The fate of Hamza al-Isfahani's list

Articles in Press

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

• mersede Eslami Sabzevar
• Mohammad Jafar Yahaghi

Ferdowsi University of Mashhad

10.22067/jls.2024.87734.1575

Abstract

The list of the eight Siyar-al-Moluk in the Hamza al-Isfahani's Tarikh sini moluk al-ard wa'l-anbiya, is one of the most famous indexes of Iranian historical sources which has been repeated six times in the oldest historical sources of Muslims from the 4th to the 6th century AH. In this article, we compared the list in these sources and found that Hamza's history had at least two versions with minor differences. The first version with a complete list was given to the authors of Abu-Mansuri's Shahnameh and reached other sources. In another version, is named by Biruni as Tawarikh al-Kebar al-Umam, the name of one of the sources has been removed from the list. This version was given to the Abu Ali Balkhi and al-Biruni and The later and existing manuscripts of Hamza's history are consistent with this text. On the other hand, by comparing the way of recording specific names in different narrations, we found that contrary to the general opinion, some of the eight sources were probably written in Persian language. We also found that the authors of Bal'ami's history of the "Great Shahnameh" in this section probably meant the Abu-Mansuri's Shahnameh, not the Shahnameh by Abu al-Mo'ayed Balkhi.

Keywords

• "Hamza al-Isfahani"
• "Tarikh sini moluk al-ard wa'l-anbiya"
• "Tawarikh al-Kebar al-Umam"
• "Siyar-al-Moluk"
• "Musa Issa al-Kasrawi"

Main Subjects

• Literary Studies

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