Al-Tabari delivers a very long-winded Arabian-slant account of Sasanian Persia, painting these pre-Islamic rulers as far more brutal that what Ferdowsi describes in his patriotic Persian epic, The Shanameh. Al-Tabari's accounts of Arabia and Yemen in the centuries before Muhammad are studded with omens and miraculous signs of the coming Prophet that rival anything presented in the Bible, or in the tales of Constantine and St. Patrick.