Ta'rīkh al-Rusul wa-al-Mulūk, Vol. V: The Sāsānids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen

Introduction

Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī (839–923 CE) was a Persian scholar writing in Arabic at the height of Abbasid intellectual culture in Baghdad. His Ta'rīkh al-Rusul wa-al-Mulūk — the History of the Prophets and Kings — is the most ambitious work of universal history to survive from the early Islamic world. Spanning from the creation of the world to 915 CE, it is organised in two registers simultaneously: salvation history (the succession of prophets from Adam to Muḥammad) and political history (the succession of empires and dynasties, culminating in the Abbasid caliphate). In both its scale and its method — al-Ṭabarī reproduces his sources explicitly and at length, identifying transmitters in the manner of ḥadīth scholarship — the Ta'rīkh has no close parallel in the ancient or medieval world.

Volume V of the State University of New York Press annotated translation series, translated and annotated by Clifford Edmund Bosworth, covers the period before and immediately around the rise of Islam: the Sasanid dynasty of Iran, the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire, the Lakhmid client kingdom of al-Ḥīra, and the pre-Islamic kingdoms of Yemen. This is the world into which Islam emerged, and al-Ṭabarī's account of it draws on sources — Persian royal annals, Syriac chronicles, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry — that are otherwise largely lost or inaccessible in their original form. The volume thus occupies an unusual position: it is at once a witness to Sasanid and late antique history, and a document of how the early Islamic tradition remembered and constructed the world it had superseded.

Al-Ṭabarī and His World

Baghdad under the Abbasids

Al-Ṭabarī was born in Āmul, in the province of Ṭabaristān on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea — hence his epithet. He studied across the Islamic world, travelling to Rayy, Baghdad, Basra, Kufa, Egypt, and Syria before settling permanently in Baghdad, where he spent the last decades of his life writing and teaching. His career unfolded under the later Abbasid caliphs, in the period when Baghdad remained the pre-eminent centre of Islamic learning despite increasing political fragmentation in the caliphate's outlying provinces.

The intellectual culture of ninth-century Baghdad was defined by the great translation movement (ḥarakat al-tarjama) that rendered Greek philosophical, scientific, and medical texts into Arabic — a movement centred on the Bayt al-Ḥikma (House of Wisdom) and patronised by caliphs including al-Maʾmūn. Al-Ṭabarī was a figure of comparable ambition but different orientation: where the translators turned to Greece, his historical project turned to Persia and to the Arabic oral and written traditions of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods. He was fluent in Persian and had access to Persian historical materials that were being translated into Arabic in this era, some of which survive only through his use of them.

Al-Ṭabarī as Scholar

The Ta'rīkh was composed alongside al-Ṭabarī's other major work, the Jāmiʿ al-Bayān ʿan Taʾwīl Āy al-Qurʾān — a vast Quranic commentary of comparable scope and method. Together, the two works define the twin pillars of his scholarly legacy. He is reported to have been a figure of extraordinary industry: later biographers record that he wrote forty leaves a day for forty years, a figure that even discounted remains suggestive of the sheer volume of his output.

His historical method is distinctive and demands some explanation. Al-Ṭabarī does not, for the most part, synthesise his sources into a single continuous narrative. Instead, he presents multiple, often conflicting accounts of the same event, each introduced by its chain of transmitters (isnād), and leaves the reader to weigh them. This practice, borrowed from the methodological conventions of ḥadīth scholarship, means that the Ta'rīkh is simultaneously a history and an archive: it preserves the raw materials of historical tradition in a form that allows later scholars to assess provenance and reliability. The method has its costs — the text is often repetitive, and the cumulative narrative argument can be difficult to trace — but its documentary value is incalculable.

The Text

Sources for Vol. V

The sources on which al-Ṭabarī draws for the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods treated in Vol. V are heterogeneous in origin and uneven in quality. Bosworth's annotation is largely devoted to identifying and assessing them.

