The First Arabic Annals: Fragments of Umayyad History by Edward Zychowicz-Coghill

This svelte tome offers a highly technical study of early Arabic historiography, based on the reconstruction of an early Islamic annalistic history that is now lost to us but which survives in quotations from later works. Readers of this journal should understand from the start that this reconstruction is based on modern printed editions, not from work with manuscripts. Nevertheless, it has much to offer readers interested in the history of the book even beyond its natural audience of early Islamic historians.

Edward Zychowicz-Coghill (hereafter EZC) sets himself the goal of pushing back the date for the inception of annalistic-style historical writing among Muslims, and he is thoroughly successful in doing so. The received wisdom has usually been that the earliest surviving histories in this form date back to the ninth century; EZC, by contrast, shows that it is possible to retrieve a largely intact example of the genre dating to the middle eighth century—the period of Marwanid caliphal rule over much of the Middle East, North Africa, and al-Andalus. The example in question is the Taʾrikh of al-Layth ibn Saʿd (d. 791), known through its recension by his student Ibn Bukayr (d. 846), a text and recension that is no longer extant, but whose existence is mentioned by a number of medieval sources. More importantly, it is quoted directly and extensively by three later independent works by other authors from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, and less extensively by a scattering of others.

EZC’s task then is one of textual archaeology: not simply collecting quotations but rather identifying patterns in citation and in the cited material from al-Layth that was transmitted together in a coherent package “which we might think of as a proto-book” (6). The total result of this enterprise is a group of some 301 separate annalistic notices from al-Layth’s chronicle via Ibn Bukayr—no small assemblage—spanning the period from the death of the Prophet Muhammad to the end of the Umayyad period, about half the original text, by a conservative estimate (44). EZC conveniently edits and translates the surviving text in the book’s final section (63–116). In short, al-Layth’s text is a year-by-year record of the caliphate in its earliest phases by an author who lived through its final years, and who can be counted as a “well-placed if not impartial observer” (56).

The bulk of the book sets out in detail how such a work came to be quoted by later authors, and why EZC feels confident that we can “infer a stable, original text ” (12) from these quotations. He does so by demonstrating that five separate authors emerge as independent witnesses to al-Layth’s text, sharing many of the same quotations from al-Layth, but also quoting bits unique to themselves (chapter 3) and by showing it to be unlikely that Ibn Bukayr simply wrote the text and ascribed it to his teacher (chapter 4).

What, then, was al-Layth’s Umayyad chronicle of caliphal history about? Briefly, it was a collection of rather brief and rather dry accounts of high politics: changes of high office, military campaigns, caliphal successions, deaths of elites, pilgrimages, and the like. The text seems to show a bias toward Egyptian events, but it is not entirely clear to me if this is Layth’s bias or the bias of the quoted samples, coming as many do from later Egyptian-centered works—who knows what geographies were never deemed worth quoting. But EZC is right that—assuming a late Umayyad context for the work—it surely “supports the notion of the Umayyad polity as a self-conscious jihad-state” (34). Moreover—and this is perhaps EZC’s more ambitious conclusion—it suggests something about the work’s formal and intellectual origins—that is, that al-Layth’s Marwanid-era chronicle (and perhaps early Arabic historical writing tout court) emerges in EZC’s careful reconstruction as a bridge between the late antique annalistic tradition of Syriac historiography and the full-blown Arabic universal chronicles of the Abbasid age (44 ff., 60).

The author’s conclusions are especially of interest to users of Arabic manuscripts and have implications for other Near Eastern manuscript traditions such as Syriac, Greek, or Armenian annals. It is of course common in all of these manuscript traditions for later sources to preserve quotations from now-lost earlier works, but identifying them without the aid of massive textual databases relies upon the clear attributions or chains of authority that, sadly, do not always make it into modern “editions” of these texts. EZC’s work provides us with a model for identifying such quotations and for assessing their independence from one another in both printed sources and manuscripts. Thanks to the author’s judicious analysis in the sources, I expect his conclusions will stand the test of time.

Still, given the long history of our field, such conclusions are not without precedents, and it was striking to not find any of the work of Fred Donner cited directly in EZC’s study, despite the fact that Donner has argued in Narratives of Islamic Origins (and elsewhere) for a Marwanid origin-point and caliphal-historical context for the birth of Arabic historiography and has even attempted to (sort of) reconstruct early Syrian historical works along the lines of the “riwaya-cum-matn” method coined by EZC. Additionally, and be that as it may, if the author is to be commended for his careful analysis and reconstruction of this obscure early historical text, the editors of the book series that this appears in might well be asked about their decisions. For example, while it is no doubt handy to have this study “between boards” as a book, it seems difficult to justify such a format when the work in question weighs in at a mere 116 pages, excluding bibliography and index and front matter. Of those 116 pages, the study itself spans only sixty—making the whole book something that could have easily graced the pages of its parent journal Der Islam in a few installments. But the content and erudition of EZC’s study rise above any form it may have been given.