The articles in this volume are concerned with the literary responses of the Syriac communities in the Middle East to the drastic political changes of the 7th and 8th centuries, in particular the Persian occupation of the eastern provinces of Byzantium under Khusrau II, and the Islamic conquests and Umayyad rule. Several studies discuss the influential Syriac works concerning Alexander the Great written shortly after AD 628, which present the Byzantine emperor Heraclius as a new Alexander; attention is given to their polemical and propagandistic functions, and to their influence on early apocalyptic texts which respond to the Arab conquests and 'Abd al-Malik's religious propaganda at the end of the 7th century. Other studies deal with the beginnings of Syriac apologetic literature in response to early Islam, discussing texts of the first decades of the 8th century. The remaining articles focus on the religious controversies in the East Syrian community in connection with the increasing political influence of the Syrian Orthodox in Persia by the end of the 6th and the beginning of the seventh century, and the after-effects of Syriac anti-Islamic apologetics in a medieval encyclopedic text.
