The Necklace of the Pleiades: 24 Essays on Persian Literature, Culture and Religion (Iranian Studies Series)

The Necklace of the Pleiades

Iranian Studies Series The Iranian Studies Series publishes high-quality scholarship on various aspects of Iranian civilisation, covering both contemporary and classical cultures of the Persian cultural area. The contemporary Persian-speaking area includes Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Central Asia, while classical societies using Persian as a literary and cultural language were located in Anatolia, Caucasus, Central Asia and the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent. The objective of the series is to foster studies of the literary, historical, religious and linguistic products in Iranian languages. In addition to research monographs and reference works, the series publishes English-Persian critical text-editions of important texts. The series intends to publish resources and original research and make them accessible to a wide audience. Chief Editor: A.A. Seyed-Gohrab (Leiden University) Advisory Board of ISS: F. Abdullaeva (University of Oxford) I. Afshar (University of Tehran) G.R. van den Berg (Leiden University) J.T.P. de Bruijn (Leiden University) N. Chalisova (Russian State University of Moscow) D. Davis (Ohio State University) F.D. Lewis (University of Chicago) L. Lewisohn (University of Exeter, UK) S. McGlinn (Unaffiliated) Ch. Melville (University of Cambridge) D. Meneghini (University of Venice) N. Pourjavady (University of Tehran) Ch. van Ruymbeke (University of Cambridge) S. Sharma (Boston University) K. Talattof (University of Arizona) Z. Vesel (CNRS, Paris) R. Zipoli (University of Venice)

The Necklace of the Pleiades Studies in Persian Literature Presented to Heshmat Moayyad on his 80th Birthday 24 Essays on Persian Literature, Culture and Religion

F.D. Lewis and S. Sharma (eds.)

Leiden University Press

Cover design: Tarek Atrissi Design ISBN 978 90 8728 091 8 e-ISBN 978 94 0060 009 6 NUR 630 © F.D. Lewis and S. Sharma / Leiden University Press, 2010 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

Heshmat Moayyad

Table of Contents Introduction Bibliography of Heshmat Moayyad’s works

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I. Alexander Romance On Some Sources of Nizm’s Iskandar-nma J. Christoph Bürgel Sources and Art of Amir Khosrou’s “The Alexandrine Mirror” Angelo Michele Piemontese

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II. The Epic Cycle Rostam and Zoroastrianism Dick Davis Reflections on Re-reading the Iliad and the Shahnameh Amin Banani Shrn and Other Female Archetypes in Firdaus’s Shhnmah Kinga Ilona Markus-Takeshita Editing the Shhnma: The Interface Between Literary and Textual Criticism Mahmoud Omidsalar Kuš-e pilguš: pahlavni degarsn (    : ) Jalal Matini

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III. Religious Texts and Contexts The Creative Compiler: The Art of Rewriting in ‘Ar’s Takirat al-awly’ Paul Losensky Shahriyr b. al-asan: A Persian Ism‘l d‘ of the Fatimid Age Wilferd Madelung “In Praise of One of the Deeply Learned ‘Ulam” –A Mysterious Poem by Qjr Court Poet Mrz „abb Allh Shrz “Q’n” Alyssa Gabbay

105

21 31

49 63 69

77 95

107 121

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IV. The Poetic Text and Central Motifs 149 Nosxa’i kohna az Divn-e Emmi-ye Haravi (        ) Iraj Afshar 151

A Life in Poetry: Hfiz’s First Ghazal Julie S. Meisami

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“My Heart is the Ball, Your Lock the Polo-Stick”: Development of the Ball and Polo-stick Metaphors in Classical Persian Poetry Asghar Seyed-Gohrab

183

V. Center and Periphery Sincerely Flattering Panegyrics: The Shrinking Ghaznavid Qasida Franklin Lewis Novelty, Tradition and Mughal Politics in Nau‘’s Sz u Gudz Sunil Sharma The Position of the Khorasani Dialects within the Persian-Dari-Tajiki Linguistic Continuum Youli Ioanessyan

