Download PDF | (SUNY series in Near Eastern Studies) C E Bosworth - The History of Al-Tabari Vol. 5_ The Sasanids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen-State University of New York Press (1999).
498 Pages
Preface
THE History OF PROPHETS AND KinGs (Ta’rikh al-rusul wa’lmulak) by Abt Ja‘far Muhammad b. Jarir al-Tabari (839-923), here rendered as The History of al-Tabari, is by common consent the most important universal history produced in the world of Islam. It has been translated here in its entirety for the first time for the benefit of non-Arabists, with historical and philological notes for those interested in the particulars of the text.
In his monumental work al-Tabari explores the history of the ancient nations, with special emphasis on biblical peoples and prophets, the legendary and factual history of ancient Iran, and, in great detail, the rise of Islam, the life of the Prophet Muhammad, and the history of the Islamic world down to the year 915. The first volume of this translation contains a biography of al-Tabari and a discussion of the method, scope, and value of his work. It also provides information on some of the technical considerations that have guided the work of the translators. The thirty-ninth volume is a compendium of biographies of early members of the Muslim community, compiled by al-Tabari; although not strictly a part of his History, it complements it.
The History has been divided here into thirty-nine volumes, each of which covers about two hundred pages of the original Arabic text in the Leiden edition. An attempt has been made to draw the dividing lines between the individual volumes in such a way that each is to some degree independent and can be read as such. The page numbers of the Leiden edition appear in the margins of the translated volumes.
Al-Tabari very often quotes his sources verbatim and traces the chain of transmission (isndd) to an original source. The chains of transmitters are, for the sake of brevity, rendered by only a dash (—) between the individual links in the chain. Thus, “According to Ibn Humayd—Salamah—lIbn Ishaq” means that al-Tabari received the report from Ibn Humayd, who said that he was told by Salamah, who said that he was told by Ibn Ishaq, and so on. The numerous subtle and important differences in the original Arabic wording have been disregarded.
The table of contents at the beginning of each volume gives a brief survey of the topics dealt with in that particular volume. It also includes the headings and subheadings as they appear in alTabari’s text, as well as those occasionally introduced by the translator.
Well-known place names, such as, for instance, Mecca, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Damascus, and the Yemen, are given in their English spellings. Less common place names, which are the vast majority, are transliterated. Biblical figures appear in the accepted English spelling. Iranian names are usually transcribed according to their Arabic forms, and the presumed Iranian forms are often discussed in the footnotes.
Technical terms have been translated wherever possible, but some, such as dirham, and imdm, have been retained in Arabic forms. Others that cannot be translated with sufficient precision have been retained and italicized, as well as footnoted.
The annotation is aimed chiefly at clarifying difficult passages, identifying individuals and place names, and discussing textual difficulties. Much leeway has been left to the translators to include in the footnotes whatever they consider necessary and helpful.
The bibliographies list all the sources mentioned in the annotation.
The index in each volume contains all the names of persons and places referred to in the text, as well as those mentioned in the notes as far as they refer to the medieval period. It does not include the names of modern scholars. A general index, it is hoped, will appear after all the volumes have been published.
For further details concerning the series and acknowledgments, see the preface to Volume I.
Ehsan Yar-Shater
Translator’s Foreword
The section of al-Tabari’s History on the four centuries preceding the rise of the Prophet Muhammad continues the nonannalistic treatment of the pre-Islamic period as a whole, but it departs from the previous retailing of stories about the Children of Israel, the earlier prophets and the ancient peoples of the Near East and Arabia, which formed the first tier of Islamic salvation history, that of a pristine monotheism which had become clouded over by idolatry and a time of ignorance before God had sent His Prophet to mankind.
Instead, although we do not get the year-by-year treatment of events used for post-Islamic times, we emerge instead into something that is recognizable as real history: the origins of the successors to the Parthian Arsacids of Persia, the Sasanids, and the subsequent four centuries’ history of the dynasty; the Sasanids’ sporadic episodes of warfare with the Romans/Byzantines, and, on the eastern frontiers of the Sasanid empire, occasional wars with the peoples of Inner Asia, the Tian of Firdawsi’s version of the Persian national epic, the Shah-ndmah; the Sasanids’ attempts to maintain a buffer-state on the desert fringes of Mesopotamia in the shape of the Arab Lakhmid princes who, it was hoped, would protect Mesopotamia from depredations by the Bedouins of inner Arabia; the Sasanids’ installing of military bases on the western shores of the Persian Gulf in order to turn the gulf into a Persian lake, safe for their commerce; from the fifth century onwards, an interventionist policy across central Arabia, culmi-nating in the Persian occupation of Yemen in 570 for some sixty years; but then, at the end, the sudden disintegration of the empire at the hands of first the Byzantines and then the Muslim Arabs.
