Circle of Justice: Middle Persian Documents as Sources for Sasanian and Early Islamic History

Ziel

The seventh and eighth centuries constitute a pivotal period in the history of the Middle East and, indeed, the world. These years see not only the emergence of Islam as a geopolitical and religious force, but also the fall of the Sasanian empire, and the incorporation of the lands that had for centuries formed its core territories—Mesopotamia and the western Iranian plateau—into the nascent caliphate. As the thinkers who lived through these events understood well, history is not only a matter of the decisions taken by rulers and other powerful individuals, even if such figures take the fore in many of our sources (and modern studies) regarding the late antique and early Islamic Middle East. Rather, as laid out in the “circle of justice” motif, ubiquitous in this Sasanian and early Islamic context, rulers’ authority depends on their ability to employ an army, which depends on their ability to collect taxes and rents from agricultural producers, which in turn depends on the extent to which landowners and tax collectors deal with these producers justly. No source furnishes a more direct witness to each of these fundamental domains—the military, agriculture, taxation, and law—during this critical period than the 1700-odd Middle Persian documents produced in Sasanian-occupied Egypt and early Islamic Iran. Nevertheless, these sources have barely figured into modern studies of the seventh and eighth centuries, which continue to rely largely on historical accounts written hundreds of years after the events they purport to describe. In the CIRCLE OF JUSTICE project we will write a new history of this tumultuous and profoundly formative period, relocating Middle Persian documents from the margins to their rightful place in the center, and taking the kind of interdisciplinary approach to these texts that is a necessity if we are to use them to their full potential as historical sources.

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