How a 10th Century Learned Man Reads History: Al-Jahshiyarī (d. 942) and the Barmakids

A command of history (called akhbār) is generally recommended from the 3rd/9th c. to the aspiring secretary or bureaucrat. In fact, the theme appears very early in a letter quoted by al- Jahshiyārī, in his tenth-century history of viziers and secretaries, which he credits to ʿAbd al- Ḥamīd (d.750), the secretary of the last Umayyad caliph, Marwān II. There we read that secretaries should command the Arabic language and script, in addition to knowledge of “the ayyām of the Arabs and non-Arabs, and stories about them and their accounts” (aḥādīthahā wa siyarahā). Al-Jahshiyārī, as a secretary of the ʿAbbāsid administration, seems to have devoted himself to put into practice the ʿAbd al- Ḥamīd recommendation. I deal with the reconsideration of the Barmakids history as it is represented in the Kitāb al-wuzarā’ wa ‘l-kuttāb . Their history has been transmitted through a double register where the “ethical” elements have been overestimated in comparison with the “political” ones. We can reasonably sustain that this has not been casual. Insofar as the ethical themes like the unfathomable human destiny, the abuse by the powerful, the passions with their pernicious consequences became more and more significant in the representation of their history, it became a topos in the historical as well as in the literary production. The problem is that of the relation between facts and fiction, to what extent it would be possible, and/or useful, to distinguish between reality and representation.