Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tell-Mahre

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Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tell-Mahre completed in 774 AD is a chronicle written uunder 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

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. ^[1]

[edit] References

1. ^ Bat Ye'or ,Decline of Eastern Christianity: From Jihad to Dhimmitude Seventh-Twentieth Century. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press