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Although this introduction to Ferdausi dates but from the fifteenth century, and as for details is disfigured by inaccuracies and fictions, I attach weight to what it indicates respecting the time of its composition.
We are compensated for the loss of this prose work by at least the epos of Ferdausi which has issued from it. As the most important of extant Arabic representations of the Khoday-Nameh and the cognate literature we must regard at any rate Tabari I have already touched upon Eutychius, Ibn Kotaiba, and Yakubi.
At the time of writing this, he had an intention, if leisure should be allowed him, of translating the whole work. A version of Ferdausi, either in verse unfettered by rhyme, or in such numerous prose as the prophetical parts of the Bible are translated into, would, I think, be the most valuable transfer that our language is now capable of receiving from foreign tongues.
Immediately after the Princes of Khorasan planned to cast this prose work into poetry; and this task was first inaugurated by Dakiki for the Samanides and brought to conclusion by Ferdausi of Tus, countryman of Abu Mansur bin Abdar Razzak, for Mahamud of Ghazna.
This I have done in the footnotes but an advance is possible in this direction. On the other hand, we must keep Ferdausi steadily before our eyes. Whatever in Tabari and other Chroniclers does not issue from Ibn Mukaffa and is not represented in Ferdausi likewise merits special study.
Again the version which does not proceed from Ibn Mukaffa is for the most part in accord with the epitome of the story of the Sasanides in the introduction to Yakubi's History of the Abbasides; there the excellent author occasionally subjoins extraneous information. More often than not this presentment is in touch with Ferdausi.
In this "Indian Montpelier," where he describes "the hillocks covered with pepper vines, and sparkling with blossoms of the coffee tree," in addition to his other literary researches he twice perused the poem of Ferdausi, consisting of above sixty thousand couplets.
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