A Genealogical Examination of the Manuscripts of Saʻdī’s Kullīyāt

Many consider Saʻdī Shīrāzī (d.691/1292) Iran’s greatest author and poet of the Ilkhanid period.
Nevertheless many questions about his life and his works remain: We still do not know exactly which books and treatises constitute his “collected works” and what should be the order of their compilation in what is usually called “Saʻdī’s oeuvres”. Due to the vast number of manuscript variants, significant differences in the order of the presentation of the text and the variance in the contents of different manuscripts of the Kullīyāt, we are still uncertain about the nature of his work and the extent of his own contribution in compiling it.

A more systematic genealogical study of the existing manuscripts of his work may help us make reasonable inferences about these important questions and problems.

This paper carefully examines the manuscripts of Saʻdī’s Kullīyāt for the purpose of determining their precise contents, structure, and their different compilations and genealogical relationships.
At this level of analysis, the manuscripts will be categorized into different groupings on the basis of their structural and content similarities. I will thus show that the various groupings may be attributed to specific geographical areas.
For the purposes of this study, I have limited myself to those manuscripts which are dated before the year 850/1446, namely more than 150 years after Saʻdī’s death.