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Updated: May 21, 2025
One of them, Gushnasp Shah, is named as a contemporary of Ardashir I. It was only so late as in the time of Kawadh that this king succeeded in establishing a Sasanian prince, his son Keyus, as Shah of Tabaristan in 530. At the death of his father he contested the throne with Khusrow I, and was therefore slain by the latter in 537.
Yakut has preserved for us the information that at Raishahar in the district of Arrajan there lived in the Sasanian times men, versed in a peculiar species of syllabary who wrote medical, astronomical and logical works. Wustenfeld, II, p. 887. This passage has been translated by Barbier de Maynard in his "Geographical, Historical and Literary Dictionary of Persia", in French, pp. 270-271.
His rendering of Kalila and Dimma is well-known. It enjoys a prime role in the migration of this collection of stories to the West. Well-known also is his translation of the Persian book of Khoday Nameh, that is, the official chronicle of the Sasanian times and of the Ain Nameh, the Institutes of the time. We shall have occasion to speak about these books later on.
These facts generally important for the history of the preservation of the epic, historic and artistic traditions of Iran, are particularly important for the investigation of the sources of the Arabic translations of the Sasanian chronicles and of the epopee of Firdausi.
Among the sources of our knowledge of the Sasanian institutions, one of the most important is the letter of Tansar to the king of Tabaristan published and translated by Darmesteter in the Journal Asiatique . The information which it gives on points where we can verify it is so exact that we cannot doubt that the letter was composed in the time of the Sasanians.
And even here the Sasanian tradition has survived the dynasties; in the study of the commerce and industry as well as the art of the Moslem epoch we have necessarily to refer back to the preceding times of the Persian history. In pre-Moslem Arabia the high development of the civilisation of Sasanian Persia was well known.
It has been shown that the official chronicles of the Sasanian times exercised influence on the development of the Musalman science of history. On the other hand, the epic was resuscitated in heroic romances and tales . Alongside of the historical traditions and the epos stands the romantic poesy which has entered into Musalman literature in a marked degree in the shape of Iranian tradition.
We have descended to us his book called Al Yatima, a tract on that aspect of morals which was especially diffused in the Sasanian epoch and was devoted to politics and in form represented the species of writings called Furstenspiegel.
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.
But it has survived in a considerable quantity in the Avesta. The most recent and pregnant exposition is by Lehmann. It existed also in official writings of the Sasanian times, recensions of which, we possess in several Arab histories and in the Shah Nameh.
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