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VI. The Modern Period

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The Political Realm’s Literary Convention: The Examples of Ishq and Iqbl Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti Re-membering Amrads and Amradnums: Re-inventing the (Sedgwickian) Wheel Afsaneh Najmabadi The Title of Hedâyat’s Buf-e Kur [(The) Blind Owl)] Michael Hillmann Sâdeq Hedâyat, a Writer ahead of Time Claus V. Pedersen “A Fenceless Garden” – A Short Story by Mohammad Zarrin Sholeh Quinn Fayzi: nevisanda-ye n-šens ( !  "# :) Fereydun Vahman Refuting Rushdie in Persian Paul Sprachman From Dawn’s Art Michael Bylebyl

209 251

267

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295 309 325 337 353 363 373

INTRODUCTION The six or seven stars clustered in the constellation Taurus, brightly visible to the naked eye in the winter sky of the northern hemisphere and in the summer sky of the southern hemisphere, were known in Greek mythology as the Pleiades, the seven sisters born to Atlas and Pleione. In the Islamicate tradition, the Pleiades are sometimes seen as a cluster of grapes, sometimes as pearls or jewels (Imru al-Qays in his Muallaqa already likens them to a jewel-encrusted sash). The stars of the Pleiades may often appear linked as if by a halo or milky thread and are consequently likened to precious pearls on a string. “Parvin” and “Sorayyâ,” the Persian and Arabic-derived names for the Pleiades (both of which are now used as feminine proper names) are thus thought of as a necklace (eqd) which the heavens may bestow upon a poet in gratitude and reward for composing a beautiful poem. The heavenly gift mirrors the poem itself, which consists of carefully chosen words, bored like unique pearls and threaded in perfect metrical proportion. As âfe put it: You’ve sung a ghazal, pierced the pearls, come and sing it sweetly, Hafez! The heavens strew the very Necklace of the Pleiades upon your verse. *** Heshmat Moayyad (Heshmatollâh Mo’ayyad-e Sanandaji) was born in Hamadan, Iran and traveled widely through the towns and villages of that country in his youth. He earned his B.A. in Persian and Arabic literature from the University of Tehran in 1949 and left for Germany in 1951 to continue his studies in Persian literature, Islamic Studies and German at the University of Frankfurt am Main, where he studied under Hellmut Ritter, completing his Ph.D. in 1958. He began his teaching career in Frankfurt as a Lecturer, and in 1960 moved to the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples, Italy, first as a Lecturer, and then as Professore Incaricato, from 1964-65. Heshmat Moayyad first came to the United States as a visiting lecturer at Harvard University in 1962-63, at a time when Persian literature was not yet offered in many universities in this country. In 1966, with his wife Ruth, and daughters Leyli and Shirin, he came as Assistant Professor to the University of Chicago, where he established what would become a vibrant Persian Studies program, and where he has held the position of Professor of Persian Language and Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations since 1974. Heshmat Moayyad’s scholarly contributions to the literature, religions and history of Iran include ten books and in excess of one hundred articles and reviews, written in four languages (see the bibliography of his works, below). In addition, he has been an active and influential translator of modern Persian literature to English and German. Professor Moayyad has served on the advisory board of the Encyclopaedia Iranica, the

