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been indispensable in the working out of the plot. It is true that nearly all the characters have Persian names—perhaps none but Tariel, T'hinat'hin, Davar, and Avt'handil are originally Georgian (and the last is doubtful)—and a large number of Persian words are used[1]; but this seems to be due partly to a desire of avoiding the appearance of hinting at current events, and partly to a fashion of the time, the natural result of literary sympathies between two neighbouring cultured peoples. There is something to be said in favour of Professor Khakhanov's theory,[2] that the folk ballads about Tariel and Avt'handil, of which variants are still sung, especially by the mountaineers, were part of the popular literature before the T'hamaran age; while the historical fact of the great queen's elevation to the throne during her father's lifetime was used as a preface to the story.
There is a point to which attention might be given: In Arabic literature one of the earliest forms is that of the eulogy in brief epigrammatic verse. Now, in The Man in the Panther's Skin we find a remarkably frequent use of the word keba (praise); in a score of quatrains[3] keba occurs; we also meet with the Arabic word khotba (3, 1009, 1025) in approximately the same sense, and there is one reference to a professional eulogist, makebi catzi (1527); finally, one passage (1574) says the poem is made up out of kebani (eulogies). It is for scholars to inquire into the matter, and see whether the numerous kebani may not be more ancient than the poem, and perhaps the determinant factor in the choice of the verse form (called shairi); whether, in fact, Rust'haveli did not take from oral tradition certain short verses uniform in their prosody, and weave his work round them after their pattern. In the Athos manuscript of the Georgian Bible, copied in A.D. 978
