Khwaday-Namag


Khwadāy-Nāmag was a Middle Persian history text from the Sasanian era, now lost, imagined first by Theodor Nöldeke to be the common ancestor of all later Persian-language histories of the Sasanian Empire, a view which has recently been disproven. It was supposed to have been first translated into Arabic by Abd-Allāh Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, who had access to Sasanian court documents. According to Nöldeke's theory, the book itself was composed first under the reign of Khosrow I Anushirvan, and redacted in the reign of the last Sasanian monarch, Yazdegerd III. Khwaday-Namag was the primary source of Persian book Shahnameh written by Ferdowsi. Khwaday-Namag was also translated to New Persian, and was expanded using other sources, by Samanid scholars under supervision of Abu Mansur Mamari in 957, but only the introduction of this work remains today.