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world. Like the historians and compilers of his generation, he was engaged in recovering and recording these memories before they disappeared for ever. The story itself stresses some familiar themes. The Byzantines are wealthy and complacent, unused to the rigours of warfare. Furthermore the text shows sharp divisions of class and wealth between the son of the patrician and the narrator. The Arab, by contrast, lives a life of privation and austerity in his tent. Unlike the upper-class Byzantine he is an excellent horseman, having a close and affectionate relationship with his mount and being able to leap on to it and ride bareback. He is also, of course, a skilled and hardened spearsman. After the death of the patrician, he shows his religious zeal by reciting the Koran and his lack of concern for material goods by not stopping to strip the corpse of his victim. The governor’s concluding question about the appearance of the man allows the narrator to describe a small, wiry, ill-favoured individual. In a way, this is a surprisingly unflattering portrait, but it too makes a point; the man is described as typically Yemeni. Most of the Arabs who conquered Egypt were of Yemeni or south Arabian origin. The governor, in contrast, came from the tribe of Quraysh, the tribe of the Prophet himself, a much more aristocratic lineage. However, the author who is said to have preserved this anecdote was himself a Yemeni, from the ancient tribe of Khawlān. Khawlān were not Bedouin in the traditional sense but inhabited an area of villages in the mountainous heart of Yemen. Their descendants, still called Khawlān, live in the same area today. Khawlānis played an important part in the conquest of Egypt and were prominent among the old established Arab families of Fustāt (Old Cairo) in the two centuries that followed. The author clearly developed the anecdote as a way of emphasizing the important role of his kinsmen, and of Yemenis in general, in the conquest of the country they now lived in.
     
    The anecdote is also making a point about the ways in which the Muslims thought of themselves as different from, and more virtuous than, the Christians who surrounded them and who were certainly at this stage much more numerous. It makes a political point too about the role of Yemenis in the conquests and the way in which the governor should respect them for their achievements at this time. The final redactor, Ibn Abd al-Hakam, in whose work we find the story, was writing at a time in the mid ninth century when these old Yemeni families were losing their influence and special status as Turkish troops employed by the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad came to take over military power in Egypt. By pointing out the heroism of this early generation, he is making a point about the rights and status of his own class in his own day. The story has clearly been refashioned along the way, but it preserves a social memory of the hardiness, piety and Yemeni identity of the conquerors. This memory was preserved because it was valuable to those who kept it alive, but it also reflects the reality of the environment, if not the detail, of the conquests themselves.
     
    The Arabic historiography also varies greatly in quality and approach. In general, the accounts of the first phases of the conquests, from the 630s to the 650s, are generally replete with mythical and tropical elements, imagined speeches and dialogue and lists of names of participants. They are correspondingly short of details about topography and terrain, equipment and tactics. The accounts of the conquests of Egypt and North Africa owe something to a local historiographical tradition, but in both cases this tradition is disappointingly thin. The conquests of the early eighth century are very differently reported. The accounts of the expeditions in Transoxania, collected and edited by the writer Madā’inī and published in Tabarī’s History , are by far the most vivid and detailed we have of any of