In his tenth-century History of the Arcruni House, T'ovma Arcruni complains about the ʿAbbāsid caliph Mutawakkil. The caliph “began to lift his horns in impiety to roar and butt at the four corners of the earth … for confusion and the spreading of blood were dear to him.” He “pour[ed] out the bitterness of his mortal poison” and attacked Armenia “in great folly” and “like a ferocious wild beast.” The charges leveled against the caliph here are not necessarily noteworthy in and of themselves, but for the fact that the passage is pulled nearly verbatim from Ełišē's fifth-century description of the Sasanian emperor Yazdegerd. J. Muyldermans argues that this case demonstrates the recycling of specific descriptors in medieval Armenian texts, an enduring “procédé hagiographique” by which Christians responded to persecution of the faith in a uniform way. The comparison between Ełišē's Yazdegerd and T'ovma's Mutawakkil reveals the entrenched nature of the corpus of historical works composed in Armenia. Understanding of Near Eastern texts in general is predicated on the ability of the modern historian to perceive the “multilayered narrative,” in this case, earlier histories and personalities that the medieval reader would presumably recognize.

The two passages, so similar despite the lapse of five centuries between the authors, also illustrate the way in which perceptions of power varied little in the transition from the Sasanian Empire to the Caliphate, a trend we see in descriptions of local governors and universal monarchs alike. Although substantial changes were introduced over several centuries, as neither the Sasanian nor caliphal administration remained static with set, invariable policies, a few similarities demonstrate a sustained administrative continuity and, much more commonly, the perception of continuity between the two periods. We see this not only in the brief passage discussed in Muyldermans's article, but also in T'ovma's general tendency to turn to Ełišē's depiction of the Sasanian period to color his description of caliphal rule. In his introduction to the History of the Arcruni House, R. Thomson notes the potential political message for T'ovma's audience: