astronomer, and Kisāʽī, a native of the same town, a man of stern and ascetic manners, who sang in melodious rhythm the praise of ʽAlī and the twelve imams. All these poets flourished under the patronage of the Sāmānid princes, who also fostered the growing desire of their nation for historical and antiquarian researches, for exegetical and medical studies. Manṣūr I., the grandson of Rūdagī’s patron, ordered (963; 352 A.H.) his vizier Balʽamī to translate the famous universal history of Ṭabarī Ṭabarī. (838–923 A.D.) from Arabic into Persian; and this Ta’rikh-i-Ṭabarī, the oldest prose work in modern Persian, is not merely remarkable from a philological point of view, it is also the classic model of an easy and simple style (French trans. by L. Dubeux and H. Zotenberg, 1867–1874). The same prince employed the most learned among the ulemā of Transoxiana for a translation of Ṭabarī’s second great work, the Tafsīr, or commentary on the Koran, and accepted the dedication of the first Persian book on medicine, a pharmacopoeia by the physician Abū Manṣūr Muwaffaq b. ʽAlī of Herāt (edited by Seligmann, Vienna, 1859), which forms a kind of connecting link between Greek and Indian medicine. It was soon after further developed by the great Avicenna (d. 1037; 428 A.H.), himself a Persian by birth and author of pretty wine-songs, moral maxims, psychological tracts, and a manual of philosophic science, the Dānishnāma-i-Alā’i, in his native tongue.
A still greater impulse was given, both to the patriotic feelings and the national poetry of the Persians, by Manṣūr’s son and successor, Prince Nūḥ II, who ascended the throne in 976 (365 A.H.). Full of enthusiasm for the glorious past of the old Iranian kingdom, he charged his court poet Daḳīḳī (Daqiqi), who openly professed in his ghazals the Zoroastrian Daḳīḳī. creed, to turn the Khodā’īnāma, or “Book of Kings,” into Persian verse. Shortly after commencing this work Daḳīḳī was murdered in the prime of life; his death was soon followed by the fall of the Sāmānid dynasty itself. But Daḳīḳī’s great enterprise was not abandoned; a stronger hand, a higher genius, was to continue and to complete it, and this genius was found in Firdousī (940–1020; 328–411 A.H.), with whom we Firdousī. enter the golden age of the national epopee in Persia (see Firdousī). In 1011, after thirty-five years of unremitting labour, he accomplished his gigantic task, and wrote the last distichs of the immortal Shāhnāma, that “glorious monument of Eastern genius and learning,” as Sir W. Jones calls it, “which, if ever it should be generally understood in its original language, will contest the merit of invention with Homer itself.” The Shāhnāma from the very moment of its appearance, Imitations of the “Shāhnāma.” exercised such an irresistible fascination upon all minds that there was soon a keen competition among the younger poets as to who should produce the most successful imitation of that classic model; and this competition has gone on under different forms through all the following centuries, even to the most recent times. First of all, the old popular traditions, so far as they had not yet been exhausted by Firdousī, were ransacked for new epic themes, and a regular cycle of national epopees gathered round the Book of Kings, drawn almost exclusively from the archives of the princes of Sejistān, the family of Firdousī’s greatest hero, Rustam. The first and most ambitious of these competitors seems to have been Asadī’s own son, ʽAlī b. Aḥmad al-Asadī, the author of the oldest Persian glossary, who completed in 1066 (458 A.H.), in upwards of 9000 distichs, the Garshāspnāma, or marvellous story of the warlike feats and love adventures of Garshāsp, one of Rustam’s ancestors. The heroic deeds of Rustam’s grandfather were celebrated in the Sāmnāma, which almost equals the Shāhnāma in length; those of Rustam’s two sons, in the Jahāgaīrnāma and the Farāmurznāma; those of his daughter, an amazon, in the Brunhild style of the German Nibelunge, in the Bān Gushāspnāma, those of his grandson in the Barsūnāma; those of his great-grandson in the Shahriyārnāma (ascribed to Mukhtārī and dedicated to Masʽūd Shāh, who is probably identical with Masʽūd b. Ibrāhīm, Sultan Maḥmūd’s great grandson, 1099–1114, 492–508 A.H.); and the wonderful exploits of a son of Isfandiyār, another hero of the Shāhnāma, in the Bahmannāma.
