A paper on the mingling of Arabic and Persian culture after the Arab conquest, concentrating on the Arabic adoption of Persian bookkeeping and the Persian adoption of the Arabic alphabet; with the etymology of "vizier". The vivid section on bookkeeping runs from the Persian who suggested Caliph Omar keep a payroll to the Arab who devised the Arabic financial terminology under the Omayyads and was cursed for ending the Persian scribal tradition — and died under torture. Arabic was the first alphabet for Persian, which in turn exposed it to the cultures of all Asia; Sprengling explains an obscure reference in the Fihrist by an variant of Arabic devised in Khurasan under the influence of Chinese and Syriac. The collector of scholarly invective will appreciate Sprengling's assessment of his contemporaries, as the historian will value the resulting thorough listing and candid evaluation of the sources: many are "romantic", Ibn Khaldun's social process is an "excrescence on history". Sprengling also excoriates modern debt spending, the House of Ali, the Ikhwan, Harvard, and the University of Chicago.