Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 4, 2025
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.
We should decide all this with much more certainty did we possess but one direct rendering made from the Pahlavi into Arabic. 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.
We cannot, for instance, ascertain whether alongside of the Khoday-Nameh there existed also other general continuous narrations or whether the deviations, which are for the most part trifling, in some cases of great moment, already existed in the Pahlavi work or are traceable to various recensions of that book.
Because this section is an episode which assuredly did not appear in the KHODAY-NAMEH, we may conclude that the prose Shahname on which this Shahzan collaborated, embodied all manner of similar episodes, though Firdausi may have taken several from elsewhere.
It would not be rash, to assume that some 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.
There was hardly ever a better presentment of the story of this house than the Khoday-Nameh. See p. 170.
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.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking