riters 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 anonymou