The Chronicle of Seert: Christian Historical Imagination in Late Antique Iraq

Front matter

OXFORD

THE CHRONICLE OPSEERT

Es Christian Historical Imagination d in Late Antique Iraq

Contents

Preface ix Notes on Transliteration and Terminology xi Map xii Abbreviations xiii Introduction 1 The Chronicle of Seert 2 Approaching the Chronicle 4 Trusting the Chronicle 6 The Texture of the Chronicle 9 Structures of the Sasanian State 13 Religion and the Sasanian State 19 Geography of a Christian Minority 22 Babylonia 23 Khuzistan 25 Assyria 26 1. Collaborators and Dissidents: Writing the Hagiographies of the Fifth-century Persecutions 31 The 410 Synod of Seleucia-Ctesiphon 32 The War of 421 and the New Persecutions 37 The Martyrs of Yazdegard and Vahram 39 Abgar’s Cycle: Loyalty and Persecution 44 The Vandals Remembered 48 Conclusions 50

2. The Martyrs and the Catholicos: The Acts of the Symeon and

Their Reinvention 52 The Relic Cult and the Invention of History 52 Symeon bar Sebba‘e: Martyr for a Christian People 55 Developing the Acts of Symeon: Authority and the Catholicos 57 The Acts of Symeon and the Control of History 60 Conclusions 64 3. The Patriarchal Histories: Genesis of a Centralizing Narrative 66 The Medieval Compilations: Bar Hebraeus, Mari, and ‘Amr 67 The Medieval Compilations: The Chronicle of Seert and the Haddad Chronicle 70 Acacius’ History 71

Preface

This study of the Chronicle of Seert grew out a series of interests that developed while researching my doctorate. While my DPhil was concerned with the eastern Roman Empire, my eyes were increasingly drawn across the frontier, to the reception of the ideas, narratives, and institutional structures of the eastern Roman world in the Sasanian Empire. The Chronicle of Seert stood out in particular as a text that scholars sometimes mentioned in passing, but never treated as a whole, let alone situating it into its Sasanian and Abbasid contexts.

My study of the Chronicle was aided by the opportunity to use a closely related text, the Mukhtasar al-akhbār al-bi‘iya. This was discovered by Father Butrus Haddad in Baghdad immediately before the second Iraq war, and students of Iraqi history should be most indebted to him for bringing this text to the light of day. Following the custom of calling the Khuzistan Chronicle after its discoverer, Ignazio Guidi, I have used the term Haddad Chronicle, as a shorthand reference. In addition, I am personally very grateful to Robert Hoyland for allowing me to photocopy his copy of the chronicle.

I was very fortunate to be funded by a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship, which allowed me time to work on this project. I am also very grateful to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for providing such a wonderful base for my Junior Research Fellowship and for the membership of the Corpus Classics centre. They were very happy years. My fellowship also allowed me to start work on Arabic, which I pursued in Damascus, and to spend time in the Syrian orthodox patriarchal monastery at Ma‘arat Seidnaya. The book was completed at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, to whom I also owe a debt of gratitude.

I have accumulated a great many debts in the course of this project. My very great thanks go to Averil Cameron, my doctoral supervisor, who read the whole text in draft and made many highly pertinent observations. James Howard-Johnston was my British Academy mentor for the fellowship and was assiduous in offering advice on the text and urging me to remember the geography of my subject. David Taylor has been helpful and humorous in equal measure, and guided me out of several pitfalls, and Mazan Rabi‘a taught me Arabic for several summers, sitting under the fig tree in his garden in Damascus: both have the patience of saints.

My thanks also goes to Richard Payne and Elizabeth Campbell, who were travelling companions for trips to Iran, Iraq, and Turkey and offered much valuable advice. I must also thank the various poor souls who I persuaded to read sections of the text in various stages of preparation, especially Rosamond McKitterick, Daniel Hadas, Harry Munt, Phil Booth, Adam Becker, Khodadad

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Rezakhani, Greg Fisher, and Sarah Savant. John Watt offered invaluable suggestions in his role as OUP’s external reader. Mat Dalton prepared the map. Father Mikael Oez gave great help with the Syriac, and Haydar al-Lami with the Arabic. The late Tom Sizgorich was also kind enough to share with me a chapter from an unpublished manuscript. I remain in their debt. Finally, my greatest thanks goes to Katherine, Charlotte, and all my family, for all their love and kindness.

