Translations of Historical Works from Middle Persian into Arabic

This article maps the mainly lost Sasanian historiographical literature through the Arabic translations of Middle Persian works and the information preserved in early Arabic sources. Although only two texts have been preserved in the original Middle Persian, the Arabic sources reveal a sizeable corpus in translation

Quaderni di Studi Arabi 16 (2021) 42-60 dominated in historiography and historical narratives.Very little was translated in this field from Greek or Syriac, while several Middle Persian historical texts were translated into Arabic.In some cases, we have positive evidence for the one-time existence of such translations, even if they have later been lost.Mostly, though, we face the perennial problem that few texts have been preserved and none in both the original and in direct translation.Before having a look at what there was in Middle Persian and what was translated into Arabic, we have to define what we mean by historical works.Middle Persian, Arabic, and Classical Persian histories make no difference between the mythological, legendary, and historical periods of Persian history.Thus, e.g., al-Ṭabarī discusses the history of Persia in the same manner from the Creation to the end of the Sasanians.
Much of what historians of the early Islamic centuries tell us even about historical kings is fictitious.When we, e.g., read of Alexander the Great's travels beyond inhabited lands, we move, from a modern viewpoint, from history to fiction.Although fiction and entertainment are anachronistic terms for the literature of the period, there was a difference between serious and less serious books, mirrored, e.g., in the chapter headings of Ibn al-Nadīm's Fihrist, namely "Tales [asmār] of the Persians" (p.364) and "Titles of the books composed by the Persians concerning their kings' history [siyar] and true tales [al-asmār al-ṣaḥīḥa]" (p.364).Only the latter works belong to history proper (Category A), the others fall outside of serious historiography (Category B).The following shows categories of Middle Persian historical literature and the titles we know.3The categories partly overlap, and as most books are only known by their title, some may have been listed under the wrong heading.
often made conclusions on the basis of distorted Greek names in Arabic works, trying to explain these by Middle Persian script and assuming hypothetical Middle Persian originals, with very little further evidence.The two strongest cases are still those studied by Nallino in 1922 ("Tracce"), but even these would benefit from further study.For non-historical translations from Middle Persian, see Gutas,Greek Thought,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][108][109][110] (with further references).Gutas is somewhat too willing to assume the existence of Middle Persian books on the basis of later information.3 Macuch, "Pahlavi literature," is unfortunately not very helpful, and there is no usable study of Middle Persian historiography that would take into account both the preserved Middle Persian texts and the Arabic (and Classical Persian) translations.Cereti, Letteratura, is useful for the preserved Middle Persian texts.I have briefly discussed many of the texts in Hämeen-Anttila, Khwadāynāmag, where the focus was on the Ḫwadāynāmag.The present article partly uses the same material for a different purpose.I exclude astrological history, or political astrology, for which see Gutas,Greek Thought,and  as they tangentially touch historiography, being attributed to historical characters.Category C is selectively introduced, and, e.g., works of pure andarz ('wise sayings') will not be discussed, even though they, too, are mostly attributed to historical characters.5 Middle Persian literature rarely mentions non-religious book titles and almost all books discussed in this article have been lost, which means that most of the titles we know are in Arabic and the books are attested only in Arabic sources.Many of the translations, too, have gone lost and the remaining are free versions of the originals.6In individual cases, the books may have been first composed in Arabic, based on learned Persian oral lore, with the Arabic author either putting down things he had heard from Persian informants or being himself of Persian extraction.7 We know that there were learned informants (such as the early ninth-century ʿUmar Kisrā and the somewhat later al-mōbad al-Mutawakkilī) and that Arab authors, such al-Maqdisī (d. after 355/966), used native informants.8

1.1
History Proper Let us start with works of General history (A1).There are no signs that Sasanian Iran would have produced any works on the history of the world outside Ērānšahr.In Middle Persian works, other nations and peoples, such as Hephthalites, Byzantines, and Turks, only appear as enemies, or allies, of the Persians.Thus, general history is restricted to the history of Persia.There seems to have been only one book which falls into this category, viz. the Ḫwadāynāmag, which, as sources inform us, related the history of mankind (i.e., Iran) from the Creation until the Arab conquest.9The title of the book is found only once in Middle Persian, in the Bundahišn,10 but its Arabic 5 I will also not discuss texts that may be useful for studying history but are not historiographical themselves, such as inscriptions and apocalyptic texts with their post facto prophecies.It should be emphasised that Ḥamza does not claim that all these books represent the same Middle Persian text and, moreover, he does not define their Middle Persian original(s).The identification with the Ḫwadāynāmag comes from a number of other sources that make the equation between Siyar/Ta ʾrīḫ al-mulūk and the Arabic translation of the Ḫwadāynāmag.13As the title Siyar al-mulūk was also used for other books, it is possible that some of these represent a different Middle Persian text.
