the most part to abridging and re-editing the narratives in _T_abarī, with a tendency to follow the more exaggerated accounts. The geographer Ibn Khūrdādhbih gives a list of titles and names, which is, however, too confused to supply any reliable evidence. Reference has already been made to certain aspects of the conquests in which the Arab historians are misleading. Their information on the Turks and the principalities of Sogdiana can now, fortunately, be supplemented and parts of their narratives controlled from Chinese sources, chiefly through Chavannes’ valuable “Documents sur les Tou-Kiue (Turcs) Occidentaux.” But there are two other facts which also demand attention: one, that the Arabic authorities, as we possess them, and even with all allowance made for their limitations, are by no means exhaustive; _i.e._, reliance on omissions in the narratives is an unsafe principle of criticism: the other, that by critical study it is possible to distinguish at certain points several lines of tendentious tradition or legend, directed to the interests of national feeling or of some particular tribe or faction, and centred in some cases round specific persons. These may most conveniently be summarised as follows: 1. A Qaysite tradition, centred on the family of Ibn Khāzim: 2. An Azd-Rabīʿa tradition, centred on Muhallab and hostile to _H_ajjāj. This became the most popular tradition among the Arabs, and is followed by Balādhurī, but opposed by Yaʿqūbī: 3. A Bāhilite tradition, centred on the tribal hero, Qutayba b. Muslim. In general it found little favour but is occasionally quoted somewhat sarcastically by _T_abarī. 4. A local Bukhārā tradition, followed by Yaʿqūbī, Balādhurī and Narshakhī. It presents the early conquests under the form of an historical romance, centred on the Queen Khātūn in the part of a national Boadicea. Other local traditions, which are frequently utilised by _T_abarī, seem to be much more free from serious exaggeration: 5. The few notices in Dīnawarī follow an entirely divergent and extremely garbled tradition from unknown sources, which may for the most part be neglected: 6. The quotations made by Balādhurī (_e.g._ 422. 10) from Abū ʿUbayda show the influence of a rewriting of episodes with an anti-Arab bias, directed to the interests of the Shuʿūbīya movement, in which Abū ʿUbayda was a prominent figure[18]. 7. In the later period, there appears also the fragments of a tradition of which Nasr b. Sayyār is the hero.