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This study considers the production of history-writing in the Nasrid kingdom of al-Hira at the end of the sixth century. It argues that Hiran history-writing encompassed king-lists, stories of tribal migration, and episcopal histories for the see of Hira, and that the majority of these were composed in the era of the last Nasrid king, al-Nu'man III. It goes on to argue that the Hiran material embedded in later sources such as al-Tabari reflects the politics of the Hiran court in the period ca. 590-610, the last generation of Hiran independence.
The city of al-Hïra in southwestern Iraq was famous in the Islamic period as a center for the production of Arab poetry and as the capital of Arab kings. 1 It can probably be identified with Hirta d-Nu'man of the Syriac sources, the capital of the "Persian Arabs" whose armed forces were a lynchpin of the western policy of the Sasanian shahs. 2
In spite of its impressive military performance, however, we should remember that the success of the kings of al-Hïra was brittle. Its power was based on a divide-and-rule policy among the tribes of inner Arabia whom it threatened, cajoled, and rewarded, just as the kings themselves demanded rewards from their Persian masters. The kings of al-Hïra received landed estates and military support from the shahs, and in turn they appointed tribesmen as kings, military leaders, and tax collectors elsewhere in Arabia. 3 M. J. Kister suggested that some of these tribes actually pastured their flocks in the city's vicinity, while others represented an "outer circle" of allies who participated in mutually beneficial trade treaties. 4 Yet much of this system was the result of changeable and temporary treaty-building. Later Muslim authors would revel in the seizure of Persian equipment given to the king's allies or in the expansion of Mecca's trading interest, in the wake of al-Hira's decline, by men resentful of its haughty kings. 5
Greg Fisher has emphasized that the kings of the Persian Arabs, like their rivals in Roman Syria, were examples of interstitial powers that inhabited the borderlands between Rome and Persia. 6 The kings of al-Hira themselves were, in M. B. Rowton's terminology, "dimorphic," able to play a role as Sasanian courtiers as well as...