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Updated: June 25, 2025
"The times of ignorance" were not the desolate waste which Tabari, "the Livy of the Arabs," paints, and down to the close of the eighteenth century the comparison between England, Rome, and Islam offers a fair field for speculative politics. Yet the scientific conception of the destruction or decay of this whole star-system by fire or ice does of itself turn progress into a mockery.
An amanuensis of his, Jabala bin Salim, is noticed in the Fihrist as one of the translators from Persian. Ho provided his master with material from Pahlavi books. For the History of the Arabs of that period Tabari has used a variety of other sources, most prominent among them being Muhammad Ibn Ishak who is better known as the biographer of the prophet.
If the criticism of the sources is here very much facilitated on the one hand, because these orientals where they excerpt love to adhere, as far as possible, to the letter of their models or sources, it is on the other, rendered difficult because Tabari does not mention his immediate authorities.
Tabari and Macoudi, who relate his deposition, are authors on whom much reliance cannot be placed; and the cruelties reported accord but ill with the epithets of "the Beneficent" and "the Virtuous," assigned to this monarch by others. Perhaps it is most probable that he held the throne till his death, according to the statements of Agathias and Eutychius.
Procopius informs us that, in consequence of the defeat of Perozes, Persia became subject to the Ephthalites and paid them tribute for two years; and this is so probable a result, and one so likely to have been concealed by the native writers, that his authority must be regarded as outweighing the silence of Mirkhond and Tabari.
Tabari, mainly occupied with theological tradition, was no man of original research or of historical acumen even in the sense applied to a few other Persian scholars in those centuries. His annals are a compilation, a mass of rich material put together with extraordinary industry.
But Masudi works very unequally, accepts a good deal that is suspicious provided only it is entertaining, and as regards detail he is by no means over exact. As an historical authority, the Persian redaction of Tabari, so remarkable in many of its aspects, and achieved by Muhammad Belami or by others under his guidance, has but little value.
The story of Persia from the first mythical Kings to the last of the Sasanides exhibits in Tabari, as in allied Arabic works, a certain similarity of conception and presentation which leads to the assumption of an indigenous original work at least respecting a very large portion.
Hamza treats his materials in a spirit of much more freedom and independence than Tabari, but to us the compiling process of Tabari is far more convenient. Masudi in his "Meadows of Gold" affords us many a supplement to Tabari's narratives derived from reliable Persian sources.
Tabari reproduces the conflicting versions of the same incident separately one after another; Dinawari works them up into a single unified narrative. The small book which Hamza Ispahani wrote in 961, contains in brief much independent information on the Sasanides.
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