Includes bibliographical references (pages 274-297) and index.

Introduction -- Collaborators and dissidents: writing the hagiographies of the fifth-century persecutions -- The martyrs and the catholicos: the Acts of the Symeon and their reinvention -- The patriarchal histories: genesis of a centralizing narrative -- The church and the world -- Roman ecclesiastical history in the Sasanian world: reception, adaptation, and reaction -- Beyond Ctesiphon: monasteries and aristocrats in the Christian histories -- The last great war of antiquity: the reaction of Christian Iraq -- The Church of Baghdad: a new past for Christian Iraq -- Conclusions -- Episcopal and regnal lists -- Synods of the Church of the East -- History-writing in the Church of the East -- Contents of the Chronicle of Seert.

This book examines the cultural and political history of the Church of the East, the main Christian church in Iraq and Iran. Philip Wood uses medieval Arabic sources to examine history-writing by Christians in the fifth to ninth centuries AD.