Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 25, 2025
Tabari, however, did not himself use Ibn Mukaffa's work, but for the History of Persia, among other authorities, employed by preference a younger work which represented another version together with excerts from the former.
Both have relied almost to the letter upon the presentment which emanated partly from Ibn Mukaffa and partly from another translator with the only difference that the anonymous writer is oftener more concise than Tabari.
Tabari tells this story, and it is also found in the Koran; but the origin of it was nothing more than the well-known custom of Solomon to exercise personal supervision over those who were working for him. "I was the person from whom Solomon first heard of the Queen of Sheba.
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.
But the best comprehensive statement of the story of the Sasanides on the basis of this tradition is furnished us by Tabari, all his shortcomings notwithstanding and despite the pre-eminence which Firdausi's poem possesses as such. But in his narrative of this period Tabari had laid under contribution reports which were not of Persian origin.
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.
I designate this work as "Persian Tabari" and have used it in the splendid Gotha manuscript and in Zotenberg's French translation. I have also consulted the Turkish version of Belami in a Gotha Manuscript. All these writers and others present us collectively a tolerably rich and vivid portrait of Persian tradition of the Sasanide times.
Abu Jafar Muhammed bin Jarir born in the winter of 839 at Amul not far from the Caspian Sea in the Persian Province of Tabaristan, hence called Tabari, and who died in Baghdad on the 17th February 923, wrote many, partly very large, works in the Arabic language, among them an extremely voluminous chronicle, which reaches from the creation down to nearly the close of his life.
The text, however, of Tabari, at all events and more so a comparison of Tabari and other Arabs with one another and with Firdausi exhibits that entire sections of the History of Kings were already in the Pahlavi original in essentially different shapes. It is very important for a knowledge of the history that thus we have at our command all manner of dissonant reports about the Sasanide epoch.
Again this too remains a mystery whence Tabari came by most of the accounts touching the Persians, which are conspicuous by their absence in the anonymous Codex. To clear this whole ground it would appear to be expedient in the first place to set apart all that for which Ibn Mukaffa directly or indirectly is responsible.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking