Khwaday-Namag

Khwadāy-Nāmag (Iranian Persian: ; ) is the hypothetical title of a lost Middle Persian story from the Sasanian era. It presumably encompassed the national history of Iran from the beginning of time until the Sasanian period. It was a remote predecessor of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh ('Book of Kings'), the 10th-century Iranian national epic, which, it is assumed, drew from a version or versions of the Khwaday-Namag. Scholars have tried to determine the content of the Khwaday-Namag through a comparison of Zoroastrian works, Islamic sources, and Ferdowsi's Shahnameh. Some scholars use the term Khwaday-Namag to refer to a tradition or genre of texts dealing with Sasanian or Iranian national history, rather than to refer to a single putative original text.

According to Theodor Nöldeke's theory, the book itself was composed first during the reign of Khosrow I Anushirvan (), and enlarged in the reign of the last Sasanian monarch, Yazdegerd III (). It was translated into Arabic in the 8th century by the Persian translator and author Ibn al-Muqaffa, a Zoroastrian convert to Islam; this translation, too, is lost. Nöldeke believed that all later histories used al-Muqaffa's translation. In particular, the Annals of al-Tabari and Ferdowsi's Shahnameh are supposed to have best preserved the material of the Khwaday-Namag. While al-Muqaffa did in fact translate a Persian story called into Arabic, there were, by the 10th century, many (none of which have survived) with different contents, so these cannot all have derived from al-Muqaffa's translation. Mahmoud Omidsalar and Touraj Daryaee state that it is very likely that there were already different versions of the Khwaday-Namag in Sasanian times, commissioned by different noble families and telling the same Iranian national epic in different ways. However, they do not exclude that a great Khwaday-Namag was produced by the order of Khosrow I; this version may have been regarded as the finest or most prestigious of all the Khwaday-Namags. The result of this diversity was that the actual histories of the Iranian noble families were "grafted" onto Iranian mythical history and legend in the Khwaday-Namags. Early authors must have used translations of the various Khwaday-Namags and other independent epic stories when writing about ancient Iranian history. Regarding the composition of the Khwaday-Namag, A. Shapour Shahbazi writes that its Sasanian compilers "mingled the memory of recent history with remote past and hoary legends" and did not draw from documentary sources like the Middle Persian inscriptions of the Sasanian kings.