This arti­cle charts a new course for the study of the Mid­dle Per­sian doc­u­ments from ear­ly Islam­ic Iran, which takes their ear­ly Islam­ic con­text into account more ful­ly than has hith­er­to been done. This approach and its poten­tial fruits for the study of ear­ly Islam­ic his­to­ry are illus­trat­ed through an in-depth treat­ment of four sev­enth-cen­tu­ry doc­u­ments from the Qom region (pre­vi­ous­ly edit­ed and dis­cussed by Dieter Weber), each of which con­tains a fis­cal term that is appar­ent­ly oth­er­wise unat­test­ed in the doc­u­men­tary cor­pus. I show that the exist­ing inter­pre­ta­tions of these doc­u­ments anachro­nis­ti­cal­ly project the fis­cal ter­mi­nol­o­gy and struc­tures of a lat­er time into ear­ly Islam­ic Iran, and that these doc­u­ments, con­sid­ered in aggre­gate, sug­gest a cer­tain course of devel­op­ment for the Islam­ic fis­cal sys­tem in the post-Sasan­ian ter­ri­to­ries in the decades fol­low­ing the ini­tial con­quests: from broad and rel­a­tive­ly unspe­cif­ic impo­si­tions to more tar­get­ed exac­tions, based on increas­ing­ly detailed assess­ments.

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