Theophilus of Edessa was an astrologer in the court of the Muslim caliphs from the 750s to the 780s, a time when their capital, Baghdad, was a thriving cosmopolitan centre of culture and trade and one of the most populous and prosperous cities of the world. He was fluent in Greek, Syriac and Arabic, and he used this ability to bring together a number of historical sources in each of these languages and blend them into a single chronicle that charted events in the Near East from 590 to the 750s. His work is no longer extant, but it was cited extensively by a number of later historians and...

Theophilus of Edessa was an astrologer in the court of the Muslim caliphs from the 750s to the 780s, a time when their capital, Baghdad, was a thriving cosmopolitan centre of culture and trade and one of the most populous and prosperous cities of the world. He was fluent in Greek, Syriac and Arabic, and he used this ability to bring together a number of historical sources in each of these languages and blend them into a single chronicle that charted events in the Near East from 590 to the 750s. His work is no longer extant, but it was cited extensively by a number of later historians and...

The Seminar for Arabian Studies is the only international academic forum which meets annually for the presentation of research in the humanities on the Arabian Peninsula. It focuses particularly on the fields of archaeology, architecture, art, epigraphy, ethnography, history, language, linguistics, literature, and numismatics from the earliest times to the present day. A wide range of papers presented at the Seminar is published in the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies in time for the following Seminar, reflecting the dynamism and scope of this international, interdisciplinary...