This paper explores memory of Iran's pre-Islamic past at different stages in historiography. It begins with a discussion of the Khudāy-nāmag and the obscure circumstances of this late Sasanian history’s transmission into Arabic and Persian. Muslim sources such as al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) rarely acknowledge it even though they seem to have plundered its contents. The paper then explores the very different citation patterns under the Buyids, when, for example, the historian Miskawayh (d. 421/1030) claimed that he had on hand an extract in Arabic from a work attributed to Khusraw Anūshirvān (r. 531–79 CE), and quoted the Sasanian monarch in his own voice, followed by twenty pages of anecdotes displaying the king’s wisdom The paper’s primary argument is two-fold: first, patterns of citation changed in the tenth and eleventh centuries as historians started identifying their sources, whereas previous historians had generally not done so. Such changes occurred with the support of the Buyids and other Iranian dynasties, and when Muslim identity (Persian Muslim, especially) had become more firmly established in Iran. Second, historians such as Miskawayh did indeed have on hand fragments of texts that predated their own times. Scholars working in Arabic often broke down and reconstituted works. The difference with Iran’s pre-Islamic past lay in its different epistemological standing. Whereas in the first two or three centuries of Islamic history, one claimed memory of Islam’s founding moments, one did not do so for Iranian history. That is what makes the revival so interesting. The paper relies heavily on new, cutting edge work on “text-reuse,” i.e., the way that texts were copied into other texts. Computer scientists are developing software that can detect common passages between Arabic and Persian texts, and also paraphrase (much as the current anti-plagiarism program TurnItIn does). This means that, within five years or so, we will be able to trace in wholly new ways patterns of repetition, fragmentation, and mobility. Such questions are the subject of the author’s ongoing research. She will use digital methods, especially, to compare the histories of al-Ṭabarī and Miskawayh. This comparison, in and of itself, is valuable since it has long been held that Miskawayh relied heavily on al-Ṭabarī’s History, especially for the first sections of the work. Judging by what Miskawayh took from the History, he seems, instead, to have belonged to a very different era, one that – while more remote in time – felt a deeper connection to Iran’s pre-Islamic past.