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Downloaded from Brill.Com10/02/2021 12:35:27PM Via Free Access 2 Chapter 1 Chapter 1 The Khwadāynāmag and Its Context 1.1 Preliminary Issues This book revolves around two questions: What was the Khwadāynāmag and how did it influence Arabic and Classical Persian historiography and epic lit- erature? Before delving any deeper into these questions, a few preliminary is- sues have to be discussed.1 1.1.1 The Title Khwadāynāmag The title Khwadāynāmag is used in scholarly literature for a lost Middle Persian historical work that was translated, among others, by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ into Arabic. Strictly speaking, the title is a reconstruction, which is not found as such anywhere in Middle Persian literature. It is based on the title Khudāynāme used in a few Arabic sources, often in forms corrupted by later scribes. Our earliest source for the Arabic title is al-Masʿūdī’s Tanbīh, p. 106//150 (Khudāynāmāh). Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī mentions the same book in his Ta⁠ʾrīkh, p. 16: “Mūsā ibn ʿĪsā al-Kisrawī has said in his book: I looked into the book called the Khudāynāme, which is the book that, when translated from Persian into Arabic, is called Ta⁠ʾrīkh mulūk al-Furs.” The same author also uses the title on pp. 22 and 50. Likewise, Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, p. 132/118//260, speaks about a Kitāb Khudāynāme fī l-siyar and in another passage, Fihrist, p. 305/245//589, men- tions an Isḥāq ibn Yazīd, saying that “among what he translated was Sīrat al-Furs known as the *Khudāynāme”. Here the title has been variously distort- ed (ed. Tajaddud: ḤDʾD-nāme; ed. Flügel: Ikhtiyār-nāme;2 trans. Dodge follows Flügel), but the emendation is beyond doubt.3 1 For earlier studies on the Khwadāynāmag and its transmission history, see, e.g., Rypka (1959): 152–164, Boyce (1968b): 57–60, Yarshater (1983): 359–480, Shahbazi (1991); Ṣafā (1374): 78–91, Cereti (2001): 191, 200, Rubin (2005), (2008a), and (2008b), Khāliqī-Muṭlaq (2007–08), Macuch (2009): 173–181, Jackson Bonner (2011) and (2015), and Daniel (2012). For Firdawsī, see also de Blois (1992–97): 112–159. 2 Ed. Fuʾād Sayyid II: 151, reads Bakhtiyārnāme. Such a book does exist, but here the emen- dation is manifestly wrong. There are actually two separate Bakhtiyārnāmes. The one rel- evant here is the epic narrative on Bakhtiyār (see van Zutphen 2014: 80), a late member of the Sistanian heroic family. The other is a totally unrelated popular narrative, see Hanaway (1998). 3 Later attestations, Zakeri (2007a) I: 133, n. 88. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi ��.��63/9789004277649_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0Jaakko license. Hämeen-Anttila - 9789004277649 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:35:27PM via free access 2 Chapter 1 These passages leave little doubt as to the Middle Persian title, and we find further support for this in early Classical Persian sources. Several versions of Persian national history in Classical Persian are titled Shāhnāmes. In the Islamic period, the word khudāy in the sense “lord; king” fell into disuse, with a few exceptions.4 Bearing this in mind, Shāhnāme seems an exact translation of the Middle Persian Khwadāynāmag. This, however, does not mean that any of the Shāhnāmes from the tenth century or later were a translation of this book as such (Chapters 3.1 and 3.2). All in all, it seems safe to use the Middle Persian title Khwadāynāmag. Whether the work also had a more elaborate title remains an open question. 1.1.2 What was the Khwadāynāmag? The Khwadāynāmag, a central part of Persian national history, seems origi- nally to have been put down in writing in Middle Persian during the Sasanian period towards the end of the sixth century (Chapter 6.2). Theodor Nöldeke’s (1879a: xiii–xxviii) brief comments on the Khwadāynāmag in the preface of his partial translation of al-Ṭabarī’s Ta⁠ʾrīkh have been hugely influential in later literature, and a short exposition of his views offers us a good starting point. Nöldeke (1879a): xiv–xv, drew attention to the similarity of the material in Firdawsī’s Shāhnāme and the Arab historians and deduced that as Firdawsī did not, as it seemed to him, use Arabic sources, the similarity must derive from the use of a common source. This he took to be the old book, mentioned in the Bāysunqurī Preface.5 The latter is nowadays considered to be a late and unreliable source. Further, Nöldeke identified this with the Khwadāynāmag (“Dies Buch, das mit dem Chodhânâme zu identificieren wohl nicht zu kühn sein dürfte …”). As we shall later see, Nöldeke was, in fact, somewhat audacious in making this identification. Despite this, Nöldeke’s view has dominated to this day. Nöldeke also compared various Arabic sources for pre-Islamic Persian his- tory with each other and saw two basic story lines, one of which (represented by Ibn Qutayba, Eutychius, MS-Sprenger, and parts of al-Ṭabarī) he took to rep- resent a direct line from Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s translation of the Khwadāynamag, 4 Mainly petrified compounds such as nākhudāy “captain”, kadkhudāy “master of a family”, khudākush “regicide”, Bukhārā-khudāh, Gūzgānān-khudāh (for the last two and a general dis- cussion of the word, see Ṣafā 1374: 83–84). See also Shahbazi (1990): 208–209, and Shayegan (1998). 