Ferdowsi, his sources and his methodology utilized in the tale of Ardeshir Babakan

The enigma of sources and the methodology Ferdowsi employed to compose Shahnameh is one of the major challenges in Shahnameh scholarship. Based on the similarity of certain titles in the introduction remained by the Abu Mansouri Shahnameh, a group assumed that this book was the sole source used by Ferdowsi. However some believed that Ferdowsi along side it had utilized other sources. The main reason for this group of researchers is that since the only common main source used by Ferdowsi and Thaalibi is Abu Mansouri's shahnameh and that some parts of Shahnameh such as Bizhan and Manizheh, and The seven trials of Rostam which were not appeared in Thaalibi's work, Ghorarosyr it can be concluded that those parts were certainly borrowed from another source. Nevertheless the fact that Thaalibi's use of the Shahnameh of Abu Mansouri is provable according to his own claim, due to the destruction of the Shahnameh of Abu Mansouri, it is difficult to determine which stories in particular were borrowed from this Shahnameh by Thaalibi. Analysis of four narratives of the tale of Ardeshir Babakan from four texts and their comparison with the version of the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi indicates that Ferdowsi while drawing upon a written source, had used many other sources intermittently to compile the tale of Ardeshir Babakan.