These narrative sources can be supplemented by a number of other works. George of Pisidia wrote several panegyrical poems in praise of Heraclius, the patriarch Sergius, and Bonus the Patrician. There are some saints’ lives, mostly in Greek, including the Life of Theodore of Sykeon, documenting central Anatolia in the late sixth and early seventh century, Leontius’ Life of John the Almsgiver, covering Alexandria in the early seventh century, and the Life of Anastasius the Persian: The Indoctrination of Jacob the Recently Baptised covers events around the occupation of Jerusalem; see Dagron, G., and Déroche, V., “Juifs et chrétiens dans l'Orient du VIIe siècle,” Travaux et Mémoires 11 (1991), 17–248 for the text and French translation. Other ecclesiastical material and a good introduction are contained in Allen, P., ed., Sophronius of Jerusalem and Seventh-Century Heresy: The Synodical Letter and Other Documents (Oxford, 2009). There are useful collections of papal letters, in particular the voluminous correspondence of Gregory the Great (590–604). Papyri include an archive from Nessana, Kraemer, C. J., ed., Excavations at Nessana 3: Non-Literary Papyri (Princeton, 1960), but few inscriptions and laws, just a few novels of Heraclius. And finally, there is a large body of Arabic material, but historians are often uncertain as to the best way to approach this. Recent introductions include Donner, F., Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA, 2010) and Hoyland, R., Seeing Islam as Others Saw It (Princeton, 1997).Google Scholar

For the reign of Heraclius, the best modern introduction is Kaegi, W. E., Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium (Cambridge, 2003) or the papers in Reinink, G. J. and Stolte, B. H., eds., The Reign of Heraclius (610–641): Crisis and Confrontation (Leuven, 2002). Howard-Johnston, J. D., East Rome, Sasanian Persia and the End of Antiquity (Aldershot, 2006) includes the critical article “Heraclius’ Persian Campaigns and the Revival of the Eastern Roman Empire,” War in History 6 (1999), 1–44, which is used as the basis of the chronology followed here. See also Howard-Johnston, J., Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford, 2010). A wider perspective comes from Haldon, J. F., Byzantium in the Seventh Century (Cambridge, 1990). Greatrex, G. and Lieu, S. N. C., The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars AD 363–628 (London, 2002) provide easy access to the sources in translation. For the Arab wars of the seventh century, two monographs provide very different perspectives, Donner, F., The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton, 1981) and Kaegi, W. E., Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests (Cambridge, 1995). For events in Italy from the Roman perspective, a good introduction is Brown, T. S., Gentlemen and Officers (Edinburgh, 1984), but see also Moorhead, J., Gregory the Great (London, 2005). For the impact of the successive occupations of Egypt, Schiller, A. A., “The Budge Papyrus of Columbia University,” Journal of the Egyptian Research Centre in Egypt 7 (1970), 29–118.Google Scholar