Medieval Baghdad was home to academies for the study of talmudic tradition called yeshivot/metivata. This fact is relevant because the historiography that has dominated modern scholarship on the subject originated in Baghdad in the ninth through the eleventh centuries. That historiography asserted that the yeshivot of Sasanian Babylonia were similar to the talmudic academies of Islamic Iraq. The only contemporary evidence available on Jewish education in Sasanian Babylonia appears in talmudic literature. Two medieval documents contain information on the history of the Babylonian academies in Sasanian times. One is Seder Tannaim VeAmoraim. The other work is an account of the yeshivot of Baghdad by Nathan son of Isaac the Babylonian. The attempt to base the history of the academies on contemporary evidence and thereby to minimize the possibility of anachronism has resulted in an account quite different from the one presented in traditional historiography.