which was prepared by Abu Mansur bin Abdar Razzak bin Abdullah bin Ferrukh.  So far our information is surely trustworthy.  For, Biruni testifies to a Shahname by Abu Mansur bin Abdar Razzak of Tus.  According to the introduction, this man was a minister of Yakub bin Laith Saffar, who was commissioned with the work which he accomplished through a certain Sund bin Mansur Mamari with the help of four competent people from Khorasan and Sagistan in 360 A.H.  The chronological impossibility involved in the figure is removed by Mohl who emends it to 260.  Yakub ibn Laith got a foothold in Khorasan in 253 A.H. and reigned till 265.  Still this report involves much that is incorrect.  That the uncouth warrior Yakub who was perpetually camping in the battle fields should have possessed a sense for such a literary undertaking is extremely improbable, though not altogether inconceivable.  May be, he was actuated by a political design, but Abu Mansur bin Abdar Razzak did not live under Yakub but flourished two or three generations later.  For he is either a brother of Muhammad bin Abdar Razzak of Tus or Muhammad himself.  The first surmise has the weight of greater likelihood in that the Strasburg manuscript calls him once Abu Mansur Ahmed and Muhammad had in fact a brother named Ahmed who participated in his political manouvres.  Muhammad was the lord of Tus.  We hear much about him—­how he in the years A.D. 945-960 stood up now for the Samanides, his proper overlords, now for their powerful antagonist Ruknaddin, the Buide, whose capital lay in dangerous proximity to his territory.  In those days when an enthusiasm for Modern Persian was strongly awakened the enterprize 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.