When these old Iranian sources were almost exhausted, the difficulty was met in various ingenious ways. Where some slight historical records of the heroic age were still obtainable poetical imagination seized upon them at once; where no traditions at all were forthcoming fiction pure and simple asserted its right; and thus the national epopee gave way to the epic story, and—substituting prose for verse—to the novel and the fairy tale. Models of the former class are the various Iskandarnāmas, or “Books of Alexander the Great,” the oldest and most original of which is that of Nizāmī of Ganja, the modern Elizavetpol (completed about 1202; 599 A.H.); the latter begins with the Kitāb-i-Samak ʽIyār, a novel in three volumes (about 1189; 585 A.H.), and reaches its climax in the Būstān-i-Khayāl, or “Garden of Imagination,” a prose romance of fifteen large volumes, by Mahommed Taḳi Khayāl, written between 1742 and 1756 (1155 and 1169 A.H.). Some writers, both in prose and verse, turned from the exhausted fields of the national glory of Persia, and chose their subjects from the chivalrous times of their own Bedouin conquerors, or even from the Jewish legends of the Koran. Of this description are the Anbiyānāma, or history of the pre-Mahommedan prophets, by Ḥasanī Shabistarī ʽAyānī (before the 8th century of the Hegira); Ibn Ḥusām’s Khāwarnāma (1427, 830 A.H.), of the deeds of ʽAlī; Bādhil’s Ḥamla-i-Ḥaidarī, which was completed by Najaf (1723; 1135 A.H.), or the life of Mahommed and the first four caliphs; Kāżim’s Faraḥnāma-i-Fāṭima, the book of joy of Fāṭima, Mahomet’s daughter (1737; 1150 A.H.)—all four in the epic metre of the Shāhnāma; and the prose stories of Ḥātim Ṭā’ī, the famous model of liberality and generosity in pre-Islamitic times; of Amīr Ḥamzah, the uncle of Mahomet; and of the Muʽjizāt-i-Mūsawī, or the miraculous deeds of Moses, by Muʽīn-almiskīn (died about 1501; 907 A.H.).
Quite a different turn was taken by the ambition of another class of imitators of Firdousī, especially during the last four centuries of the Hegira, who tried to create a new heroic epopee by celebrating in rhythm and rhyme stirring events of recent date. The gigantic figure of Tīmūr inspired Hātifī (d. 1521; 927 A.H.) with his Tīmūrnāma; the Later Epics. stormy epoch of the first Ṣafawid rulers, who succeeded at last in reuniting for some time the various provinces of the old Persian realm into one great monarchy, furnished Ḳāsimī (died after 1560; 967 A.H.)[1] with the materials of his Shāhnāma, a poetical history of Shāh Ismaʽīl and Shāh Ṭahmāsp. Another Shāhnāma, celebrating Shāh ʽAbbās the Great, was written by Kamālī of Sabzevār; and even the cruelties of Nādir Shāh were duly chronicled in a pompous epic style in ʽIshratī’s Shāhnāma-i-Nādirī (1749; 1162 A.H.). But all these poems are surpassed in length by the 33,000 distichs of the Shāhinshāhnāma by the poet-laureate of Fatḥ ʽAlī Shāh of Persia (1797–1834), and the 40,000 distichs of the Georgenāma, a poetical history of India from its discovery by the Portuguese to the conquest of Poona by the English in 1817. In India this kind of epic versification has flourished since the beginning of Humāyūn’s reign (1530–1556); e.g. the Żafarnāma-i-Shāhjahānī by Ḳudsī (d. 1646; 1056 A.H.); the Shāhinshāhnāma by Ṭālib Kalīm (d. 1651; 1061 A.H.), another panegyrist of Shāh Jahān; Ātashī’s ʽAdilnāma, in honour of Shāh Mahommed ʽAdil of Bījāpūr, who ascended the throne in 1629 (1039 A.H.) or 1627; the Tawārīkh-i-Ḳulī Ḳuṭbshāh, a metrical history of the Ḳuṭb shāhs of Golconda; and many more, down to the Fatḥnāma-i-Tīpū Sulṭān by Ghulām Ḥasan (1784; 1198 A.H.).
But the national epopee was not the only bequest the great Firdousī left to his nation. This rich genius gave also the first impulse to romantic, didactic and mystic poetry; and even his own age produced powerful co-operators in these three most conspicuous departments of Persian literature. Romantic fiction, which achieved its highest triumph Romantic Fiction. in Niẓāmī of Ganja’s (1141–1203; 535–599 A.H.) brilliant pictures of the struggles and passions in the human heart
- ↑ After 1572 (979 A.H.) according to H. E. in Grundriss, ii. 237.
