THIS book, as its title implies, is a history, not of the different dynasties which have ruled in Persia and of the kings who Scope of work. composed those dynasties, but of the Persian people. It is, moreover, the history of that people written from a particular point of view—the literary. In other words, it is an attempt to portray the subjective— that is to say, the religious, intellectual, and æsthetic— characteristics of the Persians as manifested in their own writings, or sometimes, when these fail, in those of their neighbours. It is not, however, precisely a history of Persian Literature; since, on the one hand, it will exclude from con­sideration the writings of those who, while using the Persian language as the vehicle of their thought, were not of Persian race; and, on the other hand, it will include what has been written by Persians who chose as their medium of expression some language other than their mother-tongue. India, for example, has produced an extensive literature of which the language is Persian, but which is not a reflex of the Persian mind, and the same holds good in lesser degree of several branches of the Turkish race, but with this literature we are in no wise concerned. Persians, on the other hand, have continued ever since the Muhammadan Conquest—that is to say, for more than twelve hundred years—to use the Arabic language almost to the exclusion of their own in writing on certain subjects, notably theology and philosophy; while during the two centuries immediately succeeding the Arab invasion the language of the conquerors was, save amongst those who still adhered to the ancient national faith of Zoroaster, almost the sole literary medium employed in Persia. To ignore this literature would be to ignore many of the most important and characteristic manifestations of the Persian genius, and to form an altogether inadequate judgment of the intellectual activity of that ingenious and talented people.

The term “Persian” as used by us, and by the Greeks, Jews, Syrians, Arabs, and other foreigners, has a wider sig- Meaning of the
term Persian. nification than that which it originally bore. The Persians call themselves Írání and their land Írán,* and of this land Pársa, the Persis of the Greeks, the modern Fárs,* is one province out of several. But because that province gave birth to the two great dynasties (the Achæmenian in the sixth century before, and the Sásánian in the third century after Christ) which made their arms for­midable and their name famous in the West, its meaning was extended so as to include the whole people and country which we call Persian; just as the tribe of Angles, though numerically inferior to the Saxons, gave their name to England and all that the term English now connotes. As in our own country Angles, Saxons, and Jutes merged in one English people, and the dialects of Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex in one English language, so in Írán the inhabitants of Parthia, Media, and Persis became in course of time blended in one Persian people, and their kindred dialects (for already Strabo found them in his time “almost of the same speech,” <text in Greek script omitted>)* in one Persian tongue.

The Persian language of to-day, Fársí, the language of Fárs, is then the lineal offspring of the language which The Persian language of Achæmenian times. Cyrus and Darius spoke, and in which the proclamations engraved by their commands on the rocks of Behistun (now called Bí-sitún) and Naqsh-i-Rustam, and the walls and columns of Persepolis, are drawn up. These inscriptions of the Achæ-menian kings, who ruled in Persia from B.C. 550 until the last Darius was overthrown by Alexander the Great, B.C. 330, are sufficiently extensive and well understood to show us what the Persian language was more than 2,400 years ago.

Remote as is the period from which the earliest written monuments of the Persian language date, they do not, unfor- Interruptions in the series of written monu­ments of the Per­sian language. tunately, present an unbroken series. On the contrary, their continuity is broken between the Achæmenian period and the present day by two great gaps corresponding with two great foreign invasions which shattered the Persian power and reduced the Persian people to the position of a subject race. The first of these, beginning with the Greek invasion under Alexander and ending with the overthrow of the Parthian by the Sásánian dynasty, embraces a period of about five centuries and a half (B.C. 330-A.D. 226). The second, beginning with the Arab invasion and Muhammadan Conquest, which destroyed the Sásánian dynasty and overthrew the Zoroastrian religion, though much shorter, had far deeper and more permanent effects on the people, thought, and language of Persia. “Hellenism,” as Nöldeke says, “never touched more than the surface of Persian life, but Írán was penetrated to the core by Arabian religion and Arab ways.” The Arab con­quest, though presaged by earlier events,* may be said to have begun with the battles of Buwayb and Qádisiyya (A.D. 635-637), and to have been completed and confirmed by the death of the last Sásánian king, Yazdigird III, A.D. 651 or 652. The end of the Arabian period cannot be so definitely fixed. In a certain sense it endured till the sack of Baghdad and murder of al-Musta'ṣim bi'lláh, the last 'Abbásid Caliph, in A.D. 1258 by the Mongols under Hulágú Khán, the grandson of Changíz Khán. Long before this, however, the Arab power had passed into the hands of Persian and Turkish vassals, and the Caliph, whom they sometimes cajoled and conciliated, but more often coerced or ignored, had ceased to exercise aught beyond a spiritual authority save in the imme­diate neighbourhood of Baghdad. Broadly speaking, however, the revival of the Persian language proceeded pari passu with the detachment of the Persian provinces from the direct control of the Caliph's administration, and the uprising of local dynasties which yielded at most a merely nominal obedience to the 'Abbásid court. Of these dynasties the Ṭáhirids (A.D. 820) are sometimes accounted the first; but they may more truly be considered to begin with the Ṣaffárids (A.D. 867), Sámánids (A.D. 874), and Buwayhids (A.D. 932), and to reach their full development in the Ghaznawids and Seljúqs.

