THIS PAPER IS DEDICATED to the section of al-Tabarī's Taʾrikh whose main subject is the history of the Sasanian kings. This is exactly the section covered by Theodor Nöldeke's annotated translation, which appeared under the title Geschichte der Perser und Araber zur Zeit der Sasaniden in 1879, one year before the publication of the text volume containing this section, prepared by Nöldeke himself for the De Goeje edition of al-Ṭabarī This is an unenviable starting point, since Nöldeke's work is undoubtedly an all-time classic. It is still worth reading in its entirety and consulting for detail, not less today than over a century ago, in spite of the many discoveries of new material since its publication, especially in the fields of early Sasanian and South Arabian epigraphy. It was mainly Nöldeke's translation which proved that al-Tabari was the most important source of consecutive, detailed narrative history of the Sasanian period. A fully annotated translation of this important source was therefore tantamount to a skeletal narrative history of the Sasanian period, and Nöldeke's translation is still frequently treated as such.

The question arises whether al-Ṭabarī's narrative is still vital enough to deserve a new annotated translation that will take into account more than a century of research and discoveries. In order to answer it, Zeev Rubin not only points in which Nöldeke's commentary has been rendered obsolete by newly discovered material ought to be considered, nor even mainly such points. Rather, an overview of the whole scene would be advisable, with the purpose of presenting a new perspective in the light of the advance that had been made in the field since Nöldeke.

Where and how does one start such a survey? One possible way of approaching the problem would be to begin with some sections that Nöldeke decided to leave out of his translation, because he regarded them not only as completely fictional, but also as irrelevant to his task. This immediately raises the question of what he considered his task to be. Would a modern translator have defined his task in similar terms, and would he therefore have chosen to omit these very sections on the same grounds?