The Sasanian Book-of-Kings layer behind Khwaday-Namag

Epistemic status

Unattested inferred source layer.

This article describes an entity that is not directly attested. It is an inference from the evidence listed below.

Summary

Inferpedia infers a lost Sasanian Book-of-Kings transmission layer behind later Arabic and Persian reports associated with the Khwaday-Namag, while avoiding the stronger claim that one stable original book can be reconstructed.

What is being inferred

The inferred entity is a transmission layer: Middle Persian royal-historical material, translations, excerpts, and retellings that fed later accounts of Iranian kingship and epic history.

What is attested

• Modern scholarship treats Khwadaynamag as a lost Middle Persian Book-of-Kings problem.
• Later Arabic and Classical Persian works preserve material that is commonly routed back to Sasanian historical tradition.
• A major scholarly account warns that no surviving Middle Persian fragment can simply be identified as the Khwadaynamag itself.

Why infer this entity

• Later historiographical and epic materials repeatedly require an upstream Sasanian royal-historical substrate.
• The transmission path crosses languages and genres, which explains why the surviving traces are distributed rather than preserved as one manuscript.
• The safest object is a lost source layer or tradition matrix, not a single recoverable codex.

Evidence ledger

The imported ledger uses Hameen-Anttila's open-access Brill monograph as the primary specialist source, Britannica as independent reference support, and Library of Congress metadata as bibliographic control.

Counterarguments

• Khwadaynamag may be a retrospective scholarly label for a wider tradition rather than a single title.
• Later Arabic and Persian retellings may have reshaped the material too heavily for precise reconstruction.
• Some references to Book-of-Kings material may point to multiple books or genres rather than one lineage.

Confidence scores

• Direct attestation: 30
• Existence warrant: 78
• Specificity confidence: 48
• Reconstruction dependence: 72
• Counterevidence pressure: 28

What would change the score

• A newly identified Middle Persian fragment explicitly tied to the tradition would raise specificity and direct attestation.
• A source-critical map showing several unrelated source families would split the entry into multiple inferred layers.
• Strong evidence that later Islamic-period authors invented the upstream continuity would lower warrant.

Related lacunae

• Lost Sasanian historical writing.
• Shahnameh source traditions.
• Arabic translations of Middle Persian historical material.