Another question is whether they were independent translations.Rozen, "K voprosu," tried to differentiate between them on the basis of the terminology used by Ḥamza, but I am not convinced by his reasoning.The term mostly used by Ḥamza is naql, which at the time was the standard word for translation14 but can also mean transmission.It seems possible that most of the "translations" on the list should be understood as variant versions of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's translation.
Sasanian Dynastic history (A2) is less clearly documented, and we have no idea of the titles of Middle Persian books dedicated to the Sasanian dynasty 11 This is to be found in Ḥamza, Ta ʾrīḫ, p. 9-10, and several other sources. in general, but we have two Arabic titles that refer to books translated from Middle Persian, Kitāb al-Ṣuwar and KitābTa ʾrīḫ mulūk Banī Sāsān.The first is mentioned by al-Masʿūdī in hisTanbīh, p. 106, where he speaks of a large book that he had seen in the possession of a noble family in Iṣṭaḫr in 303/916.Among other things, it contained pictures of the 25 kings and 2 queens of the Sasanians, from Ardašīr to Yazdaǧird ibn Šahriyār ibn Kisrā Abarwīz, as well as "the way of life of each one of them with its private and public details and the notable events and important occasions that had taken place during their rule."Furthermore, he tells us that it was based on a manuscript found in the middle of Ǧumādā II in 113/731 and had been translated into Arabic for Hišām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān (r.105-125/724-743).15 The one-time existence of Kitāb al-Ṣuwar is proven by extensive quotations from it in Ḥamza al-Iṣ fahānī's Ta ʾrīḫ, p. 38-49, and occasional quotations elsewhere, mostly unattributed and sometimes derived from Ḥamza, as in the Muǧmal.
The other dynastic history, Kitāb Ta ʾrīḫ mulūk Banī Sāsān by Hišām ibn Qāsim al-Iṣbahānī (date unknown), and the book by the same title by Mūsā ibn ʿĪsā al-Kisrawī (active in the 860s) are only known from Ḥamza's list, although it is probable that some of the al-Kisrawī quotations in literature derive from this work.Hišām's book is completely lost except for the mention of its title.It is possible, but not necessary, that the two works should be considered versions of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's translation of the section of the Sasanians in the Ḫwadāynāmag.For KitābAḫbāral-ʿAǧam, see below.
Much better documented are the histories of individual kings (A3), that we find more evenly distributed between several dynasties.The only two preserved Middle Persian historical texts belong to this category.Ayādgār ī Zarērān relates the battle of King Vištāsp (Guštāsb) against Arğāsp, king of the Hunnic peoples.The original shows traces of Parthian and metric structure, so that it has probably been an epic text in Parthian before it became codified in Pahlavi prose.16 This text is nowhere said to have been translated into Arabic, but its contents did reach al-Ṭabarī (d.310/923).Al-Ṭabarī's version loosely follows the Middle Persian original, but as translation strategy of historical texts was in general loose, this does not help us to decide whether al-Ṭabarī had a written source at his disposal or whether he relied on orally transmitted learned tradition.15 Cf.Hämeen-Anttila, Khwadāynāmag, p. 36-39.16 Cf. Cereti,Letteratura,[200][201][202].Note that being composed in Parthian does not mean that it was necessarily composed in Arsacid times.The story of Zarēr surfaces in Arabic also in another source, al-Ṯaʿālibī's Ġurar, p. 262-276, a universal history written in 412/1022 or a few years earlier, of which only the Persian part has been edited.Al-Ṯaʿālibī's main source was the Early New Persian Prose Šāhnāme, compiled in 346/957 from a number of texts, the majority of which would probably have been in Middle Persian.This was also Firdawsī's main source for his Šāhnāme.The story of this compilation is told in the so-called Old Preface, a text which has been added to some manuscripts of Firdawsī's Šāhnāme but the core of which probably originally belonged to the Prose Šāhnāme.17 Al-Ṯaʿālibī used Early New Persian, not Middle Persian, sources, and the work he translated was the compilation, not the individual texts as such, but still, it reflects the transmission history of Middle Persian historiography in the Islamic period.It is not possible to know whether the compilers of the Prose Šāhnāme used an existing Arabic translation of the story of Zarēr, but it is more probable that it was directly translated from Middle Persian into Early New Persian.In any case, al-Ṯaʿālibī's version is closer to the Middle Persian original than al-Ṭabarī's version, so he could not have used al-Ṭabarī here.
