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It is well known that books under this title, "the proper and the improper" or "the licit and the illicit" are to be found among the Pahlavi tracts the time of whose composition can be fixed somewhere between the seventh and the ninth centuries A.D. Comparing the Pahlavi tracts with reference to these questions with Arabic books on good and bad qualities and manners, we have to bear in mind the general features, general outline, as well as the conditions of civilisation of the period when these books were written, in other words, the circumstances of their intimate relation generally of a cultural nature, particularly of a literary form obtaining between the Arab and Persian nations, and between Islam and Parsism.
This work which was sufficiently known and made use of in the early Moslem period has not come down to us in the original Pahlavi. In view of the importance attached to this and the following risalas by the author of the Fihrist, it would be interesting to have their editions and translations. The essay probably referred to is called Rasalat fi al Khamis lil Mamun.
Alongside of this most celebrated Pand Nameh in the Pahlavi literature are also famous a number of other analogous literary monuments traceable to definite persons, while some are anonymous. They are of a nature, for instance, of a simple testament from father to son .
In the eyes of Erskine, Zend was a Sanscrit dialect, imported from India by the founders of Mazdeism, but never spoken in Persia. His main argument was that Zend is not mentioned among the seven dialects which were current in ancient Persia according to the Farhang-i Jehangiri, and that Pahlavi and Persian exhibit no close relationship with Zend. In Germany, Meiners had found no followers.
In this way in this book or in the first half of it we have certainly the Andarz Khusro, the celebrated work in the Pahlavi literature which has been preserved up to our times and which has been translated into the European languages. It contains a number of counsels of Khusro to his son and occupies the place of importance in this species of literature. It is of a pseudo-epigraphic character.
Add to all this the incontrovertible argument to be drawn from the language, the antiquity of which is established by the fact that it was necessary to translate a part of the Zend books into Pahlavi, a language which was growing obsolete as early as the time of the Sassanides.
That Thaalibi knew the correct distinction between Pahlavi and Persian can be seen from the fact that he says at p. 633 of his history with reference to the book of Kalileh wa Dimna as follows: When Burzuyeh arrived at the court and presented himself before Anushirwan he recounted to him what had happened to him and announced to him as a happy event that he was in possession of the book.
The name of the four people who executed the work for the son of Abdar Razzak are all genuinely Persian; which indicates that they were all adherents of the ancient religion and that they had actully a Pahlavi original before them. To transfer an Arabic version into Modern Persian would not have required four men.
Not only redactions of Persian historical books like Khuday Nameh and the Ain Nameh, not only diverse monuments of Persian ethico-didactic literature but also books with Pahlavi titles appear in the index of the books of the flourishing period of Arabic literature in Fihrist.
From this information we learn that in one of the castles of Fars down to the tenth century there were preserved manuscripts written probably in the Pahlavi language containing narratives from Persian history and illustrated with, portraits after the style of the Sasanian reliefs to be found in the rocks in the district of Sabur.
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