TOWARDS the end of the tenth century of our era Persia, though still nominally subject to the Caliph of Baghdád (at State of Persia at the close of the tenth century. this time al-Qádir bi'lláh, whose long reign lasted from A.D. 991 to 1031), was in fact divided between the Sámánids, whose capital was at Bu­khárá, and the Daylamite House of Buwayh, who dominated the southern and south-western provinces and were practically absolute in Baghdád itself, the Caliph being a mere puppet in their hands. * Besides these, two small dynasties, the Houses of Ziyár and Ḥasanawayh, ruled respectively in Ṭabaristán (the modern Gílán and Mázandarán, lying between the southern shore of the Caspian and the Elburz Mountains) and Kurdistán. All of these dynasties appear to have been of Íránian (Persian or Kurdish) race, and none of their rulers claimed the title of Sulṭán, but contented themselves generally with those of Amír, Ispahbad, or Malik: in other words, they regarded themselves as princes and governors, but not as kings.

Al-Bírúní, the great chronologist, who flourished about A.D. 1000, and is therefore a contemporary witness for the period of which we are now speaking, discusses at some length the pedigrees of the three more important of the four dynasties mentioned above. * On the pedigree of the Buwayhids, who traced their descent from the Sásánian king Bahrám Gúr, he Persian origin of the Houses of Buwayh, Sámán, and Ziyár. casts, it is true, some doubt, and adds that certain persons ascribed to them an Arabian origin; but, whether or no they were scions of the ancient Royal House of Persia, there can be no reasonable doubt as to their Persian nationality. Concerning the House of Sámán he declares that “nobody contests the fact” that they were descended from Bahrám Chúbín, the great marzubán, or Warden of the Marches, who raised so formidable an insurrection during the reign of the Sásánian king Khusraw Parwíz (A.D. 590-627); whilst of the Ziyárids he similarly traces the pedigree up to the Sásánian king Qubádh (A.D. 488-531). We must, however, bear in mind that personal and political bias may have somewhat influenced al-Bírúní's doubts and assurances in this matter, since he could hardly refrain from professing certainty as to the noble pedigree claimed by his generous and enlightened patron and benefactor Qábús, the son of Washmgír the Ziyárid, entitled Shamsu'l-Ma'álí, “the Sun of the Heights,” whom also he may have thought to please by his aspersions on the House of Buwayh. Confirma­tion of this view is afforded by another passage in the same work (p. 131 of Sachau's translation), where al-Bírúní blames the Buwayhids for the high-sounding titles bestowed by them on their ministers, which he stigmatises as “nothing but one great lie,” yet a few lines lower lauds his patron Shamsu'l-Ma'álí (“the Sun of the Heights”) for choosing for himself “a title the full meaning of which did not exceed his merits.”

