Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tell-Mahre

Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tell-Mahre completed in 774 AD is a chronicle written under the name of a Monophysite monk Dionysius of Tell-Mahre, a native of Tell-Mahre, a village in Mesopotamia. The chronicle provides a detailed account of life of non-Muslim Dhimmis in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. The work is preserved in a single handwritten copy from the monastery of Zuqnin near Amida (now Diyarbekir in Turkey), which is now in the Vatican (shelfmark Vatican Syriac 162).
Middle East historian Bat Ye'or describes the content of the work:
:At that time, the dhimmis formed the majority of the rural population: small landowners, artisans, or share-croppers farming the fiefs allotted to Arabs; a numerous Jewish peasantry lived alongside Christian villagers: Copts, Syrians, and Nestorians. This chronicle reveals the mechanisms which destroyed the social structure of a flourishing dhimmi peasantry in the whole Islamized Orient. The continuous process of the confiscation of lands by the infiltration of Bedouin tribes with their flocks or by Arabs who settled at the time of the first wave of Islamization was aggravated by the government's damaging fiscal oppression. Bat Ye'or ,Decline of Eastern Christianity: From Jihad to Dhimmitude Seventh-Twentieth Century. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press 
== References ==
* Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre: Chronicle, Part III. Tr. by Witold Witakowski. Liverpool, 1997 (Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians).
* Witold Witakowski, Syriac Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre: A Study in the History of Historiography. Uppsala, 1987 (Studia Semitica Upsaliensia).
* Amir Harrak, "The Chronicle of Zuqnin, Parts III and IV : A.D. 488-775" Toronto, 1999.
 
Category:Eastern Christianity