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The name of the author of this romance and the precise time when it was composed are not known. Ouseley states that none of the manuscripts of the work which he had seen appeared to be much older than the end of the 17th century. But we are now able to place the date of its composition at least three centuries earlier, since the manuscript of the Turkī version, already referred to, bears to have been transcribed A.H. 838, or A.D. 1434; and it is not unlikely that the translation was made several years before that date. And as well-known or popular works are usually selected for translation, we may reasonably conclude that the Persian Romance of Prince Bakhtyār was composed not later than the end of the 14th century. That it is posterior to the end of the 13th century might be supposed from the circumstance that the author in two instances^[19] employs maxims which are found in the writings of the great Persian poet Sa`dī, if we were sure that these maxims are really Sa`dī’s own.^[20] It has struck me as rather singular that I can recognise only two of the nine stories which Bakhtyār relates as existing in another Eastern work, namely, the Tūtī Nāma, or Tales of a Parrot, of Nakshabī. This work, according to Pertsch, was written in A.D. 1330, and was preceded by another Persian book on the same subject, by an unknown writer, which was based on an older Sanskrit book (now lost), of which the Suka Saptati, or Seventy Tales of a Parrot, is only an abstract. Nakshabī’s work (adds Pertsch), copies of which are rare, has been greatly superseded by Kāderī’s abridgment, which was written in India, probably about the middle of the 17th century.^[21] The “Story of the King of Abyssinia” (pp. 74–85 of the present work) is identical with the story told by the Parrot on the 50th Night in the Tūtī Nāma of Nakshabī (India Office MS. 2573), where it bears the title of “Story of the Daughter of the Kaisar of Rūm, and her trouble by reason of her Son;” and the “Story of the King of Abyssinia” (pp. ssss1–72) corresponds with the 51st Night, “Story of the Daughter of the Vizier Khāssa, and how she found safety through the blessing of her own purity” (for King Dādīn, and his Viziers Kāmkār and Kārdār of our story, Nakshabī has King Bahrām, and the Viziers Khāssa and Khalāssa). Here the question naturally suggests itself: did Nakshabī take these two stories from the Bakhtyār Nāma, or did the author of the latter borrow them from Nakshabī? It is at least a rather curious coincidence that in the Persian romance of the “Four Dervishes” (Chehār Darvīsh), ascribed to Amīr Khusrū (about A.D. 1300), a work which is best known by its Hindustanī version, Bāgh o Bāhar, or Garden and Spring, occur the names of three of the persons who figure in the Bakhtyār romance: the King, as in our work, is called Āzādbakht, his son Bakhtyār, and Bihzād is the name of a third.