A critical study of the redaction of the book Biographical accounts of the Barmakids

Considering that knowledge of text redacting over the past fifty years or so, and the availability of new tools and methods have greatly improved, one expects that the texts recently edited and presented to the scholarly circle should be accurate, or at least with fewer errors. Nevertheless, texts that are being brought out with numerous oversights are far from few. Ahval and akhbar-e Barmakian (“Biographical accounts of the Barmakids”) that was published through the publications office of Dr Mahmud Afshar’s Endowments Foundation in 1390 A.H./2011.Unfortunately it contains a lot of mistakes, which in some places, have caused ambiguity in the text. This book consists of two treatises that were translated by an anonymous translator or translators, probably in the 6th/12 century, from various narratives