Khwadāynāmag the Middle Persian Book of Kings

294 Pages·2018·1.163 MB·English

by  Jaakko Hameen-Anttila

Khwadāynāmag
The Middle Persian Book of Kings
Studies in
Persian Cultural History
Editors
Charles Melville (Cambridge University)
Gabrielle van den Berg (Leiden University)
Sunil Sharma (Boston University)
Volume 14
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/spch
Khwadāynāmag
The Middle Persian
Book of Kings
By
Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: The head of a Sasanian king. From an Arab-Sasanian dirham minted in 56/675-6 in Basra
for ʿUbaydallāh ibn Ziyād. Drawing by Virpi Hämeen-Anttila from the original image in Wikimedia: https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arab-Sasanian_Dirham_in_the_name_of_Ubayd_Allah_ibn_Ziyad.jpg.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hämeen-Anttila, Jaakko, author.
Title: Khwadāynāmag : the Middle Persian Book of kings / by Jaakko
 Hämeen-Anttila.
Description: Boston ; Leiden : Brill, [2018] | Series: Studies in Persian
 cultural history ; Volume 14 | Includes bibliographical references and
 index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018003778 (print) | LCCN 2018007221 (ebook) | ISBN
 9789004277649 (E-book) | ISBN 9789004365469 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Khwadāynāmag. | Pahlavi literature—History and criticism.
 | Sassanids—Historiography. | Sassanids—History—Sources.
Classification: LCC PK6198.K493 (ebook) | LCC PK6198.K493 H36 2018 (print) |
 DDC 891/.53—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003778
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 2210-3554
isbn 978-90-04-36546-9 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-27764-9 (e-book)
Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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Contents
Preface ix
1 The Khwadāynāmag and Its Context 1
1.1 Preliminary Issues 1
1.1.1 The Title Khwadāynāmag 1
1.1.2 What was the Khwadāynāmag? 2
1.1.3 The Khwadāynāmag and Persian National History:
Clarification of Terminology 5
1.2 Middle Persian Historical Material 9
1.2.1 Ayādgār ī Zarērān 10
1.2.2 Kārnāmag ī Ardashīr 11
1.2.3 Other Books Containing Historical Material 13
1.3 Early Sources in Other Languages 14
1.3.1 Agathias 14
1.3.2 Other Sources 21
1.4 Oral Tradition 23
2 Transmitting Materials over a Linguistic Border 26
2.1 The Translation Movement and Its Context 26
2.2 Translations of Middle Persian Texts 28
2.2.1 Works Related to Persian National History 30
2.2.2 Other Works 41
2.3 The Alexander Romance 45
2.4 Translation in the First Millennium 51
3 Arabic Translations of the Khwadāynāmag 59
3.1 The List of Ḥamza 59
3.2 Translators and Their Translations 67
3.2.1 Muḥammad ibn al-Jahm al-Barmakī 67
3.2.2 Taʾrīkh mulūk al-Furs, Taken from the Treasury of
al-Ma⁠ʾmūn 68
3.2.3 Zādūye ibn Shāhūye al-Iṣbahānī 68
3.2.4 Bahrām ibn Mihrān ibn Miṭyār al-Iṣbahānī; Muḥammad ibn
Bahrām ibn Miṭyār al-Iṣbahānī; Muḥammad ibn Miṭyār 69
vi contents
3.2.5 Hishām ibn Qāsim al-Iṣbahānī 70
3.2.6 Bahrām ibn Mardānshāh 71
3.2.7 Isḥāq ibn Yazīd 72
3.2.8 Farrukhān and ʿUmar ibn al-Farrukhān 73
3.2.9 Bahrām al-Harawī al-Majūsī 74
3.2.10 Rāmīn 74
3.2.11 ʿUmar Kisrā and al-mōbad al-Mutawakkilī 74
3.3 Mūsā ibn ʿĪsā al-Kisrawī 76
3.4 Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ and Nihāyat al-arab 89
3.5 Sources and Nature of These Translations 99
3.6 Pre-Islamic Iran in Early Arabic and Persian Historical Texts 100
3.7 The Contents of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Translation 128
4 Classical Persian Shāhnāmes 131
4.1 The Other Shāhnāmes 132
4.1.1 Masʿūdī-ye Marwazī 133
4.1.2 Abū ʿAlī Muḥammad al-Balkhī 134
4.1.3 Abū al-Muʾayyad al-Balkhī 137
4.1.4 Daqīqī 139
4.2 The Prose Shāhnāme 141
4.3 Balʿamī 147
4.4 Al-Thaʿālibī 148
4.5 Firdawsī 152
4.6 Firdawsī, al-Thaʿālibī, and Pahlavi Texts 158
4.7 Nāme Literature 167
5 Two Case Studies 174
5.1 Rustam in Arabic and Persian Literature 174
5.2 Armāyīl and Garmāyīl: The Formation of an Episode in Firdawsī’s
Shāhnāme 199
6 Back to the Khwadāynāmag 213
6.1 One Khwadāynāmag. Or Many? 213
6.2 The Contents, Size, Sources, and Date of the Khwadāynāmag 223
Contents vii
7 Translations of the Key Texts Concerning the Khwadāynāmag 233
7.1 Agathias 233
7.2 al-Masʿūdī 234
7.3 Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī 236
7.4 The Prose Shāhnāme/Preface 239
7.5 Ibn al-Nadīm 243
7.6 Balʿamī 244
7.7 Firdawsī 244
7.8 al-Bīrūnī 247
7.9 The Mujmal 247
Bibliography 249
Indices 271