For the Sasanid dynasty, al-Ṭabarī's principal source was a Middle Persian royal chronicle, the Khwadāynāmag (Book of Lords), which had been translated into Arabic in the early Islamic period. This text, now lost in its original form, provided the official Sasanid royal narrative: king-lists, regnal lengths, accounts of wars and court events, structured around the ceremonial ideology of Iranian kingship. Al-Ṭabarī supplements it with material from later Arabic-language historians and with traditions traceable to Syriac Christian sources, which provide a different vantage point on the same events — particularly for the Sasanid persecution of Christians and the long wars with Byzantium.

For Byzantium, al-Ṭabarī's knowledge is less direct. His account of Byzantine affairs is largely refracted through the Sasanid perspective and through early Islamic traditions about the Rūm (the Romans/Byzantines). Bosworth's annotation draws extensively on the Byzantine and Syriac sources that allow these accounts to be checked and contextualised.

For the Lakhmids — the Arab client dynasty of al-Ḥīra, vassals of the Sasanids — al-Ṭabarī draws on pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and on the oral historical traditions (ayyām al-ʿarab, the "days of the Arabs") that were being compiled and codified in the early Islamic period. These are sources of a very different kind from the royal chronicle: fragmented, poetically mediated, and shaped by tribal rather than dynastic concerns.

For Yemen, the source base is similarly varied: a mixture of Yemeni tribal tradition, Syriac material on the Christian kingdom of Axum and its intervention in Yemen, and oral Arabic traditions about the pre-Islamic Ḥimyarite kingdom and the memory of Abraha's expedition against Mecca — the Year of the Elephant — which forms the immediate prologue to the birth of the Prophet Muḥammad.

Structure and Content of Vol. V

The volume does not correspond to a single discrete section of al-Ṭabarī's original text; rather, it draws together material that al-Ṭabarī distributes across his history according to his annalistic and typological scheme. Bosworth's editorial work consists in part of identifying, ordering, and contextualising this material.

The Sasanid section traces the dynasty from its foundation by Ardashīr I in the early third century CE through the reigns of Shāpūr I, Shāpūr II, the later fifth-century kings, the wars of Khusraw I (Anūshīrwān) with Justinian, the turbulent early seventh century, and the catastrophic collapse of the empire under the Arab conquests. Al-Ṭabarī's treatment of Khusraw I — the most celebrated Sasanid king in the Islamic tradition, associated with justice, learning, and the codification of Zoroastrian scripture — is particularly full, drawing on the Khwadāynāmag tradition and on later literary elaborations.

The Lakhmid section covers the dynasty of al-Ḥīra from its legendary origins through its final king, al-Nuʿmān III, executed by the Sasanid Khusraw II around 602 — an event that, in al-Ṭabarī's telling, contributed to the destabilisation of the Sasanid frontier and ultimately to the success of the Arab conquests.

The Yemeni section treats the Ḥimyarite kings, the Axumite (Ethiopian) occupation of Yemen in the sixth century, the career of the Christian Axumite viceroy Abraha, and his abortive campaign against Mecca — events embedded in the Quranic text (Sūrat al-Fīl, Q 105) and therefore of central importance to early Islamic historical memory.

Al-Ṭabarī and the Problem of Pre-Islamic History

Reading Vol. V critically requires attention to a structural difficulty that runs through al-Ṭabarī's entire treatment of the pre-Islamic period. His sources for Sasanid and Arabian history were, by the time he wrote, already several generations removed from the events they purported to describe, and had passed through processes of translation, oral transmission, and Islamicising reinterpretation that are not always easy to trace. The Khwadāynāmag tradition had been mediated through Arabic translation and through the interests of early Islamic scholars who used it to frame the Sasanid empire as the providentially prepared ground for the Arab conquests. Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and oral tradition had been subject to selective collection and to forgery. The result is a text that must be read simultaneously as a historical source and as a document of early Islamic historical consciousness.