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Notes on Transliteration and Terminology

Syriac and Arabic proper names that have a common Anglicized form have not been fully transliterated. Citations from sources and titles of works have been transliterated. Where the published translations include clear pagination for the edition, I have only cited the editions in my notes, but I have employed the translations noted in the bibliography. My adaptations are mostly for style and to modernize language.

I have referred to ‘Iraq’ throughout. For the late antique period, this may feel anachronistic, but I preferred to retain a single term for the region across the work.

‘Roman’ and ‘Western’ generally refer to the region west of the Sasanian Empire and are used interchangeably. ‘Iranian’ and ‘Persian’ are also used interchangeably: both terms are found in the primary sources. I use the more commonly understood terms Ghassanid and Lakhmid for the Arab phylarchates, though ‘Jafnid’ and ‘Nasrid’ would probably be more acccurate.

Earlier versions of parts of chapters 1 and 5 were published in collected volumes edited by Adam Silverstein and Teresa Bernheimer (Late Antiquity: Eastern Perspectives, Edinburgh, 2012) and by myself (History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East, Oxford, 2013). They are reproduced here with permission. Further discussion of the sources of the Chronicle of Seert will appear in an article in the journal Oriens Christianus.

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Sinjare™” a K Mosul (Nineveh)

. .

BETH GARMAI ¢ \ Takrit

Pherat ® 2”

Schatt al-Arab `

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Abbreviations

AAE Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy

AB Analecta Bollandiana

AC L’Assyrie chrétienne: contribution a l'étude de histoire et de la géographie ecclésiastiques et monastiques du Nord de l'Iraq, 3 vols. (Beiruit, 1966-8)

AJN American Journal of Numismatics

AMS Acta Martyrorum et Sanctorum, ed. P. Bedjan, 7 vols. (Paris, 1896)

BAI Bulletin of the Asia Institute

BJRL Bulletin of the John Rylands Library

BO Bibliotheca Orientalis, 4 vols. (Vatican City, 1719-28)

BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

CSCO Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium

DHGE naire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastique, ed. A. Baudrillat et al. (Paris, 1912-)

DOP Dumbarton Oaks Papers

DS Dictionnaire de spiritualité: ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, ed. M. Viler et al. (Paris 1937-95)

EI2 Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn, ed. P. J. Bearman et al. (Leider 1960-2005)

EIr Encyclopaedia Iranica, online edition (<URL>http://www.iranicaonline. com), ed. E. Yarshater (New York, 1996-). Articles consulted on 30/1/13.

GCS Die Griechischen Christliche Schriftseller

GRBS Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies

HE Ecclesiastical History

HTR Harvard Theological Review

TrAnt Tranica Antiqua

JA Journal Asiatique

JAOS Journal of American Oriental Studies

JECS Journal of Early Christian Studies

JESHO Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient

JJS Journal of Jewish Studies

JLA Journal of Late Antiquity

JRAS Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society

JRS Journal of Roman Studies

JSAI Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam

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JTS Journal of Theological Studies

LM Le Muséon

MUS] Mélanges de université de S. Joseph

MW Muslim World

OC Oriens Christianus

OS L'Orient syrien

PdO Parole de lOrient

PG Patrologia Graeca

PLRE Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire ed. A. H. M. Jones and J. Martindale, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1971-92)

PO Patrologia Orientalis

POC Proche-Orient Chrétien

PS Patrologia Syriaca

RHR Revue de l’histoire des religions

ROC Revue de l’Orient Chrétien

SC Sources chrétiens

Stir Studia Iranica

T&M Travaux et mémoires

TTH Translated Texts for Historians

VC Vigiliae Christianae

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Introduction

When the Church of the East held its first synod in Ctesiphon in 410, Christians had already been present in Iraq for a long time. Converts from Judaism and ‘paganism’ mingled in the cities of the Sasanian (Persian) empire with Christian prisoners of war from the Roman world.' Many of these Sasanian Christians were also linked to one another, and to their co-religionists across the Roman frontier, by their shared Syriac language.”

