The Iskandarnameh (or Iskandarnamah, Iskandarnama ; "Book of Alexander"), not to be confused with the Iskandarnameh of Nizami,[1][2] is the oldest Persian recension of the Alexander Romance tradition, anonymous and dated to some time between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, although recently its compilation has been placed in the eleventh century by Evangelos Venetis, during the reign of Mahmud of Ghazni in the court of the Ghaznavid Empire.
Alexander is described as a Muslim king and prophet and is identified with the conqueror named Dhu al-Qarnayn in the Quran.
One of the named copyists in the tradition may be known, Ebn-Abi’l-Barakât, who is known to have lived in the 12th century, thus providing a terminus ante quem for the dating of the text as well.
Alongside the Iskandarnameh, he studied four other pre-Safavid works of Persian prose romances: the Dārābnāma, Fīrūzshāhnāma, Samak-i ʿayyār, and the Qissa-yi Hamza.
[5][6] Subsequently, only sporadic papers or encyclopedic entries have been published on the work, including those by Southgate,[7] Rubanovich,[8][4] and Hanaway.