This volume of al-T'abari's History has a particularly wide sweep and interest. It provides the most complete and detailed historical source for the Persian empire of the Sasanids, whose four centuries of rule were one of the most glorious periods in Persia's long history. It also gives information on the history of pre-Islamic Arabs of the Mesopotamian desert fringes and eastern Arabia (in al-Hira and the Ghassanid kingdom), and on the quite separate civilization of South Arabia, the Yemen, otherwise known mainly by inscriptions. It furnishes details of the centuries'-long warfare of the two...

Volume I of the thirty-eight volume translation of Tabari's great History begins with the creation of the world and ends with the time of Noah and the Flood. It not only brings a vast amount of speculation about the early history of mankind into sharp Muslim focus, but it also synchronizes ancient Iranian ideas about the prehistory of mankind with those inspired by the Qur'an and the Bible. The volume is thus an excellent guide to the cosmological views of many of Tabari's contemporaries. The translator, Franz Rosenthal, one of the world's foremost scholars of Arabic, has also written an...