copies of the work contained additional matter taken
from other Pahlavi books like the Romance of Bahram. Bahram the high
priest of the city of Shapur collected, according to Hamza, more than 20
manuscripts of the _Khoday-Nameh_ and from their divergence made out
another independent recension. Musa Ibn Isa Kesravi complains of the
variants in the copies of the work; the latter author who speaks of
defects in translation has in view only the Arabic redactions. The text,
however, of Tabari, at all events and more so a comparison of Tabari and
other Arabs with one another and with Firdausi exhibits that entire
sections of the History of Kings were already in the Pahlavi original in
essentially different shapes. Otherwise, it would not be possible, for
instance, that where Tabari offers two different versions, one should
harmonise with Eutychius and Ibn Kotaiba (derived from the translation
of Ibn Mukaffa) and the other should agree with the Arab Yakubi and
often with Firdausi, who goes back to the Pahlavi text not directly but
mediately through compositions in modern Persian. It is very important
for a knowledge of the history that thus we have at our command all
manner of dissonant reports about the Sasanide epoch. But we have to
observe all the same that the character and the tendency of the several
versions are almost all along consistent and further more that often we
have more recensions than one which differ but little and which have one
and the same ground-work or prototype. The question whether this
difference is older or younger than the _Khoday-Nameh_ has more literary
than historical significance.

[Sidenote: Translation of _Khoday-Nameh_ into Arabic. Its general
fidelity to the original.]

[Sidenote: The Arabic translation may be pieced together from various
sources.]

We should decide all this with much more certainty did we possess but
one direct rendering made from the Pahlavi into Arabic. Above all we
have to deplore the loss of Ibn Mukaffa's history of Persian Kings which
is always assigned the first place among translations of the Persian
Book of Kings by Hamza and other authorities. This distinguished man who
only late in life exchanged the faith of his forbears for that of Islam,
and who never professed the latter with over much zeal, translated a
series of Pahlavi writings into Arabic including the _Khoday-Nameh_. He
was a courtier, and passed for a good Arabic poet and one of the best
rhetorical w