islamic community had been increasingly approximated to the treat-
ment of state property and crown land in late antiquity.
Such an expanded royal household system of mobilizing resources
competed with the regular bureaucratic taxation system for revenues.
Muslims inherited this conflict most directly from the Sasanians along
with the systems themselves, although the early Islamic regime partly
offset its effects by making land grants out of reclaimed land and by
eventually identifying a permanent base for the land tax in the Sawad.
By the eighth century, both organizational alternatives, which had
their origins in ancient Babylonia, had found an Islamic form and a
tentative balance.^149
COURT INSTITUTIONS AND ROYAL CUSTOMSThe Late Sasanian Royal Court
Although the Sasanian bureaucratic system had been reconstituted
at the provincial level in Iraq by the time Ziyad was governor for
Mu'awiya, one of the most important immediate effects of the con-
quest was to relax the close centralization of the late Sasanian period
by eclipsing its superstructure at court. The titles and offices of the
Sasanian court were highly differentiated, usually hierarchic, occa-
sionally unique, and supposedly hereditary. Some of the positions were
standard for the operation of a royal household, but others headed
the social, professional, bureaucratic, or religious hierarchies. The po-
147 Baladhuri, FutulJ, pp. 353, 363.
148 Jahshiyari, Wuzarii', p. 43.
149 For a more extensive discussion of the questions concerning state property, see
M. Morony, "Landholding in Seventh Century Iraq: Late Sasanian and Early Islamic
Patterns," in The Islamic Middle East, 700-1900: Studies in Economic and Social
History, ed. A. L. Udovitch (Princeton, N.J., 1981), pp. 135-75.