These eleven articles, subdivided in three parts, teach us much because their approach is offbeat: they transcend the literary sources about the Umayyads. The Introduction situates the Umayyads as Islam's first dynasty (ruling from 661 to 750 ad) while summarizing and contextualizing the book's contributions. The editors stress that recent textual evidence reveals how foundational the Umayyads were, a hitherto underrated consideration. The study of material products of the Umayyad past – the fields of archaeology, art, architecture, and numismatics – coupled with texts, yields new insights, hence the two foci of this collection: (1) Umayyad material culture; and (2) Umayyad historiography. The result is an exciting read, the more so if you, like me, are a text-based historian.

Part I, “Caliphal authority in text and image”, deals with Umayyad self-representation vis-à-vis their own subjects or competing empires. In “‘God's Caliph’ revisited: Umayyad political thought in its late antique context”, Andrew Marsham nuances the hypothesis of God's Caliph (1986) by Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds. Rethinking numismatic evidence, Marsham suggests that the title khalīfat Allāh may have been used alongside other titles like amīr al-muʾminīn or khalīfat rasūl Allāh, and only during the second half of Umayyad rule did it acquire an overarching imperial formula with full spiritual and secular authority. Alain George discusses, in “Paradise or empire? On a paradox of Umayyad art”, the building of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Great Mosque of Damascus. The mosaics of both structures suggest the theme of associating Umayyad rule with Paradise to enhance their authority, which is also the theme of “A Qurʾanic script from Umayyad times: around the Codex of Fustat”, by François Déroche, who submits that the Umayyads introduced an orthographic reform (adding diacritics and enumerating its components). These “new” Qurans were distributed throughout the empire to challenge contemporary Christian Bibles and reinforce Umayyad authority.

Part II deals with the “desert castles”, once thought to have been retreats for Umayyads longing to withdraw from city life, but in recent times evidence has emerged to suggest that they may have been busy, irrigated estates that also served as trade centres. Robert Hillenbrand's contribution, “Hishām's balancing act: the case of Qaṣr al-Ḥayr al-Gharbī”, opens this part and points to how Byzantine imagery was realized by using Persian stucco. Hillenbrand maintains that earlier buildings like the Dome of the Rock and the Great Mosque of Damascus were inspired by classical and Byzantine traditions, while later Umayyad architecture leaned more on an equilibrium between Byzantine and Persian architectural cultures. Fiscal texts deciphered by Robert Hoyland in his “Khanāṣira and Andarīn (Northern Syria) in the Umayyad period and a new Arabic tax document” offer more evidence of a sustained presence of the Umayyads in northern Syria. In “Two possible caliphal representations from Qaṣr al-Ḥayr al-Sharqī and their implication for the history of the site”, Denis Genequand analyses two panels from the same castle that Hillenbrand wrote about; he proposes that they represent a caliph. This hypothesis adds to the evidence that its function was more important than previously imagined. The book's largest article closes Part II and reads like a detective story: “Umayyad palace iconography: on the practical aspects of artistic creation”, in which Nadia Ali and Mattia Guidetti refuse to re-walk familiar vistas of iconography and use an assumed canon of received artistic practices to explain the structure and decoration of desert castles. Aware they may be accused of simplified reductionism, their main goal is to supplement textual evidence with what they uncovered in the regularities of transmission of forms. They succeed in piecing together bits of evidence to relate them to known practices by artisans of the time. The genesis of Umayyad architectural style partially goes back to what the workmen of the day had learned from their predecessors, be they Persian or Byzantine.

The title of Part III, “Historiography and historical memory”, speaks for itself, and Philip Wood, in his “Christians in Umayyad Iraq: decentralization and expansion (600–750)”, starts off by observing a shift in monastic hagiography in Iraq that occurred during the Umayyad period. All historical writing up to then was centred on the catholicos, but as this church leader was pressured to raise funds for the Umayyads (which he refused to do), the catholicosate lost this centrality. Retaining patronage from old and new elites, monasteries resisted Umayyad pressure, but when the Abbasids ascended, the “norm” of a centralized catholicosate was restored. In his article, “The future of the past: historical writing in early Islamic Syria and Umayyad memory”, Antoine Borrut argues that echoes of the Umayyad past were preserved in later narratives despite Abbasid animosity to their predecessors. The author proposes that non-Muslim texts complement Muslim sources by offering access to different historical “moments” of the Umayyad period. A future research vista could trace back elements of a now largely lost early Islamic historiography through these non-Muslim sources. Nicola Clarke's “Caliphs and conquerors: images of the Marwanids and their agents in narratives of the Conquest of Iberia” discusses the only remaining Umayyad entity after the Abbasids took over in 750 ad. The narrative about the conquest of al-Andalus, Clarke maintains, was geared to show that the Umayyads were needed to ensure that justice ruled the land and thus legitimize their rule. The final contribution, “The Umayyads in contemporary Arab TV drama: ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf in Musalsalāt”, by Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, examines contemporary historical television series, which illustrate that the writing of history is just as much about the past as it is about the present. With an eye to Jurji Zaydan, these series depict values that are relevant today. Concretely speaking, Egyptian series tend to be concerned with moralism while Syrian series highlight nationalism.