The First Arabic Annals: Fragments of Umayyad History (Issn)

The earliest development of Arabic historical writing remains shrouded in uncertainty until the 9th century CE, when our first extant texts were composed. This book demonstrates a new method, termed riwāya-cum-matn, which allows us to identify citation-markers that securely indicate the quotation of earlier Arabic historical works, proto-books first circulated in the eighth century. As a case study it reconstructs, with an edition and translation, around half of an annalistic history written by al-Layth b. Saʿd in the 740s. In doing so it shows that annalistic history-writing, comparable to contemporary Syriac or Greek models, was a part of the first development of Arabic historiography in the Marwanid period, providing a chronological framework for more ambitious later Abbasid history-writing. Reconstructing the original production-contexts and larger narrative frames of now-atomised quotations not only lets us judge their likely accuracy, but to consider the political and social relations underpinning the first production of authoritative historical knowledge in Islam. It also enables us to assess how Abbasid compilers combined and augmented the base texts from which they constructed their histories. Acknowledgements 5 Contents 7 Introduction: An Arabic History from 8 th -Century Egypt 9 1 Using isnāds to Identify Quotations of Books 13 2 Repeated riwāya-isnāds to al-Layth’s –Taʾrīkh Presenting Common Information 16 3 Five Independent Witnesses to Ibn Bukayr’s Recension of al-Layth’s -Taʾrīkh 21 4 Al-Layth’s –Taʾrīkh or Ibn Bukayr’s? 33 5 The Scope and Content of al-Layth’s –Taʾrīkh 38 6 Al-Layth and Ibn Bukayr 59 Conclusions 65 Edition and Translation 71 Bibliography 125 Index of Names and Places 131 Studies in the History and Culture of the Middle East are published as supplement to Der Islam which was founded in 1910 by Carl Heinrich Becker, an early practitioner of the modern study of Islam. The mission of the series is the study of past societies of the Middle East, their belief systems, and their underlying social and economic relations--in their aim to cover the entire spectrum of the historically oriented humanities and social sciences