may most appropriately have been taken in hand. Immediately after the
Princes of Khorasan planned to cast this prose work into poetry; and
this task was first inaugurated by Dakiki for the Samanides and brought
to conclusion by Ferdausi of Tus, countryman of Abu Mansur bin Abdar
Razzak, for Mahamud of Ghazna. The name of the four people who executed
the work for the son of Abdar Razzak are all genuinely Persian; which
indicates that they were all adherents of the ancient religion and that
they had actully a Pahlavi original before them. To transfer an Arabic
version into Modern Persian would not have required four men. Moreover,
Firdausi's poem occasionally betrays that his sources had not flowed to
him through Arabic. Of those men one only is met with again, Shahzan son
of Barzin. He is mentioned by Firdausi at the head of his account of the
genesis of KALILA WA DIMNA: "Listen to what Shahzan, son of Barzin has
said when he revealed the secret." Because this section is an episode
which assuredly did not appear in the KHODAY-NAMEH, we may conclude that
the prose Shahname on which this Shahzan collaborated, embodied all
manner of similar episodes, though Firdausi may have taken several from
elsewhere. It is an interesting circumstance that the potentate who had
this work prepared by Abu Mansur bin Abdar Razzak, had inserted--so
Biruni tell us--a fictitious genealogical tree in it which led up his
ancestors to Minochihr. Such things were in those times very common
among new men of Persian origin who attained power. We are compensated
for the loss of this prose work by at least the epos of Ferdausi which
has issued from it.

[Sidenote: Dinawari.]

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.