IN a former volume, * intended to serve as an Introduction to this work, and yet to be in a measure independent, I have Scope of this volume. treated of the History of the Persians, chiefly from the intellectual and literary standpoints, from its first beginnings down to the early Ghaznawí Period, in which, about A.D. 1000, the genius of Firdawsí definitely assured the success of that Renaissance of Persian literature which began rather more than a century before his time. The present volume, therefore, deals not with origins, but with Persian literary history in the narrower sense—that is, the literature of the Persians (including so much of the external and intellectual history of Persia as is necessary for a proper comprehension of this) from the time when their language assumed its present form (that is, from the time of the Arab Conquest and the adoption by the Persians of the religion of Islám in the seventh century of our era) down to the present day. This post-Muhammadan literature (which is what we ordinarily mean when we speak of “Persian Litera­ture”) arose gradually after the subjugation of Persia by the Arabs, and the overthrow by Islám of the Zoroastrian creed, and may be said to have begun, so far as documentary evidence exists, about a thousand years ago. During the whole of this period the language has undergone changes so slight that the verses of ancient poets like Ḥandhala of Bádghís (A.D. 820-872) and Rúdagí (end of ninth and beginning of tenth centuries) are at least as easily understood by a Persian of the present day as are the works of Shakespear by a modern Englishman. It is important for all students of Persian to apprehend this fact thoroughly, and to realise that that lan­guage has changed less in the last thousand years than English has changed in the last three centuries. The most archaic literary monuments of the Persian language (by which term, throughout this volume, post-Muhammadan Persian is intended) are, indeed, characterised by certain peculiarities of style and vocabulary; but I much question whether there exists any Persian scholar, native or foreign, who could assign even an approximate date to a work of unknown authorship written within the last five centuries and containing no historical allusions which might serve to fix the period of its com­position.

I cannot in this volume repeat what I have elsewhere set forth in detail as to the history of Persia in pre-Muhammadan Scope of the Prolegomena contained in the previous volume. and early Muhammadan times. This history was in my Prolegomena carried down to that period when the great 'Abbásid Caliphate of Baghdád, culminating in the splendid reigns of Hárúnu'r-Rashíd and his son al-Ma'mún (A.D. 786-833), was already on the decline; a decline manifested externally by the gradual detachment from effective central control of one province after another, and continuing steadily, if slowly, until Húlágú's Mongol hordes gave it the coup de grâce in A.D. 1258, when Baghdád was sacked and the last real Caliph of the House of 'Abbás cruelly done to death.

For the ordinary student of Persian literature it is sufficient to know, so far as its origins are concerned, that the immediate ancestor of Persian was Pahlawí, the official language of Persia under the Sásánian kings (A.D. 226-651), and, for Sketch of the origins discussed in the Prolego­mena. two or three subsequent centuries, the religious language of the Zoroastrian priests; that the extant literature of Pahlawí has been estimated by Dr. E. W. West (perhaps the greatest European authority on this subject) as roughly equal in bulk to the Old Testament, and that it is chiefly religious and liturgical in character; that there exist, besides this literature, inscriptions on rocks, coins, and gems dating from the middle of the third century; that this Pahlawí language, the ancestor of later Persian, is itself the descendant of the Old Persian tongue known to us only through the inscriptions carved on the rocks of Persepolis, Behistun, and other places by order of Darius the Great and subsequent Achæmenian kings; and that the Avestic (so-called “Zend”) language in which the Zoroastrian scriptures are written was a sister-tongue to that last men­tioned and to Sanskrit, standing, therefore, out of the direct line of ascent from modern Persian, and represented at the present day by certain provincial dialects of Persia, and, as Darmesteter supposes, by the Pashto or Afghán speech.

Arranged in tabular form, the above facts may be expressed as follows:—

I. Old Persian of Achæmenian Avestic, represented by the Avesta, Period of which the oldest portion is (B.C. 550-330), represented only by inscriptions. that known as the Gáthás, which are generally supposed to date from the time of Zoroaster or his immediate disciples (probably about B.C. 600).

II. The Invasion of Alexander (B.C. 333) inaugurates a period of anarchy, devoid of literary monuments, which lasted five centuries and a half, and was terminated by the establishment of—

III. The Sásánian Dynasty (A.D. 226-651), under which Pahlawí became the official language of the State and of the Zoroastrian Church, this language being the child of Old Persian, and the parent of modern Persian.