Preface
Among books that all know and none has seen, the Middle Persian
Khwadāynāmag presents a towering figure. Not only has this “official history of
the Sasanids” been lost so that not one sentence in Middle Persian can safely
be attributed to it, but its Arabic translation(s) have also vanished into air al-
most as thin.
Yet every scholar in the field seems to know the book. For some, Firdawsī’s
Shāhnāme virtually equals the Khwadāynāmag, to others some existing Arabic
work, or a combination of quotations from existing sources, can with little hes-
itation be used as indicative of the contents of the Khwadāynāmag. Most do
not even stop to ask themselves what relation a certain text may actually have
to the Khwadāynāmag, but speak summarily of “the Khwadāynāmag tradition”
with, or usually without, defining the term.
The lack of critical discussion about the Khwadāynāmag is surprising, grant-
ed its importance for Late Antique and Early Islamic historiography. Not only
is it important as part of the rather scanty non-religious Pahlavi literature, it is
also crucial for the reconstruction of the historical events of the Sasanid period
and for understanding the genesis of Arabic historical writing and the relation
of Firdawsī to his sources. All are major questions in their various fields.
Let us take but two examples, one on the Arabic and the other on the Persian
side. The question of the genesis of the Arabic historiographical tradition is al-
most without exception addressed from an Islamic viewpoint, through ḥadīths
and akhbār, and it has become commonplace to claim that historical books
started being written by Ibn Isḥāq and his generation on the basis of informa-
tion preserved orally or in brief notes concerning the Prophet Muḥammad and
the birth of Islam. Such comments ignore the fact that the Khwadāynāmag was
translated into Arabic as a complete book some decades before the death of
Ibn Isḥāq. As the text was well known to early historians who wrote in Arabic,
it cannot be separated from the main tradition of Arabic historiography or im-
plied to have been influential only within the sphere of the translation move-
ment, but not among historians themselves. For the Persian parts of their
works, Ibn Qutayba, al-Dīnawarī, and al-Ṭabarī are to a large extent ultimately
dependent on Middle Persian material, and they must unavoidably have been
influenced by Middle Persian ways of writing history.
On the Persian side, the question of Firdawsī’s sources may be taken as
an example of the range of Khwadāynāmag studies. In her book The Oral
Background of Persian Epics (2003), Kumiko Yamamoto opines (p. xix) that the
study of the sources of Firdawsī’s Shāhnāme has come to a dead end and other
x preface
viewpoints are needed. While most certainly right when it comes to a need for
fresh viewpoints, Yamamoto does not quite do justice to source studies. It is
true that there have been tedious repetitions in the field of Firdawsī’s source
studies, but this is not due to the question itself, but to the restricted use of
source material for such studies. A fuller analysis of the Khwadāynāmag and
the Arabic and Persian literature dependent on it helps to settle this key text to
its rightful place, after which we will be able to approach Firdawsī’s Shāhnāme
from a fresh viewpoint.
This book, however, is neither about Arabic historiography nor Firdawsī’s
Shāhnāme. Its focus is on the lost Middle Persian Khwadāynāmag and its trans-
lations and reverberations in later literature. However, while trying to clear the
ground by showing what there was between the eighth to tenth centuries and
what the relations of individual texts were I also hope to be able to offer some
freshness to both these fields.
I discuss the Khwadāynāmag from various viewpoints. Chapter 1 clarifies
the terminology and introduces the pre-Islamic sources that are relevant for
the study of the Khwadāynāmag. Some of the Pahlavi texts analysed in this
chapter are from the Islamic period but they tap older sources. Chapter 2 de-
scribes the translation culture in the centuries when the Khwadāynāmag was
translated into Arabic and gives an overview of what was, in general, translated
from Middle Persian into Arabic.
Chapter 3 moves on to the Arabic translations of the Khwadāynāmag, and
Chapter 4 discusses the various narratives of Persian national history (Books of
Kings, Shāhnāmes) in Persian until Firdawsī and even slightly later. Chapter 5
consists of two case studies, where the potential content of the Khwadāynāmag
is studied through an analysis of the works that, in one way or another, have a
relation to the Khwadāynāmag.
Chapter 6 comes back to the questions laid out in the first chapter and sums
up the discussion in this book, which is concluded by Chapter 7, where the
most important passages from Arabic and Persian sources are translated for
the benefit of a reader who does not readily have at hand the various editions
from which they have been culled or has not enough fluency in either Arabic
or Persian.
Technical Notes
This book uses materials in mainly three languages, Pahlavi, Arabic, and
Classical Persian, most of them coming from a range of 700 years (500–1200 AD).
In transliterating Pahlavi, I have used the system of David MacKenzie (1971):