The second historical work that has been preserved in Middle Persian is KārnāmagīArdašīr, which relates the beginning of the Sasanian dynasty.18Like in the case of the Ayādgār, we have no information about its potential translation into Arabic, and it is also included in Firdawsī's Šāhnāme VI, p. 138-214, and al-Ṯaʿālibī's Ġurar, p. 473-480, and, hence, it was in all probability included in the Prose Šāhnāme, but as al-Ṭabarī is again able to include its material into his Ta ʾrīḫ, it must have found its way into Arabic literature earlier.
All the individual histories that we know from mentions in Arabic literature relate to the Sasanian period.Three such works are mentioned by Ibn al-Nadīm.According to topic, the earliest of these is KitābBahrāmwa-Narsī (Fihrist, p. 364), which refers to Bahrām Gūr and his brother Narsē or, perhaps, his trusted commander Mihr-Narsē, both prominent in the vagaries of Bahrām Gūr.The latter is occasionally abbreviated to Narsī in Arabic sources.Whether the story focused on Bahrām's adventures in India, his battle against the invading Hephthalites, Mihr-Narsē's campaign against the Byzantines, or all of these cannot be known on the basis of our present sources.
Another Bahrām, whose adventures gave enough material for a separate monograph was Bahrām Čūbīn.by name, although he remains a rather obscure character.19Arthur Christensen reconstructed in his 1907 book in Danish Bahrām Čūbīn's story (Romanen), but he laboured under the wrong assumption that everything we learn from Arabic sources about Bahrām Čūbīn must come from this book, so his "reconstruction" is unfortunately only useful as a collection of materials.
It may be this book that al-Masʿūdī, Murūǧ §644, has in mind, giving a valuable summary of its contents, which deserves to be quoted in full:20 Persians have a separate book for the stories of Bahrām Ǧūbīn and his stratagems in the country of the Turks to which he travelled, saving the daughter of the King of the Turks from a beast called simʿ, which is like a great goat and which had captured her from among her maidens when she had gone to a park.(The book contained Bahrām's story) from the beginning of his affair until his death and included his genealogy.
Interestingly, the summary focuses on the encounter with the simʿ, which is not known from other works, except for a mention in Balʿamī's Tārīḫ and Tārīk̮ nāme.21It implies that the work contained legendary material and narrative elements that far outreached the dry facts of Bahrām's role in history.Balʿamī, Tārīḫnāme II: 764, refers to al-Ṭabarī's inadequacy in the discussion of Bahrām."I found a fuller version," he continues, "in Kitāb-e Aḫbār-eʿAjam and will relate it based on this book," which he proceeds to do in Tārīḫnāme II, p. 764-805, mixing long extracts of this book with what al-Ṭabarī had transmitted.
The title of the book is, technically, given in Persian, but the simple addition of the article would turn it into Arabic, KitābAḫbāral-ʿAǧam.The additions of Balʿamī are partly paralleled in al-Dīnawarī, Aḫbār, and Nihāyatal-arab,22 which can be assumed to derive them from an Arabic source.23Likewise, the additions in Balʿamī show signs of having been translated from Arabic.24The title KitābAḫbāral-ʿAǧam implies a larger history, general or dynastic, but all the material that I have as yet been able to locate relates to Bahrām Čūbīn.
The third work belonging to this category is ŠahrbarāzandAbarwīz, given by Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, p. 364, in a corrupt form (ŠahrīzādmaʿaAbarwīz).25 The outlines of this narrative can be sketched on the basis of later Arabic, Persian, Syriac, Greek, and Armenian sources.A detailed comparison of the available sources shows that Greek and Syriac sources create a seemingly realistic picture of Šahrbarāz, one of Kisrā Abarwīz's commanders in the war against Byzantium and a later usurper of the royal power, while Arabic and Persian sources develop the story as literature and add details of complicated and entertaining plots and concentrate on his adventures with the Persian king rather than his role in the Byzantine wars, which also matches what we know about the story of Bahrām Čūbīn.
The Alexander Romance would also belong to this category, but it seems improbable that the Romance was ever translated into Middle Persian and from there into Arabic, despite this being rather commonly assumed.The idea goes back to Theodor Nöldeke's discussion in 1890 (Beiträge), where he pointed out that many of the Greek names in one of the existing Syriac versions are distorted in a way that could -according to Nöldeke -be explained through the complicated Pahlavi script.Otherwise, there is no evidence either in Middle Persian or Arabic literature for there ever having been a Middle Persian translation of the text.
Nöldeke's hypothesis has occasionally been criticised, and in 1998 ("Gli antecedenti") and again in 2001 ("The Syriac Version") Claudia Ciancaglini studied the question in great detail, managing to show how weak Nöldeke's argument actually is.Kevin van Bladel, "Syriac sources" (2007), has thereafter defended Nöldeke's argument but without providing sufficient answers to Ciancaglini's arguments, who replied in "Ancora" (2015).All considered, it seems rather improbable that a Middle Persian Romance ever existed.26 The next category, Sistanian history (A4), would by modern standards fall outside the sphere of history, but, if we follow the historians who wrote the 24 E.g., in the Nihāya, p. 356, the irritated Bahrām Chūbīn uses the Arabic expression ilayka ʿannīlāummalak "get off, scoundrel!"which Balʿamī translates as: ḫāmūšbāš,kemādar aztotahīnišīnād "be quiet, may your mother be left without you!", which sounds like an attempt to translate lāummalak, literally "there is no mother for you."national history of Iran, then we have to allow Sistanian works into the sphere of historiography, as they relate the history of events that were considered as historical as the battles between Iran and Byzantium in the Sasanian period.
Two such works have been mentioned and briefly described by al-Masʿūdī, viz.This (Bābal-Lān) is one of the fortresses in the world that are considered impenetrable.The Persians mention it in their poems and tell how Isbandiyār ibn Bistāsf built it.Isbandiyār waged many wars in the East against various peoples.He was the one who travelled to the furthest parts of the Turkish lands and destroyed the City of Brass (Madīnatal-Ṣufr).The deeds of Isbandiyār and all the things we have told are mentioned in the book known as Kitābal-Baykār, which Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ translated into Arabic (Murūǧ §479-480).
On Kitābal-Sakīsarān, he writes: Persians tell numerous tales about Afrāsiyāb's death and his battles, the battles and raids between Persians and Turks, the death of Siyāwuš, and the story of Rustam ibn Dastān.All this is found explained in the book titled Kitābal-Sakīsarān, which was translated by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ from Ancient Persian into Arabic.The story of Isfandiyār (…) and how Rustam ibn Dastān killed him is narrated there, as well as how Bahman ibn Isfandiyār killed Rustam and other wonders and tales of the Ancient Persians.Persians think highly of this book because it contains stories about their ancestors and their kings' histories.Thank God, we have been able to narrate many of their histories in our earlier books (Murūǧ §541).
According to what is told in the Bookofal-Sakīsarān the Persians say that his paternal grandfather Kay Qāwūs was the king before Kay Ḫusraw and that Kay Ḫusraw had no offspring, so he gave the kingship to Luhrāsb (Murūǧ §543).
