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 the history of the dynasty as given in a manual by the same Ibn Kotaiba and which is styled Kitab al Maarif, brief as it is, betrays as in the instance of the reign of Peroz, all through such an harmony with Eutychius that here two independent authors must necessarily have drawn upon one and the same original; and that original source can be no other than the production of Ibn Mukaffa.  The abstract in Eutychius is very unequal being in some parts exhaustive, in others much abridged.  The narrations as preserved in Tabari, which correspond to the statements in Eutychius and Ibn Kotaiba and which consequently go back to Ibn Mukaffa, are of a similar nature though Tabari gives in addition other parallel reports.  Tabari, however, did not himself use Ibn Mukaffa’s work, but for the History of Persia, among other authorities, employed by preference a younger work which represented another version together with excerts from the former.  This can be inferred from the fact that the anonymous Codex Sprengers 30, which and Tabari are mutually independent, shows quite the same combination of two main sources and so far as the section in question goes, can be utilised and treated as a new manuscript of Tabari.  Both have relied almost to the letter upon the presentment which emanated partly from Ibn