The ''Iskandarnameh'' (''Book of Alexander''),' is the oldest

Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...

recension of the '' Alexander Romance'' tradition, anonymous and dated to some time between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, although recently its compilation has been placed in the eleventh century by Evangelos Venetis, during the reign of

Mahmud of Ghazni Abu al-Qasim Mahmud ibn Sabuktigin (; 2 November 971 – 30 April 1030), usually known as Mahmud of Ghazni or Mahmud Ghaznavi (), was Sultan of the Ghaznavid Empire, ruling from 998 to 1030. During his reign and in medieval sources, he is usuall ...

in the court of the

Ghaznavid Empire The Ghaznavid dynasty ( ''Ġaznaviyān'') was a Persianate Muslim dynasty of Turkic peoples, Turkic ''mamluk'' origin. It ruled the Ghaznavid Empire or the Empire of Ghazni from 977 to 1186, which at its greatest extent, extended from the Oxus ...

. Alexander is described as a

Muslim Muslims () are people who adhere to Islam, a Monotheism, monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God ...

king and prophet and is identified with the conqueror named

Dhu al-Qarnayn , (, ; "The Owner of Two-Horns") is a leader who appears in the Qur'an, Surah al-Kahf (18), Ayahs 83–101, as one who travels to the east and west and sets up a barrier between a certain people and Gog and Magog (). Elsewhere, the Qur'an t ...

in the

Quran The Quran, also Romanization, romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a Waḥy, revelation directly from God in Islam, God (''Allah, Allāh''). It is organized in 114 chapters (, ) which ...

. This identification is also witnessed in the Arabic recensions of the Alexander romance, such as the Qissat al-Iskandar and the

Qissat Dhulqarnayn The Qiṣṣat Dhī ʾl-Qarnayn (''Qissat Dhulqarnayn'', "Story of Dhulqarnayn") is a Hispano-Arabic legend of Alexander the Great preserved in two fourteenth-century manuscripts in Madrid and likely dates as a ninth-century Arabic translation of ...

. As such, he is double-horned and builds the famous

Gates of Alexander The Gates of Alexander, also known as the Caspian Gates, are one of several mountain passes in eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and Persia, often imagined as an actual fortification, or as a symbolic boundary separating the civilized from the unciv ...

against

Gog and Magog Gog and Magog (; ) or Ya'juj and Ma'juj () are a pair of names that appear in the Bible and the Quran, Qur'an, variously ascribed to individuals, tribes, or lands. In Ezekiel 38, Gog is an individual and Magog is his land. By the time of the New ...

. The composition of the ''Iskandarnameh'' was influenced by earlier Persian compositions, such as the ''

Shahnameh The ''Shahnameh'' (, ), also transliterated ''Shahnama'', is a long epic poem written by the Persian literature, Persian poet Ferdowsi between and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Greater Iran. Consisting of some 50,000 distichs or couple ...

'' of

Ferdowsi Abu'l-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi (also Firdawsi, ; 940 – 1019/1025) was a Persians, Persian poet and the author of ''Shahnameh'' ("Book of Kings"), which is one of the world's longest epic poetry, epic poems created by a single poet, and the gre ...

Manuscripts

The ''Iskandarnameh'' is known through one manuscript, located in the private collection of Sa‘īd Nafīsī in

Tehran Tehran (; , ''Tehrân'') is the capital and largest city of Iran. It is the capital of Tehran province, and the administrative center for Tehran County and its Central District (Tehran County), Central District. With a population of around 9. ...

. The manuscript was likely composed between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The initial and final part of the known manuscript is missing. Various clear erasures and rewritings are present. The copyist claims that the writer of his own original antigraph (Abd-al-Kâfi ebn-Abi’l-Barakât) had access to several copies of the text, including the original.

Dating

is explicitly mentioned by the text, thus providing a ''terminus post quem'' for the composition of the text at minimum. One of the named copyists in the tradition may be known, Ebn-Abi’l-Barakât, who is known to have lived in the 12th century, thus providing a ''terminus ante quem'' for the dating of the text as well.

Scholarship

An edited version of the manuscript was published by Īraj Afshār first in 1964, and then again in 2008 to correct weaknesses in the earlier edition. The first substantial academic work done on the ''Iskandarnameh'' text by William Hanaway, published in his PhD dissertation in 1970. Alongside the ''Iskandarnameh'', he studied four other pre-Safavid works of Persian prose romances: the ''Dārābnāma'', ''Fīrūzshāhnāma'', ''Samak-i ʿayyār'', and the ''Qissa-yi Hamza.'' Subsequently, only sporadic papers or encyclopedic entries have been published on the work, including those by Southgate, Rubanovich, and Hanaway. The work was also the subject of the 2006 dissertation of Venetis, who published the first English translation of the work in 2017.

Translations

In 1978, Minoo Southgate produced an abridged (partial) English translation encompassing one fifth of the original text. The first complete English translation of the text was published by Venetis in 2017.

References

{{Reflist 11th-century literature Alexander Romance Dhul-Qarnayn Persian literature

Manuscripts

Dating

Scholarship

Translations

See also

References