Bosworth's annotation addresses these problems directly and with considerable precision, identifying where al-Ṭabarī's accounts can be corroborated by contemporary or near-contemporary external sources — Syriac chronicles, Byzantine historians, numismatic and epigraphic evidence — and where they cannot. This comparative work is one of the principal scholarly contributions of the SUNY series as a whole, and it is especially valuable in Vol. V, where the external source base for late Sasanid history is relatively rich.

Bosworth's Translation and Annotation

Clifford Edmund Bosworth (1928–2015) was among the leading Islamicists of the twentieth century, best known for his work on the eastern Islamic world and for his revision of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. His command of the relevant languages — Arabic, Persian, and the relevant secondary literatures in European scholarship — makes his volume in the SUNY series among the most densely annotated and reliable in the set.

The SUNY History of al-Ṭabarī series, published between 1985 and 2007 in thirty-nine volumes, represents a collaborative scholarly undertaking of unusual ambition: the first complete annotated translation of the Ta'rīkh into any Western language. Each volume was assigned to a specialist in the relevant period and linguistic tradition, with the result that the series is uneven in approach but consistently high in scholarly quality. The general editor was Ehsan Yar-Shater.

Bosworth's translation is accurate and readable without sacrificing precision. His annotation identifies the isnāds (chains of transmission), traces the identifiable underlying sources, supplies the relevant passages from Syriac, Byzantine, and other parallel sources, and provides geographical and prosopographical notes throughout. The volume includes maps and an index. Readers without Arabic who wish to engage seriously with al-Ṭabarī's pre-Islamic material will find Bosworth's volume an indispensable guide.

Editions and Translations

Arabic Text

De Goeje, M. J., ed. Annales quos scripsit Abu Djafar Mohammed ibn Djarir at-Tabari. 15 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1879–1901. The standard critical edition of the Arabic text, still in use. Vol. I contains the pre-Islamic material relevant to this companion entry.
Ta'rīkh al-Rusul wa-al-Mulūk. Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1960–1969. The standard modern Arabic edition in ten volumes.

English Translation

Bosworth, C. E., trans. and annot. The History of al-Ṭabarī, Vol. V: The Sāsānids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen. SUNY Series in Near Eastern Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. The translation used as the basis for this companion entry.
Yar-Shater, Ehsan, gen. ed. The History of al-Ṭabarī. 39 vols. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985–2007. The complete annotated translation; individual volumes by specialists.

A Note on Reading

Vol. V rewards reading in two directions simultaneously. Forward, it illuminates the world that the Islamic conquests transformed: the exhausted Sasanid empire, the depleted Byzantine provinces, the unstable client kingdoms of the desert margins. Backward, it illuminates the Islamic tradition's own understanding of that world — what it chose to remember, what it shaped into providential narrative, and what it allowed to recede.

Bosworth's annotation makes both kinds of reading possible. The notes are dense and sometimes demand patience, but they consistently supply what the text itself cannot: the corroborating or contradicting evidence from external sources, the identification of the underlying Persian or Syriac tradition behind a given passage, the modern scholarly debate about a contested point. Reading the translation without the notes is possible; reading it with them is a substantially richer experience.

It is also worth reading Vol. V alongside the relevant volumes of the SUNY series that follow it — particularly Vol. XIV (The Conquest of Iran, trans. G. Rex Smith), Vol. XI (The Challenge to the Empires, trans. Khalid Yahya Blankinship), and Vol. XVIII (Between Civil Wars: The Caliphate of Muʿāwiyah, trans. Michael G. Morony) — to trace how the world described in this volume was absorbed into the new order that al-Ṭabarī's history ultimately chronicles. The pre-Islamic empires are not simply a prologue in his account: they are the civilisational inheritance that early Islam had to negotiate, contest, and in many respects preserve.

Introduction#

Al-Ṭabarī and His World#

Baghdad under the Abbasids#

Al-Ṭabarī as Scholar#

The Text#

Sources for Vol. V#

Structure and Content of Vol. V#

Al-Ṭabarī and the Problem of Pre-Islamic History#

Bosworth's Translation and Annotation#

Editions and Translations#

Further Reading#

A Note on Reading#