This section of al-Tabari’s work is thus by no means exclusively concerned with the affairs of the Persian imperial heartland proper, the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia, where the capital Seleucia-Ctesiphon lay, but is to a considerable extent concerned with its western and southwestern fringes; that is, the Roman/ Byzantine provinces of eastern Anatolia and the Semitic Near East, including such ruling Arab families as the Lakhmids of alHirah and the chiefs of Kindah of the family of Hujr Akil al-Murar in central Arabia.
Much of the material in al-Tabari on the Sasanids’ external relations can be corroborated or amplified from outside contemporary or near-contemporary sources. For the warfare with the Romans/Byzantines, there is a rich array of Byzantine chroniclers, some of them, like Procopius, closely connected with the military commanders concerned or, like Agathias, with a special channel of communication for knowledge of Persian affairs. For the Arabian peninsula, there is a fair amount of Arabic information, admittedly post-Islamic in the form we know it, about the Lakhmid kings and the chiefs of Kindah, arising out of the Arabs’ passion for genealogical information and its historical background and out of the need to elucidate the background of poetic activity at the court of al-Hirah or in the person of a poet-chief like Imrw’ al-Qays.
In his translation, Geschichte der Perser und Araber zur Zeit der Sasaniden (see on this, below), Néldeke omitted some sections of al-Tabari’s material on pre-Islamic Yemen, since he considered it as “zu fabelhafte” (88017-8824, but with 88119-8824 inserted out of order in his translation at 147-48; 8904-892!4, go1!—917!7). He also omitted as irrelevant to his general topic 96615-9812, on the miraculous birth and early upbringing of the Prophet Muhammad, and the closing section in this Prima series, vol. 2, 106917—107229, on the chronology of the world from Adam to the Prophet’s birth.
With regard to the South Arabian material, during the 1870s, with little more secondary material available on the history of the pre-Islamic Arabs than A. P. Caussin de Perceval’s attempt at making historical bricks without straw, his Essai sur l'histoire des Arabes avant I’Islamisme, pendant l’époque de Mahomet et jusqu’a la réduction de toutes les tribus sous la loi musulmane (Paris 1847-48}, this must have seemed substantially the case. Only from the early 1870s, through the pioneer efforts of scholarly travelers like Halévy in copying inscriptions on the spot, with his subsequent decipherment of the script and then further elucidation of the material by D. H. Miller and others, did knowledge begin to emerge of the rich but patchy heritage of South Arabian inscriptions (and also, around this time, of inscriptions in other languages of the peninsula like Thamudic, Lihyanitic, Safaitic, etc.).
Néldeke was of course aware of the pioneer discoveries and publications here, but the material was still meager in quantity and philologically difficult to evaluate. During the course of the present century, the study of Epigraphic South Arabian has emerged as a fully grown branch of Semitic studies, and we now have confirmation—if at times in an allusive rather than direct manner—of several apparently “fabelhafte” events in al-Tabari’s presentation of South Arabian history. Nor should one forget the significant quantity of material in Syriac and other languages of the Christian Orient that has now come to light and has illuminated the formation of an indigenous Christian church in Southwestern Arabia and such episodes as the struggle for political power and influence there involving such outside powers as Abyssinia, Byzantium, and Persia.
Even the history of the lands beyond Persia’s northeastern frontier has had a certain amount of fresh illumination thrown upon it by recent work on the Western Turk empire and on the Kushans, Kidarites, and Hephthalites, utilizing the results of such disciplines as archaeology, numismatics, and epigraphy; and the emergence in the last decade of material from a family archive in what is now northern Afghanistan will almost certainly increase our knowledge of the history and language of Bactria, the later Islamic Tukh§aristan, in its preIslamic phase.
We have been talking about the peripheries of Persia, but there remains central to this section of al-Tabari’s History the Persian and Mesopotamian core of the Sasanid empire. The populations and resources of these territories, the firm social structure, the cohesive power within society of the Zoroastrian state church and its ethos, the richness of the irrigated lands of the Sawdad of Iraq and the oases of the Iranian plateau, all these provided the motive power for Sdsanid expansionism and military success. For nearly four centuries there was a perceptible trend of Sasanid military success over the Romans/Byzantines: in the great battleground of Upper Mesopotamia, the Persian captured Nisibis in 363 and held it continuously thereafter as a bastion of Persian power threatening the Greeks, with the supreme success of final breakthrough in 614.
