The sources for al-Ṭabarī's History covering the years from the Prophet’s death to the fall of the Umayyad dynasty (661–750 CE) were short monographs, each treating a major event or the circumstances attending the death of an important person. Al-Ṭabarī supplemented this material with historical reports embodied in works on genealogy, poetry, and tribal affairs. Further, details of the early ʿAbbāsid period were available to him in a few histories of the caliphs that unfortunately have come down only in the fragments preserved by al-Ṭabarī. Almost all of these accounts reflected an Iraqi perspective of the community; coupled with this is al-Ṭabarī’s scant attention to affairs in Egypt, North Africa, and Muslim Spain, so that his History does not have the secular “universal” outlook sometimes attributed to it. From the beginning of the Muslim era (dated from 622, the date of the hijrah—the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina), the History is arranged as a set of annals according to the years after the hijrah. It terminates in the year 915.