Hamza al-Iṣfahānī as a Source on the Zoroastrian Story of Creation

In the first part of Hamza al-Iṣfahānī’s Ta’rīkh sinī mulūk al-arḍ wa’l-anbiyā, otherwise known as Kitab al-omam, there is a chapter which narrates the Zoroastrian creation story, based an unknown source. The purpose of this article is to identify the source / book for Hamza. This is done by comparing the content quoted by Hamza and that of the existing Pahlavi books. We conclude that only one of the surviving Pahlavi texts have been used, namely that of the Bunahišn. Therefore the study of Bundahišn is in a way the model for the unknown source in Hamza al-Iṣfahānī's bibliography.