At certain points, however, the Sasanian regime subjected its Christian subjects to a series of ‘persecutions.’ It is difficult to estimate the size of this Christian community, or to enumerate or quantify the persecutions it suffered, but these events provided the major source of the Christian community’s self-identity. The church of the Sasanian empire, which we glimpse in the acts of its first synod, was clearly divided by language and by administrative practices. However, a shared experience of persecution, and reverence for the martyrs of the fourth century, may have come to represent a powerful source of unity for these different communities: one of the first secure pieces of information we have for the Church of the East is a Syriac language martyrion (a list of martyrs), dated to the year 411, listing the martyrs killed under Shapur II (309-79).*

1 Note especially S. P. Brock, ‘Christians in the Sasanian Empire: a case of divided loyalties’, Studies in Church History 18 (1982), 1-19 and his ‘Nestorian church: a lamentable misnomer’, BJRL 78 (1996), 23-53. General surveys are provided by J. Labourt, Le christianisme dans empire Perse (Paris, 1904); C. Baumer, The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity (London, 2006) and W. Baum and D. Winkler, The Church of the East: A Concise History (London/New York, 2003). Underlying much of this work is J.-M. Fiey, L’Assyrie chrétienne: contribution a l'étude de Phistoire et de la géographie ecclésiastiques et monastiques du Nord de l'Iraq, 3 vols. (Beiruit, 1966-8).

? On the existence of a shared Syriac religious culture on both sides of the border see R. Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in the Early Syriac Tradition (London, 2004), esp. 343-4. Also note E. Kettenhoffen, “‘Deportations ii. In the Pathian and Sasanian periods’, in FIr.

3 J. Rist, ‘Die Verfolgung der Christen im spatantiken Sasanidenreich’, OC 80 (1996), 17-42, esp. 40 (though he tends to take the hagiographers’ reports at face value).

4 W, Hatch, An Album of Dated Syriac Manuscripts (Boston, Mass., 1946), 52. These martyria may be based on a slightly earlier Greek original.

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A list of martyrs’ names may seem a humble beginning. Yet it represents an early stage in the development of a written history of the Church of the East. It is an important way point in the evolution of a sense of shared history that made different Christian communities conscious of their membership of a single church, a history that was constantly rearticulated in response to changing events. In short, changes in the church’s historical awareness altered the behaviour and identity of Christians.

There is also a second feature of the 411 martyrion that deserves our attention. It was composed in the city of Edessa, a centre for the Syriac language that lay well inside Roman territory, rather than within the Sasanian Empire. Its contents were said to have been collected by one Marutha, bishop of Maypherkat, the Roman emissary who helped to convene the 410 synod.” The conjunction of the collection of a martyr list with the first church’s inaugural synod should remind us of the role of administrative centralization in stimulating the creation of history, both real and invented. The church’s shared experience was a good point of emphasis when the bishop of Ctesiphon intended to proclaim himself ‘catholicos’ over all the other bishops of the East.° The origins of the document also point to the role of earlier Roman models for the Church of the East.’ This is true most clearly at the level of theology, since the Church of the East imported the dogma of the Western church wholesale. But it is equally important for the politics and history. In the Roman emperor Constantine, Iraqi Christians saw a model of state sponsorship that they would continue to wish for in their own rulers, while the church of the Roman world provided a centralized model that the bishops of the Sasanian capital Ctesiphon sought to emulate.

Many of the sources for the history of Christians in late antique Iraq are much later medieval compilations. This study will attempt to unpeel the layers of the later compilations, some of which go back to the fifth to seventh centuries, and

5 Marutha’s role here is a matter of debate. See Labourt, Le christianisme, 53-4 and M. Van Esbroek, ‘Abraham le confesseur (Ve siécle), traducteur des passions des martyres perses’, AB 95 (1977), 169-79.

