Commentators: Manan Ahmed (Columbia U) and Matt Mosca (U Washington).

The earliest extant Arabic histories describing the rise of Islam and the Caliphate date to the ninth century, some two centuries after the events they purport to describe. This has prompted a strong tendency towards skepticism among historians of early Islam who suggest that perhaps these histories reveal more about ʿAbbasid-era realities than about conquest- or Umayyad-era events. Accordingly, a number of scholars have turned to non-Arabic sources to corroborate or challenge the data culled from Arabic histories.

This paper questions the use of non-Arabic sources as independent checks on the Arabic. In particular, it examines the accounts of the seventh-century Arab conquest of Armenia and specifically Dabīl/Duin, the Sasanian and caliphal capital of Armenia, to forward suggestions about how we might trace oral transmission of historical reports in multilingual communities of the medieval Near East.