We should decide all this with much more certainty did we possess but
one direct rendering made from the Pahlavi into Arabic. Above all we
have to deplore the loss of Ibn Mukaffa's history of Persian Kings which
is always assigned the first place among translations of the Persian
Book of Kings by Hamza and other authorities. This distinguished man who
only late in life exchanged the faith of his forbears for that of Islam,
and who never professed the latter with over much zeal, translated a
series of Pahlavi writings into Arabic including the _Khoday-Nameh_. He
was a courtier, and passed for a good Arabic poet and one of the best
rhetorical writers of his time. The famous Wazir Ibn Mukla counted him
among "the ten most eloquent men." He must consequently have striven to
suit his rendering of the book of Persian kings to the taste of his
contemporaries. But we have no sufficient grounds to assume that he
introduced arbitrary and material alterations into his translations or
even that he greatly elaborated the rhetorical passages of the original
text or invested them with an altogether different garb. Such a
suspicion is contradicted by the coincidences with other sources which,
like Firdausi, are independent of him. There is little probability of
Ibn Mukaffa's work being again brought to light in its entirety. But on
the other hand, it will indeed be possible to gather together in course
of time more and more stray passages belonging to the book; though it is
to be feared, unfortunately that these fragments will prove more to be
preserved as efforts of rhetoric than because of their intrinsic value.
A few extracts of this nature we find in Ibn Kotaiba's _Oyun-al Akhbar_.
Among these citations which I owe to the goodness of Rosen, there is one
tolerably long on the death of Peroz. Now the same fragment, little
curtailed, is in the chronicle of Said bin Batrik or Eutychius, the
patriarch of Alexandria. We should, therefore, be inclined from the
first to derive other information in Eutychius on the Sasanides from Ibn
Mukaffa. And our predisposition is supported by the circumstance that