The translation of Rustam wa-Isfandiyār is attributed by Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, p. 364, to Ǧabala ibn Sālim, and while nothing is said about its content, it most 27 The former clearly reflects Persian paykār "battle," the latter is unclear but may refer to "the chiefs of the Sakas/Sistanians."probably related the tragic battle between the two, with more or less extensive discussion of its background and the later events.28 These three books did probably not exhaust Sistanian stories that were available in written Middle Persian form, but we have no further evidence of their Arabic translations.Such stories probably also survived in oral form, but the Arabic translations make it highly probable that there existed a written Sistanian tradition, whether with or without a parallel oral tradition.29

1.2
Stories Set in History In addition to historiographical literature, by the end of the tenth century there existed a rather voluminous literature of stories in Middle or Early New Persian.Many of these were set in history though they were not considered "serious" parts of Persian national history.Thus, e.g., Firdawsī himself mentions an existing story of BīžanandManīže (Šāhnāme III, and an analysis of the style of the story in the Šāhnāme supports its separate origin.30Like BīžanandManīže, most such stories probably never reached the Arabs, but some were translated into Arabic.31One such example is Balāš and the Indian Princess, which is known in two Arabic versions, one of which is attributed to al-Kisrawī, who may have added this romantic and tragic story to his version of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ  We can also add to this category ŠarwīnofDastabay, a story already mentioned by Abū Nuwās (d. ca. 198/813) in a poem33 and later surfacing in short mentions in a number of works by historians and geographers, both in Arabic and in Persian.34While we cannot trace the plot of the story, we know through these occasional mentions that it contained heroes and witches, perhaps damsels in distress, and other elements familiar from Persian stories and epics that have strong links to folk literature.While Arabic and Persian literature provides various dates for Šarwīn, Greek sources help us date the historical model of the main character to the reign of Yazdağird I, and the early reference in Abū Nuwās' poem puts the origin of the story itself firmly in the time when Middle Persian was still the literary language in Iran.In its fully developed form, it seems to have been closer to storytelling than historiography.35(Abar)Wizārišnīčatrang ud nihišnīnēv-Ardašīr, which has been preserved in the original Middle Persian, tells of the invention of chess at the time of king Khusraw and Buzurgmihr and belongs to these marginally historical stories.Like the fully historical Ayādgār and Kārnāmag, it found its way into the Prose Šāhnāme and from the New Persian version it was further translated into Arabic by al-Ṯaʿālibī in his Ġurar, p. 622-624.36

1.3
Political Literature Another group of texts related to historiography and sometimes sharing elements with it is political literature (C), which refers to the governance and administration of the Sasanian state, often in the form of pseudepigraphs.Al-Masʿūdī,Tanbīh, p. 104, mentions Āyīnnāmāh and Kahnāmāh (for Āyīnnāmag and Gahnāmag), which he briefly describes as follows: Persians have a book called Kahnāmāh, in which there are (listed) the ranks in the kingdom of Fārs, which were 600, according to their counting.This book forms part of the Āyīnnāmāh.The meaning of Āyīnnāmāh is "book of customs" (kitābal-rusūm), and it is large, (going up to) thousands of pages.It is rarely found complete except in the hands of mōbads and suchlike.
Al-Masʿūdī merely mentions the books but does not claim them to have been translated into Arabic.Yet, Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, p. 132, attributes the translation of the Āyīnnāmag to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ.
While these books have been lost and there is no further information of their potential translations,37 some political texts have been preserved in Arabic translation.An interesting piece is ʿAhdArdašīr,38 which purports to be the political testament of Ardashīr to all Sasanian kings that were to follow 35 The stories of KalīlaandDimna and other story collections of Indian origin are not historical, but some of the stories of Hazārafsān(e) may well have been set in historical context.For these collections, see Khwadāynāmag, See Khwadāynāmag,Šāhnāme VII, There are some Āyīn books that were translated into Arabic (or composed as Arabic pseudepigraphs), but there is no reason to assume that every book that includes the word Āyīn in its title is necessarily part of the Āyīnnāmag.him.The text is usually considered to derive from the sixth century, and it partly overlaps with the Tansarnāme, another lost text, which is said to have been translated by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ.Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's translation has been preserved in a Persian translation quoted in full in Ibn Ḏamm (Rasāʾil II,p. 193), also mentions Siyāsat Ardašīr,Tadbīr Anūširwān, andIstiqāmatal-bilād li-ĀlSāsān together with the ʿAhd, and further titles may be found in Fihrist,p. 132,134,and 186.40While these texts are interesting in themselves and were translated into Arabic, they concentrate on how a state should be administered and have little bearing on history.The same goes for wisdom literature, where we have numerous andarz collections attributed to ancient kings, some translated into Arabic.Perhaps worth pointing out is Husraw ud rēdag-ē, the Arabic version of which is to be found in al-Ṯaʿālibī, Ġurar, p. 705-711, clearly an indirect translation through the Prose Šāhnāme.Likewise, the geographical text Šahristānīhā īĒrānšahr, preserved in Middle Persian, belongs to the margins of historical literature as it focuses on the founding of cities and is thus oriented towards the past, but it was never translated into Arabic.41 Quaderni di Studi Arabi 16 (2021) 42-60 In the Late Sasanian and Early Islamic periods, there seems to have been a strong tendency to use history as material for literature or, put in other words, to add literary embellishment to historical texts.42We find this tendency fully developed in Firdawsī's Šāhnāme, which can be seen both as a historical source and a major contribution to world literature.On a lower key, this mixture of history and fiction can be seen in several texts that we know to have existed and partly still possess in Arabic translation (e.g., ŠarwīnofDastabay; Balāš and the Princess; ŠahrbarāzandAbarwīz).
Looking at the titles we know from Arabic sources, this mixture seems to have been the main form of Middle Persian historiography, but it did have another side, too.Despite widespread misunderstandings, the Ḫwadāynāmag was most probably a dry list of kings with very little if any narrative elements and literary embellishments,43 and the Kitābal-Ṣuwar may likewise have been more of a list than a storybook.
It is probable that some of the gaps in later Arab-Islamic historiography reflect gaps in the Middle Persian tradition.The most obvious one concerns the history of nations and peoples other than Iran.The existing Middle Persian literature, in the original language or in translation, is solipsistic: other nations are mentioned only as a backdrop against which Persian history is played.Turanians and Byzantines, Hephthalites and Turks are not there to be discussed for their own sake but only in relation to Persia.
The second gap concerns Persian history itself.The national history consisted of two separate traditions.Zoroastrianism was born in the Eastern parts of the Iranian cultural area, and the earliest history was tied up with this religious background.The earliest dynasties, the Pīshdādians and the Kayanids, come from the East Iranian traditions in the Avesta.From this religious past, the historical narrative jumps to Alexander the Great -mainly seen as an accursed conqueror and destroyer -and to the Arsacids and the Sasanians, moving the focus to the West and to real historical events.
This left the Achaemenids in the dark, except as far as the last of them interacted with Alexander.It was obviously the lack of sources that caused this, rather than any national amnesia.The same goes for the almost complete disappearance of the Seleucids and even the marginalisation of the Arsacids, the Persian historiography not having deep roots in the native tradition.This was the world view Arab historians received and retained.There is no translation literature without translators.In this case, we know, however, very little about them.In addition to the list of Ḥamza and occasional references elsewhere in Arabic or Persian literature, our main source is Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, p. 305, which lists translators from Persian into Arabic and includes those on Ḥamza's list.Almost all the translators of historical works are shadowy and do not allow for any proper prosopographical study, but the following attempts to draw a timeline of translations before 900.Note that the list takes the evidence at face value and every item should be studied in detail to assess the credibility of the information: but he was probably aware of the Siyāsa and the Tadbīr before his last year and their translations may well have been from the eighth century or early ninth.
In the tenth century, Middle Persian texts started being translated into Early New Persian, mainly through Arabic sources (e.g., the Tansarnāme).
Although Middle Persian translations were a minor branch of the translation movement, they did leave their traces in Arabic literature and historiography.Universal histories included Biblical history and Persian history in detail, while the history of other nations, Greeks included, remained vague and superficial and were often passed by without any mention.
In literature proper, in the sense of belles-lettres, Persian influence was remarkable, although it is usually ignored.Complete story collections of Persian origin, such as Kalīla wa-Dimna and Hazār afsāne, better known by the title it received in Arabic, Alf layla wa-layla (the Thousand and One Nights), are well known, but their Persian origin either tends to be pushed aside once briefly acknowledged, or the whole collection is marginalised as extraneous to "real" Arabic literature.However, both Middle Persian collections and individual stories found their way into Arabic literature at a time it had no artistic prose narratives.By the time al-Tanūḫī and al-Hamaḏānī were writing, there existed a centuries-long Arabic tradition of fictitious narratives of Persian origins in a historical garb.