6 The catholicos Ahai would himself collect martyrs’ relics and hagiographic accounts (c.414). See chapters 2-3.

7 S, P. Brock, ‘Review of Wiessner, Untersuchungen .. .’, JTS (new series) 19 (1968), 300-9, at 303 observes that it was contact with the Roman world that ensured that the Shapurian persecutions were remembered, while others, known from inscriptions in the third century, were mostly forgotten by the Christians.

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The most important of these medieval texts is the tenth-century Chronicle of Seert, a universal history, written in Arabic, that was discovered by the Chaldean archbishop Addai Scher at the start of the twentieth century. The Chronicle’s surviving material covers the period c.251-423 and c.483-650, and there is a substantial gap in its coverage of the fifth century. We are left with only part of a work that may have once extended from Christ to the tenth century, though it is impossible to judge how dense this missing material might have been. Even as it stands, the text is very long, comprising some four fascicles of the Patrologia Orientalis.

The Chronicle was probably composed in the tenth century, since it employs the Melkite historian Qusta ibn Lūqā (d.910) and refers to Isho‘yahb III as ‘the last catholicos of that name’, placing it before the reign of Isho‘yahb IV in 1023.? It is a dense text, and the Chronicle includes a number of different layers of composition, each of which may abbreviate material from other sources, and, in some cases, blend this material together. While the Chronicle is written in Arabic, much of it derives from material that was originally in Syriac, the chief written language of Sasanian Christians before the coming of the Arabs. Many of the sources cited in the Chronicle are ecclesiastical histories of the seventh century, though these would have included even earlier sources.'° In addition, the compiler has included extracts from earlier Syriac texts that are still extant, such as the Lives of the catholicoi Aba and Sabrisho‘.

I argue that it is possible to reconstruct the agendas and, in some cases, the content of earlier histories by reading this later text in the context of earlier late antique material. Following this method, I propose that the Chronicle was based around a fifth-century ‘patriarchal history’ that was continued into the middle of the sixth century. After this point, the range of material expands greatly. New histories based around monasticism, scholastic culture, and the ecclesiastical history of the West and secular history were added from the late sixth century, and historians began to integrate their accounts of the catholicoi with these other narrative traditions. This expansion of an episcopal history

8 J.-M. Fiey, ‘L’apport de Mgr Addai Scher (+1915) à ’hagiographie orientale’, AB 83 (1965), 121-45.

? See R. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 444; J.-M. Fiey, Jalons pour V’histoire de léglise en Iraq (Beiruit, 1970), 21; R. Degen, ‘Zwei Miszellen zur Chronik von Se‘ert’, OC 54 (1970), 76-95. There is also one reference in the text to a thirteenth-century Fatimid caliph (Chronicle of Seert, I/ii, 263), but this seems to be a later scribal addition. The manuscript, written in a hand that is ‘old-fashioned, large, and clear’, probably dates to this time (A. Scher, PO 4, 215-18).

10 L, Sako, ‘Les sources de la chronique de Seert’, PdO 14 (1987), 155-67 lists these.

This is an open access version of the publication distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nce-nd/3.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact academic.permissions@oup.com into something as voluminous as the Chronicle of Seert is an indication of the development of many different ways to assert a Christian identity or think about the Christian past, and the efforts of the catholicoi to subordinate these ideas to a ‘universal’ history, structured around the catholicosate.

The layered composition of the Chronicle provides rich evidence for patterns of history-writing in the Church of the East. This in turn, grants us an insight into the complex relationships that existed between church structures, laymen, and monastic institutions, all of which developed their own historical traditions. In all of these spheres, the reinvention of the past by each new generation of East Syrian Christians points to the changing contours of their self-conception as followers of a catholicos and as a “Christian people’ within the Sasanian world.