Recently, James Howard-Johnston has perceptively weighed up the comparative positions and réles of the two great empires of the Near and Middle East, concluding that it was above all the Persians’ possession of Mesopotamia, with its populousness, its advanced, irrigated agriculture and its position at the head of the Persian Gulf with trade routes stretching thither from the East— all these advantages complementing the results of a similar exploitation of the oasis economies of the Iranian plateau—which gradually gave the Sasanids the edge over Byzantium, enabling inter alia the emperors to use the threat of renewed military action to impose humiliating, tribute-paying conditions on the Greeks.!
Unfortunately, our knowledge of whole stretches of Sasanid internal history and of the mechanisms driving the empire remains very imperfect. Such basic topics as the nature of the social structure and the réles of the aristocracy, gentry, priesthood, and merchants, and the nature of the landholding and financial system on which the state apparatus rested, continue to excite discussion and controversy among scholars. Sources of information like that from the rich corpus of Sasanid royal and priestly inscriptions and reliefs, the testimony of coins and sealings, the material concerning subordinate faiths of the empire such as that from the conciliar acts of the Nestorian Church and from the Babylonian Talmud, have all been carefully sifted, but cannot compensate for the almost total absence of contemporary records and literature in Middle Persian; and the exact dating and provenance of such exiguous material as we do have, like the Letter of Tansar (see on this p. 17 n. 66, below) continue to be debated. Hence the continued, central importance of al-Tabari’s historical information on Sasanid history, supplemented by equally valuable if scantier information in writers like Ibn Qutaybah, al-Ya‘quibi, al-Dinawari, al-Mas‘tidi, and Hamzah al-Isfahani.
It is undeniably true, as Howard-Johnston has again observed, that the version of Sasanid history that reached al-Tabari from one or other versions of the Khwadday-ndmag or Book of Kings, probably from that translated into Arabic by the late Umayyad writer Ibn al-Mugqaffa‘, almost certainly involved much distortion, suppression, and invention.2 The penchant for entertaining anecdotes, memorable sayings, curiosa, moralizing tales, and the like, which seem to go back to the Book of Kings's Pahlavi original, was characteristic also of early Arabic udabd’ or littérateurs.
In his endeavor to produce a plausible, straightforward historical narrative, al-Tabari must have tried valiantly to cut his way through a mass of entertaining but historically irrelevant information presented to him in these royal annals, but he could not entirely break free of the adab tradition (cf. his inclusion of the totally unhistorical story of Shabir II’s wandering disguised in the Roman camp and capture, p. 60 below, and the tale of Kawad I’s escape from imprisonment at the end of the interregnum of Jamasp’s rule, p. 135 below). Al-Tabari’s efforts at pruning less relevant material can be seen in the shortened Persian translation produced by Abi ‘Ali Bal‘ami (see on this, below), in which the Samanid vizier put back in his narrative certain items from the Sasanid historical tradition where he thought al-Tabari had pruned it overzealously. The fact that anecdotal material of the examples given above remained in al-Tabari’s History detracts only a little from confidence in his search for sober history.
There is nevertheless a certain unevenness of treatment, perhaps inevitable considering the material within al-Tabari’s hands. Sometimes confirmation or amplification of incidents in alTabari’s narrative can be found in, for example, the Greek, Syriac, or Armenian sources, but when the internal history of the Sasanid empire did not impinge upon or affect the Christians of Persia, there was little reason for Eastern Christian sources to notice events there. Hence we are left with many blank or little-known periods in Sasanid history, such as the reigns of Bahram II in the later third century (covering seventeen years), of Bahram IV at the end of the fourth century (eleven years) and of Yazdagird II in the mid fifth century (almost two decades), skated over by al-Tabari (see pp. 46, 69, 106-109 below).
For a crucial subject like Khusraw Antisharwan’s financial, tenurial, and military reforms, vital for our understanding of the internal dynamics of the later Sasanid empire, we are still largely dependent on al-Tabari’s account; it is detailed and informative, but capable of varying interpretation, and hence has not surprisingly attracted a substantial body of comment and interpretation (see p. 258 n. 624, below). The same applies to the slightly earlier episode of Mazdak and his religiosocial movement in the reign of Kaw4d I and the earlier part of Anusharwan’s reign, which has given rise to widely varying interpretations, often not unconnected with the political and social views of the scholars concerned (see p. 132 n. 342, below).
