Arab contacts with Persian culture, which had always existed in some form or other, increased markedly, first under the Umayyads but especially with the early Abbasid rul- ers, whose court pro to cols (like their bureaucracy) derived in large part from Sassanian practice. 9 Models were provided through the translation and imitation of works of the "mirror for princes" type, manuals of statecraft which had formed an . important genre of Sassanian prose literature, by secretaries and scribes who were themselves often of Persian origin, like 'Abd al-J:Iamid al-Katib (d. 750) and Ibn al-Muqaffa' (d. 754).10