APPROACHING THE CHRONICLE

Addai Scher’s discovery has not received great attention as a contribution to the history and historiography of late antiquity. It has been quarried as a repository of information about the Sasanian world and its Christians, but without many real attempts at source criticism, to determine how information entered the Chronicle and why. We cannot dismiss the Chronicle as untrustworthy merely because of its late date and the translation of older material into Arabic from other languages. For instance, François Decret has observed that the Chronicle’s entry on the third-century martyr-bishop Cyprian of Carthage is surprisingly accurate, in spite of the distance between the milieux of historian and subject.'' That said, we must not simply take the Chronicle at face value, especially where we cannot check its account against other sources. Though one might like to reconstruct the history of Christianity in third-century Iraq, it does not follow that we can use the Chronicle to do so, even where it is our only source.’* Indeed, it will be argued here that this early history was a particular target for inventions by Eastern historians, who replaced scanty early material with narratives that supported the claims of later eras.’°

Approaches to the chronicle sources of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages have been greatly enriched over the last thirty to forty years. Western

11 E, Decret, ‘L’affrontement des empires romain et sassanide’, Recherches Augustiniennes 14 (1979), 91-152, at 100-102. Also n.b. Fiey, Jalons, 21-3.

12 Eg. M.-L.Chaumont, La christianisation de lempire iranien, des origines aux grandes persécutions du IVe siècle (Louvain, 1988). Other possible sources for this period are also problematic: C. Jullien and F. Jullien, ‘La Chronique d’Arbéles: propositions pour la fin d'une controverse’, Oriens Christianus 85 (2001), 41-83.

13 See this volume, chapters 3 and 8.

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Another important perspective on the study of historiography has come from historians working on the Far East. Breuker’s study of medieval Korea has observed that the intellectual environment of the kingdom of Koryo was an ‘ideological landscape littered with philosophical, religious, mythical and historical constructs . . . some remnants of other times, some more recently constructed’. He proposes that the writing of history can be seen as a kind of codification, a response to the breakdown of practical unity that provides the illusion of a reality that was never there.'®

Many of these studies have much to offer this investigation of a historical compilation of the tenth century. It is particular appropriate to read each of the different levels of the Chronicle of Seert as a comment on the ‘salient features of society’ and their supposed relationship to the past. Moreover, as in Breuker’s study of Korea, these comments may assert a unity of identity that was never previously present, rendering it legitimate through appeals to a ‘continuous’ tradition. Indeed, it is important to remember that the historians

14 M. Innes and Y. Hen (eds.), The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2000), 2-4. Cf. R. McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004), 2, who writes of ‘the shift towards the study of historical texts as constructed narratives and bearers of memory’ and Averil Cameron, ‘Form and meaning: the Vita Constantini and the Vita Antonii, in T. Hägg and P. Rousseau (eds.), Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 2000), 72-88, at 86, who calls for a focus on hagiographies as ‘texts’ rather than as ‘sources’.

15 Y, Hen, ‘The Annals of Metz and the Merovingian past’, in Innes and Hen, Uses of the Past, 175-90.

16 R. McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge, 2008), 27-43.

17 W, Goffart, ‘Conspicuously absent: martial heroism in the Histories of Gregory of Tours and its likes’, in W. Goffart, Barbarians, Maps and Historiography (Aldershot, 2009), VI; W. Pohl, ‘Telling the difference: signs of ethnic identity’, in W. Pohl and H. Reimitz (eds.), Strategies of Distinction (Leiden/Cologne, 1998), 19-71, at 22-7.

18 R. Breuker, Establishing a Pluralist Society in Medieval Korea, 918-1170. History, Ideology and Identity in the Koryo Dynasty (Leiden, 2010), 3-9.

This is an open access version of the publication distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nce-nd/3.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact academic.permissions@oup.com of the Church of the East did not just continue older histories. They also elaborated their record of the distant past to accommodate the needs of a changing present.

