Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/686

656 PERSIA [LITERATURE. by a new literary idiom still in its infancy ; nevertheless the few poets who arose under the Tahirids and Saffurids show already the germs of the characteristic tendency of all later Persian literature, which aims at amalgamating the enforced spirit of Islamism with their own Aryan feelings, and reconciling the strict deism of the Moham medan religion with their inborn loftier and more or less pantheistic ideas ; and we can easily trace in the few fragmentary verses of men like Hanzalah, Hakim Firuz, Forms of and Abu Salik those principal forms of poetry now used Eastern in common by all Mohammedan nations the forms of poetry. ^ ue j^^fo (the encomiastic, elegiac, or satirical poem), the ghazal or ode (a love -ditty, wine -song, or religious hymn), the rubai or quatrain (our epigram, for which the Persians invented a new metre in addition to those adopted from the Arabs), and the mathnawi or double-rhymed poem (the legitimate form for epic and didactic poetry). The first who wrote such a mathnawi was Abu Shukiir of Balkh, the oldest literary representative of the third dynasty of Khorasan, the Samanids, who had been able in the course of time to dethrone the Saffarids, and to secure the government of Persia, nominally still under the supremacy of the caliphs in Baghdad, but in fact with full sovereignty. The undisputed reign of this family dates from the accession of Amir Nasr II. (9 13-942; 301-331 A. H.), who, more than any of his predecessors, patronized arts Minstrels and sciences in his dominions. The most accomplished of 10th minstrels of his time were Mohammed Fardladi ; Abu century. >i_< Abbas of Bokhara, a writer of very tender verses ; Abu 1-Muzaffar Nasr of Nishapiir ; Abu Abdallah Mohammed of Junaid, equally renowned for his Arabic and Persian poetry ; Ma nawi, full of original thoughts and spiritual subtleties ; Khusrawanf, from whom even Firdausi condescended to borrow quotations ; Abu 1-Hasan Shahid of Balkh, the first who made a diwan or alphabetical collection of his lyrics ; and Master Riidagi, the first classic genius of Persia, who impressed upon every form of lyric and didactic poetry its peculiar stamp and individual character (see RUDAGI). His graceful and captivating style was imitated by Hakim Khabbaz, a great baker, poet, and quack ; Abu Shu aib Salih of Herat, who left a spirited little song in honour of a young Christian maiden; Raunaki of Bokhara; Abu 1-Fath of Bust, who was also a good Arabic poet ; the amir Abu 1-Hasan All Alagatchi, who handled the pen as skilfully as the sword ; Umarah of Merv, a famous astronomer ; and Kisa i, a native of the same town, a man of stern and ascetic manners, who sang in melodious rhythm the praise of All and the twelve imams. All these poets flourished under the patronage of the Samanid princes, who also fostered the growing desire of their nation for historical and antiquarian researches, for exegetical and medical studies. Mansur I., the grandson of Rudagi s patron, ordered (963 ; 352 A. H.) his Avazfr Bal aii to translate the Tabari. famous universal history of Tabari (224-310 A.H.) from Arabic into Persian ; and this Ta rikh-i- Tabari, 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. The same prince employed the most learned among the ulemd of Trans- oxiana for a translation of Tabari s second great work, the Tafsir, or commentary on the Koran, and accepted the dedication of the first Persian book on medicine, a phar macopoeia by the physician Abu Mansur Muwaffak b. 1 AK of Herat (edited by Seligmann, Vienna, 1859), which forms a kind of connecting link between Greek and Indian medi cine. It was soon after further developed by the great Avicenna (died 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 Ddnishndma-i- -Aid 1 1, in his native tongue. A still greater impulse was given, both to the patriotic feelings and the national poetry of the Persians, by Mansur s son and successor, Prince Nuh 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 Dakikf, who openly professed in his ghazals the Zoroastrian Dakii creed, to turn the Pars! collection of the venerable legends and traditions of the heroic ages of Iran, the Kkodd indma, or "Book of Kings" (which had been translated from the Pahlavi under the Saffarid Ya kub b. Laith), into Per sian verse. Shortly after commencing this work Dakiki was murdered in the prime of life ; and the fall of the minstrel was soon followed by that of the Samanid dyn asty itself, which was supplanted by the younger and more vigorous house of Sabuktagin, the founder of the Ghaznawids, Avho had rapidly risen from the rank of a common Turkish soldier to that of an independent ruler of Ghazna(Ghazni, Ghuznee)and all the surrounding countries, including a considerable portion of India. But Dakiki 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 Firdausi (940-1020; 328-411 A.H.), Firda with whom we enter the golden age of the national epopee in Persia (see FIRDOUSI). In 1011, after thirty-five years of unremitting labour, he accomplished his gigantic task, and wrote the last distichs of the immortal Shdhndma, that " glorious monument of Eastern genius and learning," as Sir W. Jones calls it, "which, if ever it should be gener ally understood in its original language, will contest the merit of invention with Homer itself." And, although it was not he, the unrivalled master of epic art, but his old friend and patron, the less-renowned Unsurf, who officiated as " king of poets " in the court of Mahmud of Ghazna (998- 1030 ; 388-421 A.H.), who had continued his father Sabuk- tagin s conquests, and founded an empire extending from the Caucasus to Bengal and from BokhdrA and Kashgar to the Indian Ocean, he was nevertheless the central sun round which all the minor stars revolved, those four hundred poets who formed the famous "Round Table" in the sultan s magnificent palace. Firdausi s fame eclipsed that of all his contemporaries (however well founded their claim upon literary renown), men like Unsuri, Farrukhi, Asjadi, Ghada iri, Minutchehri, and others, whose eloquent praises of Mahmud have come down to us in very scarce copies, and even that of his own teacher Asadi, who survived his great pupil, and established a reputation of his own by introducing into Persian literature the novel form of the mundzarah or strife-poem, the equivalent of the Provencal tenson and the English estrif or joust. The Shdhndma, Imita from the very moment of its appearance, exercised such an tlon j* irresistible fascination upon all minds that there was soon ^ !t ^ a keen competition among the younger poets as to who n ( iml . 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 Firdausi, 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 Sistan, the family of Firdausi s greatest hero, Rustam. The first and most ambitious of these competitors seems to have been Asadi s own son, AH b. Ahmad al-Asadi, the author of the oldest Persian glossary, who completed in 1066 (458 A.H.), in upwards of 9000 distichs, the Garshdsjmdma, or marvellous story of the warlike feats and love-adventures of Garshdsp, one of Rustam s ancestors. The heroic deeds of Rustam s grandfather were celebrated in the Sdmndma, which almost equals the Shdhndma in length ; those of Rustam s two sons, in the Jahdnyirndma and the Fard-