''Khwadāy-Nāmag'' ( pal, 𐭧𐭥𐭲𐭠𐭩 𐭭𐭠𐭬𐭪;

New Persian New Persian ( fa, فارسی نو), also known as Modern Persian () and Dari (), is the current stage of the Persian language spoken since the 8th to 9th centuries until now in Greater Iran and surroundings. It is conventionally divided into thr ...

: ; ) was a

Middle Persian Middle Persian or Pahlavi, also known by its endonym Pārsīk or Pārsīg () in its later form, is a Western Middle Iranian language which became the literary language of the Sasanian Empire. For some time after the Sasanian collapse, Middle P ...

history from the

Sasanian The Sasanian () or Sassanid Empire, officially known as the Empire of Iranians (, ) and also referred to by historians as the Neo-Persian Empire, was the last Iranian empire before the early Muslim conquests of the 7th-8th centuries AD. Named ...

era. Now

lost Lost may refer to getting lost, or to: Geography * Lost, Aberdeenshire, a hamlet in Scotland *Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail, or LOST, a hiking and cycling trail in Florida, US History *Abbreviation of lost work, any work which is known to have bee ...

, it was imagined 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 Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

Ibn al-Muqaffa' Abū Muhammad ʿAbd Allāh Rūzbih ibn Dādūya ( ar, ابو محمد عبدالله روزبه ابن دادويه), born Rōzbih pūr-i Dādōē ( fa, روزبه پور دادویه), more commonly known as Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ ( ar, ابن الم� ...

(d. 757), 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 Yazdegerd III (also spelled Yazdgerd III and Yazdgird III; pal, 𐭩𐭦𐭣𐭪𐭥𐭲𐭩) was the last Sasanian King of Kings of Iran from 632 to 651. His father was Shahriyar and his grandfather was Khosrow II. Ascending the throne at the ...

(). ''Khwaday-Namag'' was the primary source of the 10th-century Persian epic ''

Shahnameh The ''Shahnameh'' or ''Shahnama'' ( fa, شاهنامه, Šāhnāme, lit=The Book of Kings, ) is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Greater Iran. Consisting of some 5 ...

'' ('Book of Kings') written by

Ferdowsi , image = Statue of Ferdowsi in Tus, Iran 3 (cropped).jpg , image_size = , caption = Statue of Ferdowsi in Tus by Abolhassan Sadighi , birth_date = 940 , birth_place = Tus, Samanid Empire , death_date = 1019 or 1025 (87 years old) , d ...

. ''Khwaday-Namag'' was also translated to

, and was expanded using other sources, by

Samanid The Samanid Empire ( fa, سامانیان, Sāmāniyān) also known as the Samanian Empire, Samanid dynasty, Samanid amirate, or simply as the Samanids) was a Persianate Sunni Muslim empire, of Iranian dehqan origin. The empire was centred in ...

scholars under the supervision of Abu Mansur Mamari in 957, but only the introduction of this work remains today. Although the Arabic '' Nihayat al-arab'' presents itself as partially derived from Ibn al-Muqaffa's translation of the ''Khwadāy-Nāmag'', only a small amount of its material may reasonably be traced back to the lost Persian work.

References

Sources

* * * * Lost books Middle Persian History of the Sasanian Empire Iranian books History books about Iran Persian words and phrases Khosrow I Culture of the Sasanian Empire {{iran-hist-book-stub