We must be grateful to al-Tabari for preserving as much as he did of hard historical material, among the less valuable episodes of his History that were meant more for entertainment than instruction. Writing a history of the Sasdnids without the Arabic chronicles, even though these last date from two or three centuries after the empire’s demise, would be a daunting task.
The achievement of Theodor Néldeke (1836-1930) in producing in 1878 his Geschichte der Perser und Araber zur Zeit der Sasaniden and its stupendous commentary, was uniformly praised on its publication (save for one petulant French reviewer, although one recalls that this was only seven years after the French loss of Alsace-Lorraine to the German empire and that Noldeke was at that moment sitting in Alsace in a professorial chair at Strassburg/Strasbourg University). In his extended review article of the work, Alfred von Gutschmid stated that Néldeke’s utilization of al-Tabari had made it possible for the first time to write a real history of the Sasanids.3 Succeeding generations of scholars—and not only orientalists but those from other disciplines like Byzantine studies—have continued to use Noéldeke’s work and will doubtless continue to do so, when so much of the material he brought to bear on the elucidation and amplification of the Arabic text, that from the Greek, Latin, Syriac, Hebrew, Georgian, and Armenian sources (the latter via his Berlin colleague von Gutschmid), remains still valid. Néldeke himself regarded his translation as perhaps his chef d’oeuvre.4 Nevertheless, a plethora of new information has emerged in the intervening 120 years, and this needs to be integrated with any new translation of the Arabic text.
Today we live in an age of many specialists but not of polymaths like Néldeke. How can any single person nowadays—not least the present ‘abd haqir— attempt to gather up and integrate all this new information? Thus as noted above, since Néldeke’s time, a whole new field within Semitic studies, that of Epigraphic South Arabian and South Arabian history, has emerged and matured. The obvious answer to the problem would be a team of experts collaborating on the project of a translation plus a commentary that would almost certainly exceed by many times the length of the translation itself. Such projects are easy to conceive but hard to finance and even harder to realize. The final volume of the History of al-Tabari project cannot wait a further twenty years or so, which is what such a team of experts in different fields might well require (though Néldeke finished his translation in one year!); and their finished product would almost inevitably be outdated in many respects before the end of the period of time involved.
Hence the present work is offered now for readers’ consideration as one which had to be completed within a period of two years only. The present translator and commentator is conscious of whole areas of new scholarship which should, in ideal conditions, be brought into consideration for the commentary; for instance, much exciting and relevant work is coming out of the Workshops on Late Antiquity and Early Islam, and this has been only partially tapped. But a halt must be called at some point, and I have reluctantly arrived at this; whether the achievement is worthwhile, the reader must judge for himself.
The generations of Arabists who have used Noéldeke’s Geschichte cannot have failed to be impressed by the degree of accuracy which he achieved in his translation.5 Where, as with so much of pre-Islamic poetry, replete as it is with recondite allusions, often totally unrecoverable today, doubt and uncertainty remained, he noted this. Since he actually published the translation a year before the appearance of the edited text (volume 1 of the Prima Series) on which it was based, a more complete understanding of the text led him on occasion to revise his translation (see, e.g., p. 65 n. 177 below). But such occasions were few and far between. What has happened since Néldeke’s time is that several Arabic texts that he had to use in manuscript, such as Ibn Qutaybah’s ‘Uydn al-akhbar, al-Ya‘quibi’s Ta’rikh, al-Dinawari’s alAkhbar al-tiwdl, and various poetical diwdns, have now been critically edited, and wherever possible, I have taken advantage of improved readings in these editions.
