The problems which the Arabs came up against when they set about organizing a conquest society were precisely the opposite of those which normally afflicted the barbarians in China. In contrast to the latter, the Arabs found it a relatively easy matter to take over the native administration. For one thing, it was in the nature of their conquest that they possessed an imperviousness to native values which no Turkish or Mongol conqueror ever enjoyed. And for another, it was their good fortune that whereas the Chinese bureaucracy was the backbone of Chinese civilization, those of the Byzantines and Sāsānids were mere instruments of government; in particular, the provincial bureaucracy of Byzantine Syria was strikingly devoid of social and cultural distinctiveness. The translation of the Greek administrative records thus dragged no classics in its trail, and there are no parallels in the Arab Middle East to the desperate dodges whereby the barbarians in China tried to have Confucian bureaucracy without Confucian civilization. But in return the Arabs found it extremely hard to organize themselves. Their religious aegis could provide them with a rationale for a continuing political authority when the days of the messiah were over, just as the tribal armies furnished the material for a continuing Arab state when the days of the conquests were over; but for the shape of the conquest society neither the Judaic nor the Arab tradition had much to offer. The barbarians of Central Asia fought their civil wars before the conquests and arrived with state structures; typically, their organization thus endured.