5 See Dabīr-Siyāqī (1383): 158–161 (= Shāhnāme, ed. Macan I: 11–13), discussed in Chapter 6.2, note 28. Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila - 9789004277649 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:35:27PM via free access The Khwadāynāmag and Its Context 3 thus making it possible, in broad lines, to reconstruct the content of this lost book. Nöldeke assumed that the Khwadāynamag was originally composed during the reign of Khusraw Anōshagruwān (r. 531–579). This may be supported by the evidence provided by Agathias (d. 582) if we identify the Khwadāynāmag with Agathias’ Royal annals (Chapter 1.3.1). This is a reasonable assumption, as the literary culture flourished under this King’s long rule, but it should be empha- sised that there is no direct evidence for this, and later sources were conscious of the general literary activity of Khusraw Anūshirwān and were prone to attri- bute any important work to his reign. The date will be discussed in Chapter 6.2. Nöldeke also thought that the work had later been revised, and he derived the various different narratives concerning pre-Islamic Iran from this one source through its different (hypothetical) recensions. The sources themselves, referred to by Nöldeke, however, do not claim that their information derives from the Khwadāynāmag. As we shall see later (Chapters 1.2 and 2.2.1), there is absolutely no reason to assume that all the information on pre-Islamic Persia that came to the Arabs derived from just one source. Although Nöldeke’s theories were highly hypothetical,6 they have become generally accepted and have provided the guidelines for later research, even though some scholars have recently, in one way or another, broken free from the sphere delineated by Nöldeke’s theory. As will be shown in this book, there is ample reason to update our understanding of what the Khwadāynamag was. The Khwadāynāmag has later disppeared, but both Mediaeval sources and modern studies are unanimous in accepting that it contained materials on Persian national history in one way or another. This book aims at giving a more detailed account of its contents, and the results will be summarized in Chapter 6.2. In the eighth century, the Khwadāynamag was translated into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (Chapters 3.1 and 3.4), and other scholars either made new transla- tions or new versions of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s translation (Chapters 3.2 and 3.3). In addition, a lot of historical material on Persian national history found its way into Arabic and Classical Persian texts through independent routes during the centuries after the Arab conquest of Iran, whether in oral or written form. Later, these materials kept circulating in Arabic and Persian historiographi- cal literature, while no new translations of any Middle Persian historical texts seem to have been made in the second millennium. 6 As Jackson Bonner (2015): 48, notes, neither Ibn Qutayba in his Maʿārif nor al-Ṭabarī in his Ta⁠ʾrīkh even mentions Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ by name. (To be exact, al-Ṭabari does actually mention him, but only once, II: 1979//XXVII: 88, and not in relation to Persian matters.). Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila - 9789004277649 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:35:27PM via free access 4 Chapter 1 Other Middle Persian translations of historical texts into Arabic are well documented (Chapter 2.2.1), even though most texts have undergone the same fate as the translation of the Khwadāynāmag and have been lost. We have no clear evidence that the Khwadāynāmag would have been directly translated from Middle Persian into Classical Persian. While the Khwadāynāmag was probably never translated as such into Classical Persian, it is possible – and here I am mainly thinking of the Prose Shāhnāme (Chapter 4.2) – that the Middle Persian Khwadāynāmag may have been used as a source for compiling longer versions of Persian national history. There were other direct translations from Middle Persian into Classical Persian, but we tend to know very little about these. Often, as in the case of the Prose Shāhnāme, it has been taken for granted that if a text was translated into Classical Persian by a person carrying a Zoroastrian name, the original must have been in Middle Persian. In many cases this may well have been so, but we should not hasten to claim this without a proper study of the sources.
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