Event Home

Note: We are now fully booked for this event and are only accepting names for the wait-list. Medieval Muslim historians wishing to write about ancient Iran drew on texts that were composed in the period 750–850 bearing the title "The History of the Kings of the Persians." These works served a growing audience of well­-to­do Muslim bureaucrats and scholars of Persian ancestry who were interested in their heritage and wished to make it part of the historical outlook of the new civilization that was emerging in the Middle East, namely Islamic civilization. This talk (and the book that it is based on) explores the question of how knowledge about ancient Iran was transmitted to Muslim historians, in what forms it circulated and how it was shaped and refashioned for the new Perso­-Muslim elite that served the early Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, a city that was built only a short distance away from the old Persian and Hellenistic capital of Seleucia­-Ctesiphon.