The history of the Persian language falls, therefore, into Periods in the development of the Persian Language. three well-defined periods, as follows:—

I. The Achœmenian Period (B.C. 550-330), repre­sented by the edicts and proclamations contained in the Persian cuneiform inscriptions, which, though of considerable extent, are similar in character and style, and yield a vocabulary of not much more than 400 separate words.* The language represented by these inscriptions, and by them only, is gene­rally Old Persian. called Old Persian.*

II. The Sásánian Period (A.D. 226-652), represented by inscriptions on monuments, medals, gems, seals, and coins, and Middle Persian, or Pahlawí. by a literature estimated as, roughly speaking, equal in bulk to the Old Testament.* This literature is entirely Zoroastrian and almost entirely theological and liturgical. The language in which it is written, when disentangled from the extraordinary graphic system, known as Huzváresh (Zuwárishn), used to represent it, is little more than a very archaic form of the present speech of Persia devoid of the Arabic element. It is generally known as Pahlawí, sometimes as Middle Persian. Properly speaking, the term Pahlawí applies rather to the script than the language, but, following the general usage, we shall retain it in speaking of the official language of Sásánian Persia. This script continued to be used on the coins of the early Caliphs and the independent Spáhpats or Ispahbadhs of Ṭabaristán for more than a century after the Arab conquest; and for at least as long additions continued to be made by the Zoroastrians of Persia to the Pahlawí literature, but the latest of them hardly extend beyond the ninth century of our era.* Practically speaking the natural use of what we understand as Pahlawí ceased about a thousand years ago.

III. The Muhammadan Period (from about A.D. 900 until the present day). When we talk of “Modern Persian,” we Modern or Neo­Persian. mean simply the Persian language as it reappears after the Arab Conquest, and after the adoption of the Muhammadan religion by the vast majority of the inhabitants of Persia. The difference between late Pahlawí and the earliest form of Modern Persian was, save for the Arabic element generally contained in the latter, merely a difference of script, and script in this case was, at this transition period (the ninth century of our era), mainly Dislike of written charac­ters associated with other religions. a question of religion. In the East, even at the present day, there is a tendency to associate written characters much more than language with religion. There are Syrian Christians whose language is Arabic, but who prefer to write their Arabic in the Syriac character; and these Karshuni writings (for so they are called) form a considerable literature. So also Turkish-speaking Armenians and Greeks often employ the Armenian and Greek characters respectively when they write Turkish. Similarly the Jews of Persia have a pretty extensive literature written in the Persian language but in the Hebrew character, while Moors of Spain who had forgotten how to speak Arabic wrote Spanish treatises in the Arabic Reasons why the Pahlawí script rapidly fell into desuetude. character.* The Pahlawí script was even more closely associated in the Eastern mind with the Zoroastrian religion than was the Arabic character with the faith of Islám; and when a Persian was converted from the former to the latter creed he gave up, as a rule, once and for all a method of writing which was not only cumbrous and ambiguous in the highest degree, but also fraught with heathen associations. Moreover, writing (and even read­ing) was probably a rare accomplishment amongst the Persians when the Pahlawí character was the means of written com­munication, save amongst the Zoroastrian magopats and dastobars and the professional scribes (dapír). We read in the Kárnámak-i-Artakhshír-i-Pápakán,* or Book of the Deeds of Ardashír, the son of Pápak (the founder of the Sásánian dynasty)—one of the three Pahlawí romances or “historical novels” which time has spared to us in the original form* — that when this prince “reached the age for the higher education, he attained such proficiency in Writing, Riding, and other accomplishments that he became famous throughout all Párs.” So also we read in the account which the great historian Ṭabarí* gives of the reign of Shápúr, the son and successor of Ardashír, that “when he came to the place where he wished to found the city of Gundê-Shápúr, he met there an old man named Bêl, of whom he enquired whether it would be permitted him to build a town on this site. Bêl answered, ‘If I at my advanced age can learn to write, then is it also permitted thee to build a town on this spot,’” by which answer, as Nöldeke has pointed out, he meant to imply (though in the issue he proved mistaken) that both things were impossible. To the Pahlawí script, in short, might well be applied the Frenchman's well-known definition of speech as “the art of concealing thought”; it had no intrinsic merits save as a unique philological puzzle; and, once deprived of the support of religion, ancient custom, and a conservative priesthood, it could not hold its own against the far more legible and convenient Arabic character, of which, moreover, a knowledge was essential to every Muslim. But the fact cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the peculiarity of Pahlawí (as will be more fully explained presently) lay in the script only, and that a Pahlawí book read aloud by a Zoroastrian priest or scribe of the ninth century of our era would have been perfectly intelligible to a contemporary Persian Muham­madan; and that if the latter had taken it down in the Arabic character as he heard it read, what he wrote would have been simply “Modern Persian” in its most archaic form without admixture of Arabic words. Indeed, so comparatively slight (so far as we can judge) are the changes which the Persian spoken language has undergone since the Sásánian period, that if it were possible for an educated Persian of the present day to be suddenly thrust back over a period of fourteen or fifteen hundred years, he would probably be able to understand at least a good deal of what his countrymen of that period were saying. The gulf which separates that speech from Old Persian is far wider, and the first Sásánian king, notwith­standing the accomplishments which made him “famous throughout all Párs,” if he could similarly have travelled backwards in time for some six centuries, would have comprehended hardly a word of what was said at the Achæmenian court.