- The Arab Conquest
The New Masters
THE rise of Islam and the creation during the seventh and early eighth
centuries of an Arab empire that stretched from the Pyrenees to the
Punjab, transformed the political and cultural geography of the
Mediterranean and the Near East. Arguably, these events represent
the most important developments in Europe and western Asia during
the whole of the first millennium AD.I However, for changes of such
magnitude, they have left all too little record of themselves in terms
of surviving contemporary evidence. Early society in the Arabian
peninsula was pre-literate, though enjoying a well developed tradition
of complex and formal oral poetic composition.^2 With the exception
of the Qu'ran, the record of successive divine revelations to the
Prophet MulJammad in the years c. 610 to 632, and traditionally held
to have been compiled in written form c.650, there is no extant
Arabic literature securely dateable to earlier than the late eighth
century. Moreover, the accounts of even these, the first available Arabic
histories of the origins and spread of Islam have recently been sub-
jected to harsh criticism, which has fractured whatever degree of
academic consensus there once existed in the field of modern Islamic
studies.^3
Similarly, the Byzantine Empire, which in the mid sixth century
had boasted a substantial historiographical culture, has left almost no
contemporary account of itself in the crucial seventh century. For the
central Greek tradition, after the conclusion ofthe Paschal Chronicle's
account of the year 628, only the works of ninth and tenth century
authors are available.^4 Other possibly contemporary historical texts
present a number of serious problems. The mid seventh century
Chronicle of John of Nikiu, which has an account of the Arabs' conquest
of that province, only survives in an Amharic translation of 1602 of
a lost Arabic translation of the presumed Greek or Coptic original.
With such a transmission, that sections of the work should disappear
entirely or some of the text become garbled is hardly surprising.
Likewise the apparently contemporary Armenian history of the Byz-
antine emperor Heraclius (610-41) written by a bishop Sebeos turns
out to be much altered by the activities of ninth and tenth century
interpolators.s The state of the evidence is, even by normal early
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