Book of kings

The Xwadaynāmāg (Book of Kings/History of the Lords) is a Middle Persian history of Iranian kings. The accounts are thought to have developed and circulated orally (Boyce 1957, Shahbazi 2012) before they were compiled and augmented under the auspices of several Sasanian kings, among whom Khosro I (r. 531-579) and his grandson, Khosro II (r. 590-628), are particularly noteworthy. The Xwadaynāmāg is no longer extant. Agathias (536-582) notes that he drew his materials regarding the Persians from a translation of the Royal annals (see Sergius the Translator). Based on this, it has been assumed that the Royal annals was a list containing names and dates of kings and events, the basis from which the Xwadaynāmāg was composed, or the Xwadaynāmāg itself. Given Khosro I’s scientific, historical, and literary interests and the Georgian (Rapp 2014), Armenian, and Islamic reception of the History of Iranian kings, the Xwadaynāmāg likely included detailed treatments of the lives and deeds of the Sasanian kings as well as the mytho-historical kings, possibly beginning with the Zoroastrian primogeniture, Kayūmars̱ (Middle Persian Gayōmart), or his descendant, Hūshang (Middle Persian Hoošang). The Xwadaynāmāg was translated sometime in the eighth century into Arabic by the prolific Umayyad and Abbasid secretary, Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (724-759), a Zoroastrian (suspected Manichean) convert to Islam. Though Ibn Muqaffa‘’s works were among the earliest and most important sources for information on pre-Islamic Iran, neither the translation nor his other texts dealing with Iranian kings are extant. With few exceptions, such as Ibn Qutaybah’s Uyūn al-Akhbār, most histories simply mention Ibn Muqaffa‘ as their source for certain information. It is thus difficult to ascertain what has been paraphrased and/or taken from which of his works and therefore difficult to meaningfully reconstruct any part of the translation. Among the Islamic histories that substantially treat the history of Iranian kings, the following may be mentioned: Dīnavarī’s al-Akhbār al-ṭiwāl, Ṭabarī’s Ta’rīkh al-rusul wa al-mulūk, Bal‘amī’s Tārīkhnāmeh, Ferdowsī’s Shāhnāmeh, Mas‘ūdī’s Murūj al-dhahab wa ma‘ādin al-jawhar and Tanbīh wa al-Ishrāf, Tha‘ālibī’s Ghurar akhbār mulūk al-Furs wa siyārihim. These texts, with some degree of variation, understand the history of Iranian kings as a relatively undisrupted chain of rule beginning with Kayūmars̱ to the conquest of Alexander the Great, who is made to be related to the Achaemenids, to the last king of the Sasanian empire, Yazdegerd III (r. 632-651). Theodore Nöldeke (1920), Ehsan Yarshater (1983), and, more recently, Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila (2018) are among those who have addressed the Xwadaynāmāg and its relationship to this later reception.