A third historiographical approach that is of particular relevance here is the work of historians of early Islam. They are faced with a similar problem to students of Middle Eastern Christianity: they are reliant on ninth- and tenth-century compilations to write the histories of the seventh and eighth centuries. As Stephen Humphreys puts it: ‘If our goal is to comprehend the way in which Muslims of the late 8th and 9th centuries understood the origins of their society, then we are very well off indeed. But if our aim is to find out what really happened ...then we are in trouble.’’? Persuasive solutions to these problems have been proposed. Fred Donner and Antoine Borrut have argued that early Islamic history appears to have passed through a number of filters in successive generations of oral and written transmission, which exalted the ancestors of later sponsors and removed inconsistencies or inconvenient truths.”° In this model, if we are sufficiently attuned to the process of ‘filtration’, of the criteria on which information might be excluded, adapted, or expanded, we can make basic statements about what the material originally looked like.

Like some Islamicists looking at Muslim Arab sources, there is a temptation for us to see the Chronicle purely as a product of the tenth century, a work created entirely in the cities of Abbasid Iraq.”’ There is certainly evidence of changes to place names to fit an Islamic context, changes that could well have been introduced at the moment of translation. Yet there are also good reasons to be hopeful of reconstructing earlier layers in the Chronicle. Indeed, I argue that we can be much more confident in unpicking the layers of the Chronicle of Seert than Islamicists can be in dissecting al-Tabari, al-Baladhuri, and their contemporaries.

TRUSTING THE CHRONICLE

Firstly, it is clear that the compiler of the Chronicle has adopted a very conservative attitude to editing, preserving contradictory accounts of the same events alongside one another. We see this at the scale of whole narratives

1? R. S. Humphreys, Islamic History: A Framework for Enquiry (Princeton, 1992), 69.

20 F, Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton, 1998); A. Borrut, Entre mémoire et pouvoir: lespace syrien sous les derniers Omeyyades et les premiers Abbassides (v. 72-193/692-809) (Leiden, 2011).

21 J, Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Seventh- Century Middle East (Oxford, 2010), 519-20 for this trend in the historiography.

This is an open access version of the publication distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nce-nd/3.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact academic.permissions@oup.com in his divergent accounts of Constantine’s conversion, the Life of Ephraem, or the reign of Julian.” This pattern points to great respect for earlier material and an inability to differentiate between different versions of the same event: in many cases, the tradition that the compiler depended on seems to have been isolated from Western sources that might have been used to check or alter his material. Indeed, the Chronicle is filled with anachronisms, misdated events, and obscure passages that have been mutilated during abbreviation.

Secondly, the Chronicle, like a number of similar histories, has been structured around the reigns of catholicoi, the bishops of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, and the catholicosate provided a consistent central interest to the compiler’s predecessors, who provided his raw material. Sections on ‘the fathers of the church’ are especially important for this structural diagnosis: they list holy men and theologians active at the time of a given catholicos and read like a list of contents from other compilations very similar to the Chronicle itself.” The Chronicle’s compiler has included these earlier, more abbreviated, attempts to organize this material. The succession of catholicoi, therefore, provided a core around which other information was organized from an early date.

Thirdly, a number of dateable sources exist in Syriac from the period described by the Chronicle that we can use as controls on its material. Most prominent among these is the so-called Synodicon Orientale, the record of synods of the Church of the East held in the fifth to eighth centuries. These sources also include a variety of hagiographic material, on the martyrs of the fifth-century persecutions; on prominent catholicoi and on the monastic founders of the late sixth and seventh centuries. In all these cases, the Syriac sources are important not only because they confirm or deny the ‘data’ of the Chronicle, but also because they provide plausible contexts for the composition of different parts of the Chronicle, and allow us an insight into the development of the historical tradition on which the Chronicle relies. In addition, this historiographical analysis is aided by a later, thirteenth-century list of earlier historians by “Abdisho‘ of Nisibis, which gives a sense of how an increasing number of historians worked within this tradition.”* Similarly, the chronological range of the texts of foreign origin in the Chronicle (such as ecclesiastical history from the Roman Empire) allows us to establish ‘termini post quem’ for the incorporation of this foreign material into the tradition.