"The Chronicle of Seert is an Arabic history written in the late tenth or eleventh century that draws on earlier Syriac sources from the Church of the East dating back to the sixth and seventh centuries. The richest repository of these earlier materials, the Chronicle is a monument to a literature that is now mostly destroyed and an invaluable source for those studying Late Antique history, Eastern Christianity, and the medieval Christians who lived under Sasanian and Muslim rule. This volume is the first English translation of the portion of the Chronicle covering the period from 580 to 660, narrating the great war fought between the Roman Empire and Sasanid Persia as well as the arrival of Muhammad and the Muslim armies that upended the Late Antique world. But the Chronicle also includes extensive accounts of the theological controversies that beset the Church of the East as well as the monasteries and holy men that dotted the landscape, and gives an outside perspective on events within the Roman Empire. The Chronicle thus preserves a remnant of a lost, yet influential, body of historical writing and allows us to see how a genre that was created in a Christian Roman Empire was adapted for the world further east"-- Provided by publisher.