IV. The Arab Conquest (A.D. 641-651), resulting in the conversion of the great bulk of the Persian nation to the religion of Islám, and in the practical supersession of Persian by Arabic as the official and literary language.

V. The Persian Renaissance, with which the period included in this volume may be said to begin, and which, beginning about A.D. 850, gathers strength in proportion as Persia succeeds in emancipating herself more and more from the control of the weakening Caliphate of Baghdád, and in re-asserting her political independence.

Such, in outline, is Persian literary history; but while the ordinary student of Persian may well content himself with a Influence of the Arab Conquest on Persia. summary and superficial knowledge of all that pre­cedes the Arab Conquest, he cannot thus lightly pass over the consequences of that momentous event. Once again in this volume, as in that which preceded it (p. 6), I am fain to quote Nöldeke's most pregnant saying, “Hellenism never touched more than the surface of Persian life, but Írán was penetrated to the core by Arabian religion and Arabian ways.”

The Arabic language is in a special degree the language of a great religion. To us the Bible is the Bible, whether we The unique position of the Arabic language. read it in the original tongues or in our own; but it is otherwise with the Qur'án amongst the Muslims. To them this Arabic Qur'án is the very Word of God, an objective, not a subjective reve­lation. When we read therein: “Qul: Huwa 'lláhu Aḥad” (“Say: He, God, is One”), God Himself is the speaker, not the Prophet; and therefore the Muslim, in quoting his scripture, employs the formula, “HE says, exalted is HE”; while only in quoting the traditions (Aḥádíth) of the Prophet does he say, “He says, upon him be the Blessing of God and His Peace.” Hence the Qur'án cannot properly be translated into another tongue, for he who translates by so doing interprets and perchance distorts. It is only by Christian missionaries, so far as my knowledge goes, that translations of the Qur'án have been published detached from the text; amongst Muslims the most that we find is an interlinear rendering of the Arabic text in Persian, Turkish, or Urdú, as the case may be, such rendering being in general slavishly literal. * In addition to this, the prayers which every good Muslim should recite five times a day are in Arabic, as are the Confession of Faith and other religious formulæ which are constantly on the tongue of the true believer, be he Persian, Turk, Indian, Afghan, or Malay; so that every Muslim must have some slight acquaintance with the Arabic language, while nothing so greatly raises him in the eyes of his fellows as a more profound knowledge of the sacred tongue of Islám. In addition to all this, the language of every people who embraced Islám was inundated from the first by Arabic words, first the technical terms of Theology and Jurisprudence, then the terminology of all the nascent sciences known to the Muhammadan civilisation, and lastly a mass of ordinary words, which latter have often, as the former have almost always, entirely displaced the native equivalent. To write Persian devoid of any admixture of Arabic is at least as difficult as to write English devoid of any admixture of Greek, Latin, or French derivatives; it can be done within certain limits, but the result is generally incomprehensible without the aid of a dictionary. As I write, there lies before me a specimen of such attempts, to wit a communication of nearly one hundred lines made to the Akhtar or “Star” (an excellent Persian newspaper formerly published at Constantinople, but now unfortunately extinct) by certain Zoroastrians or “guebres” of Yazd, and published in the issue of October 27, 1890. The matter is simple, and the abstract ideas requiring expression few; yet the writers have felt themselves compelled to give footnotes explaining (in every case save two by an Arabic equivalent) the meanings of no less than fourteen words, and many other such glosses would be required to make the article intelligible to the ordinary Persian reader. Thus áwízha (pure) must be glossed as kháṣṣ, darad (form) as ṣúrat, khuhr (country) as waṭan, farhikht (courtesy, culture) as adab, and so on, the glosses in all these cases and most others being Arabic words. Another more ambitious, but scarcely more successful, attempt of the same kind is Prince Jalál's Náma-i-Khusrawán (“Book of Princes”), a short history of the pre-Muhammadan dynasties of Persia published at Vienna in A.H. 1297 (A.D. 1880), and reviewed by Mordtmann in vol. xxviii of the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, pp. 506-508. Even the Sháhnáma of Firdawsí, composed nine centuries ago, and, as I think is shown by a study of con­temporary poetry, purposely composed in the most archaic style and speech which the author could command, is far from being so free from Arabic words as is often asserted and imagined.