The two and a half centuries covered by our survey witnessed many changes. The Sāmānids, original sponsors of the Persian cultural and literary revival, fell. Their Ghaznavid successors, defeated by the Saljūqs after some forty years of rule in Khurasan, retreated to their eastern territories, where they survived for a little over a century more. The Saljūqs, who also ended Būyid hegemony in the west, were divided and destabilised for most of their last century of rule. The earliest histories in our survey were written at a time of political and cultural expansion; the authors of the latest saw their own time as one of political upheaval and intellectual decline. These changing circumstances could not but affect the course of historical writing. For all that, throughout these two and a half centuries writers of history shared a number of fundamental concerns, which they expressed in terms relating to the basic themes of historical writing.

First and foremost, and central to both Arabic and Persian histories, is the term dawla, whose literal meaning of 'alternation', 'revolution' (of time) and 'turn', is extended to mean '(term of) fortune', 'success', '(period of) rule' (of an individual ruler and/or a larger group) and 'dynasty'. In this last sense it takes on increasing significance in later histories, as writers sought reasons for the rise, and more especially the fall, of the dawla with which they were associated. For early historians like 'Utbī, Gardīzī and Bayhaqī the replacement of the Sāmānids by the far greater dawla of the Ghaznavids, headed by rulers of the stature of Sabuktigīn and Maḥmūd, represented progress, particularly as it resulted in the restoration of order; and though Gardīzī and Bayhaqī were writing in troubled times, this note of optimism may still be seen. For Saljūq historians the situation is more problematical: the dawlat is most often that of the current sultan; the concept of a collective Saljūq dawlat appears relatively late, as a largely retrospective construct.