ABSTRACT
In 1889 Ignazio Guidi edited an East Syrian chronicle that covers the late Sasanian and very early Islamic period. As far as the conquest is concerned, Islamicists from Wellhausen to Caetani to Donner have relied instead on the Arabic sources, and these being generally so intractable, and Islamicists generally so conservative, scholarship has hardly moved at all. Early, naive, and historiographically independent of Islamic sources, it allows us to identify and occasionally disentangle strands of tradition that are manifestly late and polemically conditioned from other, older, strands that preserve authentically early views of conquest history. The sources familiar to ai-Tabari and al-Baladhuri held that the definitive conquest of Jundaysabur followed that of Tustar and al-Sus; this is the sequence that Donner describes. If the historiography of the conquest of Khuzistan has generally moved little from Wellhausen’s day, an exception is the siege of Tustar.
