The foregoing considerations would now allow us again to take a fresh look at questions of transmission and related issues that have already been brought up. Much of the historical and pseudo-historical material assembled in the narrative sources – and under consideration, here as above, is the whole repertoire, not restricted to material of a religious resonance generally favoured in scholarship - arose ultimately from various forms of accumulation, tantamount in some way to “collective composition,” an accumulation of materials later registered en masse into vast works such as the History of al-Ṭabarī. Such are by no means unusual or bizarre in the history of texts, where a textual koiné such as the Homeric texts at various stages of canonisation, or uncorrected versions of Jerome's Vulgate are considered authoritative, leaving room for correction as restoration (diorthōsis), the process officiated by reading out for the purposes of checking and cross-checking (paranagignōskein). This is of course quite different to the notion of an accomplished text as it came to be understood after the Reformation, and one needs to guard against anachronistic expectations.

It will be clear from the foregoing that, for the writing of history in the manner being developed in the book to which this essay is a companion, it is not of special consequence to occupy oneself obsessively with whether al-Wāqidī, for instance, attributed to himself the work of others, not least Ibn Isḥāq. The latter had some one hundred transmitters and redactors, according to the latest tally, and his work, based on earlier material, is one locus where a number of traditions transmitted were gathered, and made their way to al-Wāqidī, directly, through various redactions, or together with early material that was no longer in wide circulation. Nor would it matter enormously to note that Ibn Isḥāq, like al-Zuhrī before him, repeatedly revised his work, and that what he might have left might only have been

a fluid textual corpus unless, of course, one were to rest content with stopping their research at this point, and to draw premature conclusions on the assumption that redaction and revision necessarily implied disfiguration.