152 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINwritten in Spain. Although the Muqtabis has only survived in a frag-
mentary state, it is clear that the writings of all three of these authors
covered the whole of the period under consideration here. Other
briefer works were more limited in their compass or are less clearly
structured. The anonymous Akhbar Majmua concentrates particularly
on the period of the conquest. Although it has been claimed that this
text contains a section in it of late eighth and early ninth century
date, the arguments in favour of such a view have been shown to be
groundless.^17 It has otherwise been assigned to the eleventh century,
but the problem of its dating may realistically be said to be unre-
solved. Another source that is primarily concerned with the conquest,
though like the Akhbar Majmuii also containing briefer sections on the
subsequent Umayyad period, is the work of a certain Ibn al-Qiitiya
('Son of the Goth'), a supposed descendant of the Visigothic king
Wittiza. This author lived in the late tenth century, but the work itself
is said to have been put together from his lecture notes at a slightly
later date.ls Another text, the work of a ninth century Egyptian his-
torian Ibn 'Abd al-l;Iakam, principally concerned with Egypt and
Ifriqiya, has a small but significant amount of material in it relating
to the conquest of Al-Andalus, and will be discussed more fully below.
In the western historiographical tradition it is most unlikely that
much credence would be given to a seventeenth century account of
events that took place in the eighth or ninth centuries, though the
Irish Annals of the Four Masters might be an exception. However, the
character of Islamic historiography has been seen as giving even rela-
tively late sources considerable value; sometimes even more than that
of others closer in time to the periods described. This is thanks to the
practice of many Arab historians of including, whether avowedly or
not, substantial sections of the works of their predecessors in their
own accounts. Thus Al-Maqqari's seventeenth-century book, which
he wrote in Cairo and Damascus, is treated as a major source for
aspects of the history and society of Umayyad Al-Andalus because of
his incorporation into his text of fragments of otherwise lost works,
notably of some of the missing parts of the writings of Ibn I:Iayyan.
The same author's work and possibly those of some of his major
sources lie behind the text of Ibn Idhari's Bayiin al-Maghrib, and have
been seen as giving it particular authority as evidence for the early
history of Al-Andalus.
Significant as such survivals are, when so much else of the earliest
texts have been lost, it is unwise to assume that the later authors