When the project for an edition of the History was first mooted in the early 1870s under the stimulus of the Leiden Arabist M. J. de Goeje,6 Néldeke undertook to edit the section on the Sasanids (Prima series, 813-1067) and, after the unexpected death of Otto Loth, the ensuing section 1067-1572; that is, up to almost the end of the events of A.H. 6. Basically, Néldeke had at his disposal for the section on the Sadsanids the three manuscripts (1) L = Leiden 497, covering the whole period except for a lacuna at 87812-89917, (2) C = Constantinople/Istanbul, K6prilii 1040; and (3) T and t = Tubingen Ma. VI, 2 (Wetzstein Collection), with two parts, the second copied later than the first. Other manuscripts in part supplemented these, including P = Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, ancien fonds 627 (a manuscript cognate with L), from 899!2 (i.e., soon after the beginning of the reign of Khusraw I Anisharw4an); and BM = British Library, Add. 23,263, from 9159 (i.e., in the section on the Tubba‘ king of Yemen As‘ad Abt Karib). Néldeke also mentioned that he had found useful Ibn Hisham’s version of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat al-nabi (available in the printed edition of 1858-60 by F. Wiistenfeld); the anonymous history contained in the manuscript Sprenger 30 (in the collection acquired in 1858 from Sprenger by the Prussian State Library in Berlin, and still unpublished; it corresponds to one of the two main versions used by al-Tabari for the history of the Sasanids; see on the work the dissertation of J. G. Rothstein, De chronographo arabo anonymo, qui codice Berolinensi Sprengriano tricesimo continetur); and the Gotha manuscript 24-25 of Bal‘ami’s abbreviated, and in places slightly amplified, Persian translation of al-Tabari’s History (H. Zotenberg’s French translation was not published until 186774).7 The Cairo 1960-69 text of al-Tabari’s History by the veteran Egyptian editor Muhammad Abi al-Fadl Ibrahim, which incorporates some readings from Istanbul Topkapi Saray manuscripts and certain other ones, has been compared by the present translator with the Leiden text; the additional information gleaned has, however, proved negligible.
The rendering of Arabic names and terms follows the usual system of The History of al-Tabari. In regard to Epigraphic South Arabian, I have endeavored to follow the generally acknowledged system as exemplified in A. F. L. Beeston’s Sabaic Grammar. It is the rendering of pre-Islamic Iranian names and terms that causes difficulties, and no watertight system seems possible here. At the suggestion of Mr F. C. de Blois, for the spelling of Middle Persian words and names I have endeavored to follow the principles laid down by D. N. MacKenzie in his A Concise Pahlavi Dictionary (cf. his exposition of the ambiguities and difficulties involved in handling the Pahlavi script, Introduction, pp. x—xv) and now generally accepted by specialists; namely, a strict distinction between transliteration of the consonantal script and transcription of the reconstructed Sdsanid pronunciation.
For example, the name of the first Sasanid ruler is transliterated ’rthstr but transcribed as ArdaxSir. His father’s name is transliterated p’pky but transcribed as Pabag. ArdaxSir’s son’s name is spelled etymologically as shpwhly (for §ah + puhr), and the contemporary Sasanid pronunciation was Sabuhr, as we know from the Manichaean Middle Per-sian spelling s’bwhr; although in the commentary to al-Tabari’s History I have used the later Middle Persian (and early New Persian) form for this last name of Shabir, as being closer to the Arabic version of the name. A further slight anomaly is that I have used the later form Ardashir rather than the strictly correct, earlier form Ardakhshir, as again reflecting early New Persian usage and as being also the familiar Arabic equivalent.
Such institutions as the John Rylands University Library, Manchester; the Widener Library, Harvard University; and the Oriental Institute Library, Oxford, have aided completion of the work. Several colleagues have been helpful in making books available to me, providing xeroxes of articles difficult of access to me, sending offprints of their own articles, and giving information and guidance on various obscure or contested points. Thus I am grateful to Mr. Mohsen Ashtiany (Columbia University); Dr. S. P. Brock (Oxford University); Dr. Paul M. Cobb (Wake Forest University, N.C.); the Rev. Professor J. A. Emerton (Cainbridge University); Dr. G. Greatrex (University of Wales, Cardiff); Dr. R. G. Hoyland (Oxford University); Dr. Ph. Huyse (Paris); Mr. M. C. A Macdonald (Oxford); Prof. D. N. MacKenzie (Anglesey); Dr. M. I. Mochiri (Paris); Professor Chr. Robin (CNRS, Aix-en-Provence}; Professor N. Sims-Williams (SOAS, London); Professor G. Rex Smith (Manchester University); and Professor Edward Ullendorff (Oxford). My colleague in Manchester, Professor W. C. Brice, has drawn the maps in an expert fashion.
In particular, Mr. F. C. de Blois (Royal Asiatic Society, London), with his special expertise in such fields as Iranian, South Arabian, and Syriac studies, has been kind enough to read through a draft of the commentary and to make a considerable number of corrections and valuable suggestions for improvement; some of these are explicitly acknowledged in the commentary, but there are many other, unacknowledged places where he has saved me from error or has enriched the documentation. Hence I am deeply grateful to him. But at the end, the usual confession must be made: responsibility for the final product remains my own.
C. Edmund Bosworth
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