Khurásán, the realm of the Sámánids (which at that time greatly exceeded its modern limits and included much of what is now known as Transcaspia or Central Asia), was, as has been fully explained in the Prolegomena to this work, the cradle of “modern,” i.e., post-Muhammadan, Persian litera­ture. But in spite of the enthusiasm with which ath-Tha'-álibí * speaks of the galaxy of literary talent assembled at Bu- Relative degrees of culture in Khurásán, Ṭaba­ristán, and Southern Persia. khárá, it is not to be supposed that in culture and science Khurásán had outstripped Fárs, the cradle of Persian greatness, and the south of Persia gene­rally. Ath-Tha'álibí himself (loc. cit., p. 3) cites an Arabic verse by the poet Abú Aḥmad b. Abí Bakr, who flourished about the end of the ninth century of our era at the Sámánid Court, which points very clearly to the intellectual inferiority of Khurásán to 'Iráq; and a doggerel rhyme current in Persia at the present day stigmatises the Khurásánís as “clowns” (aldang). * Yet in Khurásán undoubtedly it was that the literary revival of the Persian language first began after the Muhammadan conquest; and that because it was the most remote province of the Caliph's domains and the furthest removed from Baghdád, the centre and metropolis of that Islámic culture of which the Arabic language was, from Spain to Samarqand, the recognised medium, until the destruction of the Caliphate by the barbarous Mongols in the middle of the thirteenth century. In Ṭabaristán also, another remote pro­vince, which, first under its Zoroastrian Ispahbads (who long survived the fall of their Sásánian masters), then under Shí'ite rulers of the House of 'Alí, and lastly under the House of Ziyár, long maintained itself independent of the Caliphs of Baghdád and the Sámánid rulers of Khurásán, a pretty high degree of literary culture is implied by many remarks in the earliest extant history of that province composed by Ibn Isfandiyár (who flourished in the first half of the thirteenth century); for he mentions numerous Arabic works and cites many Arabic verses produced there in the ninth and tenth centuries of our era, particularly under the Zaydí Imáms (A.D. 864-928), * as well as some Persian works and one or two in the peculiar dialect of Ṭabaristán. * As regards the House of Buwayh, Shí'ites and Persians as they were, it appears at first sight remarkable that so little of the literature of the Persian Renaissance should have been produced under their auspices, seeing that they were great patrons of learning and that the phrase “more eloquent than the two Ṣáds” (i.e., the Ṣáḥib Isma'íl b. 'Abbád and aṣ-Ṣábí, the great minister and the great historian of the House of Buwayh) had become proverbial; * but the fact that the literature produced under their auspices was almost entirely Arabic is explained, as already remarked, by the closer relations which they maintained with Baghdád, the seat of the Caliphate and metropolis of Islám. Yet we cannot doubt that Persian poetry as well as Arabic was cultivated at the Buwayhid Courts, and indeed Muḥammad 'Awfí, the oldest biographer of Persian poets whose work (entitled Lubábu'l-Albáb) has been preserved to us, mentions at least two poets who wrote in Persian and who enjoyed the patronage of the Ṣáḥib Isma'íl b. 'Abbád, viz., Manṣúr b. 'Alí of Ray, poetically surnamed Manṭiqí, and Abú Bakr Muḥam-mad b. 'Alí of Sarakhs, surnamed Khusrawí. * The former, as 'Awfí tells us, was greatly honoured by the Ṣáḥib, in whose praise he indited Persian qaṣídas, of which specimens are given; and when Badí'u'z-Zamán al-Hamadhání (the author of a celebrated collection of Maqámát, which, in the command of all the wealth and subtlety of the Arabic language, is deemed second only to the homonymous work of his more famous successor, al-Ḥarírí) came as a lad of twelve to the Ṣáḥib's reception, his skill in Arabic was tested by bidding him extem­porise an Arabic verse-translation of three Persian couplets by this poet. * Khusrawí, the second of the two poets above­mentioned, composed verses both in Arabic and Persian in praise of Shamsu'l-Ma'álí Qábús b. Washmgír, the Ziyárid ruler of Ṭabaristán, and the Ṣáḥib; while Qumrí of Gurgán, another early poet, sung the praises of the same prince.

Far surpassing in fame and talent the poets above mentioned was that brilliant galaxy of singers which adorned the Court Sulṭán Maḥmúd of Ghazna. of the great conqueror, Sulṭán Maḥmúd of Ghazna, who succeeded to the throne of his father Subuk-tigín in A.D. 998. The dynasty which under his energetic and martial rule rose so rapidly to the most commanding position, and after his death so quickly declined before the growing power of the Seljúqs, was actually founded in A.D. 962 by Alptigín, a Turkish slave of the House of Sámán, at Ghazna, in the heart of the Afghan highlands; but its political significance only began some fourteen years later on the accession of Maḥmúd's father Subuktigín, the slave of Alptigín. This great Maḥmúd, therefore, the champion of Islám, the conqueror of India, the ruthless foe of idolatry, “the Right Hand of the Commander of the Faithful” (<text in Greek script omitted>amínu Amíri'l-Mú'minín, or <text in Greek script omitted>amínu'd-Dawla), was the son of “the slave of a slave”; a fact of which Firdawsí made full use in that bitter satire * wherein the disappointment of his legitimate hopes of an adequate reward for his thirty years' labour on his immortal epic, the Sháhnáma, found full expres­sion, turning, as it were, in a breath into infamy that reputa­tion as a patron of letters which the King so eagerly desired; so that, as Jámí, writing five centuries later, says:—