The chronicle in question is anonymous, and Nau has shown that the note of a copyist, which was thought to assign it to the monk Joshua of Zuqnin near Amida (Diyarbakir), more probably refers to the compiler of the whole work in which it was incorporated.
In any case, the author was an eyewitness of many of the events which he describes, and must have been living at Edessa during the years when it suffered so severely during the Roman–Persian Wars.
He has a more complex approach to historical causation than many of his contemporaries, which takes into account human motivations, economic interests, tribal versus imperial politics, as well as the force of divine providence.
[3] His praise of Flavian II, the Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch, in warmer terms than those in which he talk about his great Monophysite contemporaries, Jacob of Serugh and Philoxenus of Mabbog, has led some to think that he was an orthodox Catholic.
After an elaborate dedication to a friend the priest and abbot Sergius, a brief recapitulation of events from the death of Julian in 363 and a fuller account of the reigns of the Persian kings Peroz I (457-484) and Balash (484-488), the writer enters upon his main theme: the history of the disturbed relations between the Persian and Roman Empires from the beginning of the reign of Kavadh I (489–531), which culminated in the great war of 502–6.