RESOURCESof this text with a French translation was published in nine volumes
by C. Barbier de Meynard and Pavet de Courteille as Les prairies d' or
(Paris, 1861-77). Unfortunately this edition was based on only five
manuscripts in Paris and Leiden, and the French translation tends to
be rather free and imaginative, sometimes ignoring entire phrases and
clauses of the Arabic text. Consequently the use of this French trans-
lation by non-Arabists interested in the Sasanian period from Chris-
tens en onward, has resulted in some strange interpretations of Sasanian
history and in the emergence of pseudo-issues. Many more manuscripts
of this text are now known; but when C. Pellat undertook to do a
revised edition and translation in the 1960's he claimed that a quick
survey convinced him that these manuscripts were not worth the effort
for either the text or the translation so he collated only two additional
manuscripts. Pellat's revised translation was published first in five
volumes (Paris, 1965-74), but he did little more than "modernize"
the French of the previous translation. All seven volumes of his revised
text were published in Beirut by 1979, but he was concerned mainly
with correcting the form of foreign names. Consequently Pellat's edi-
tion and translation represent little significant improvement, and there
is still no real edition of this text based on all known manuscripts. In
order to discourage the use of either of these editions or translations,
Y. Daghir's four-volume Beirut (1965-66) edition has been cited here.
For evaluations of Mas'iidi as an historian, see C. Pellat, "Was al-
Mas'iidi a Historian or an Adib?" ]PHS 9 (1961): 231-324, and
]. Ali, "Sources of Al Mas'udi's History Work (Mawarid ta'rikh al-
Mas'iidi)," Sum er 20 (1964): 1-48. Mas'iidi has recently been the
subject of two important monographs, each valuable in its own way:
T. Khalidi's Islamic Historiography: The Histories of Mas'udt (AI-
bany, 1975), and M. Shboul's Al-Mas'udt and His World: A Muslim
Humanist and His Interest in Non-Muslims (London, 1979).
The Opus Chronologicum of Elias of Nasibin (Elias bar Shinaya,
975-ca. 1049) is a bilingual, interlinear Arabic and Syriac text with
events for each year and calendrical tables until 1018; it survives in
an autograph manuscript dated 1019 (BM Add. 7197). The text was
published by E. W. Brooks and J. B. Chabot in CSCO, Scr. Syri, 21,
22 (Louvain, 1954), with a Latin translation in CSCO, Scr. Syri, 23,
24 (Louvain, 1954). The chronological part contains important details
concerning upper Iraq and Mesopotamia in the early Marwani period;
the Islamic section has been published with a German translation by