Funded by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dr Philip Wood is working on the effects of Christianisation upon regional identities and the political thought in Sassanian Iraq. He is doing this using Syriac saints' lives and local histories, that belonged to a single Aramaic-writing, Christian world that straddled both the Roman and Sassanian Empires. The project focuses upon how Iraqi Christians were increasingly separated from Christians in the Roman world, first by doctrinal quarrels, and secondly by the appropriation of the trappings of Christian universal rule, the traditional preserve of Roman emperors, by Persian shahs.

The critical text that this work will use to examine this process is the Chronicle of Seert. This Arabic chronicle contains embedded within it a series of histories, originally written in Syriac or Greek, chiefly drawn from the fifth-to-seventh century Church of the East. A repository of short summaries of much longer texts composed in Iraq or Syria, the chronicle can be used to sample the transmission of literature from the Roman Empire into the Sassanian world, since many of these texts were written in alternative religious traditions, and the oscillating positions of Christian magnates and churchmen, the Roman emperors and the shahs.