quarterly Chanteh, Iranshenasi, The Journal of Bahá’í Studies, and the Bahá’í Encyclopedia Project. He was the book review editor of Irannameh from 1983 to 1988, and of Iranshenasi from 1988 to the present day. He has been a visiting professor at UCLA (1966) and at the Harvard Summer School (1971-72), as well as at the University of Damascus (1993 – the experience of which he encapsulated in an engaging article, “Safar-nâma-ye shâm”). He has also traveled from Chicago to Iran, Afghanistan and South Asia to lecture and conduct research. In 1988 he visited the rich manuscript collections of the Raza Library (Rampur), Khuda Bakhsh Library (Patna), Abul Kalam Azad Library (Aligarh) in India, and lectured at the Aligarh Muslim University. Even as he trained students to read classical texts, Professor Moayyad constantly emphasized the importance of modern Persian literature and offered courses on the subject, a fact that is reflected in the range of papers in this volume. At Chicago he was the founder and host of the “Persian Poetry Evenings” (shab-e sher) from 1983 to 1989. He was also one of the founders of the Association of the Friends of Persian Culture, which holds yearly conferences in Persian in the Chicago area, dedicated to promoting knowledge of the arts, culture and religions of Iran. At the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, he organized the weekly Persian Circle (anjoman-e sokhan) which for several decades has provided an important forum for readings and lectures by innumerable poets and writers from Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, as well as the Persian-speaking scholars, who have visited Chicago. In addition, the Persian Circle created an invaluable forum for students of Persian as a foreign language to hear and practice the different spoken registers and varieties of the language. In 1988, Professor Moayyad organized a major conference on the classical Indo-Persian poet Amir Khosrow (d. 1325), which was attended by scholars from all over the world. In 1989, he organized a three-day conference on Parvin Ete âmi, the proceedings of which were published in 1994 as Once a Dewdrop: Essays on the Poetry of Parvin Etesami. Over the course of more than four decades of active teaching, Heshmat Moayyad has trained several generations of students and contributed to the work of many colleagues. The two dozen articles and essays offered here were written by a wide range of internationally respected scholars in the field of Persian literature, Iranian history and Iranian religions, representing colleagues, friends and students who have benefited from Prof. Moayyad’s expertise, whether in Frankfurt, Naples, Harvard, Chicago or elsewhere. They are presented to Professor Heshmat Moayyad of the University of Chicago on the occasion of his 80th birthday, in gratitude and recognition for his long and fruitful career as scholar and teacher in the field of Persian and Iranian Studies. We look forward to many more years of his companionship and scholarship! The topics of the papers range from heretical movements within Sasanian Zoroastrianism and how they may have impacted the Shh-nma to the imagery, poetics and literary intertextuality of medieval Persian qasidas, ghazals and romances; from the

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methodology of editing Persian medieval manuscripts to the politics and sexuality reflected in modern texts; from authors central to the Iranian epic tradition, such as Ferdowsi, to the Indo-Persian poets of the Mughal and the modern era; from a Persian Ismaili writer of the 12th century to a modern Baha’i novelist in Iran. We hope that these papers (three of them in Persian, and the remainder in English) will provide points of interest not only for Persianists, but also those interested more broadly in the literatures of the Middle East and South Asia, and of medieval Europe. As the articles for this festschrift have been collected at different times from scholars working on different periods and subjects, each author was given discretion to choose the transliteration system best suited to their topic. The editors felt it unnecessary to impose a uniform system of transliteration on the articles, as Persianists should encounter no problem reconstructing the original language, and specialists will not need to do so. The papers are grouped broadly into six sections. The two papers in section one deal with the subject of Persian recitations of the Alexander Romance: J. Christoph Bürgel’s “On Some Sources of Nizmñ’s Iskandarnma” argues that Neâmi’s adaptation of stories was typically complex, drawing upon multiple sources which he altered to suit his own political circumstances and aesthetic objectives. In the case of the Eskandarnâma, these probably include a variety of Arabic sources, some of them rather obscure, including the Ikhwn al- af and geographical literature, etc. Angelo Michele Piemontese’s “Sources and Art of Amir Khosrou’s ‘The Alexandrine Mirror’” provides a detailed précis and analysis of the structure and plot of a complicated poetic work that was inspired by Neâmi’s masterpiece, but has heretofore received scant scholarly attention, despite Amir Xosrow’s significance. Section two, on the Epic Cycle, includes five papers. Rostam is the pre-eminent legendary hero of pre-Islamic Iran, and for this reason there is often a tacit assumption that he is somehow a Zoroastrian hero, or at least an embodiment of pre-Islamic IranianZoroastrian values. As Dick Davis shows in his “Rostam and Zoroastrianism,” however, there are a number of indications in the Shâh-nâma and in other texts close in time to it, that at least parts of the Rostam legend refer to a committed opponent of Zoroastrianism. Amin Banani’s “Reflections on Re-reading the Iliad and the Shahnameh” offers a reconsideration of some of the salient structural affinities, as well as the general points of similarity in cultural ethos, of the great epic of Ferdowsi and Homer (occasioned in part by the new translations of Davis and Fitzgerald). He argues for a (re-)inclusion of the Shâh-nâma in the western curriculum insofar as a comparative approach to these two poems would add a different and deeper dimension to the contemporary discourse on “orientalism” and the “clash of civilizations.” Kinga Ilona Markus-Takeshita’s “Shrn and Other Female Archetypes in Firdaus’s Shhnmah” examines chronological and stylistic questions in the mytho-history of the late-Kayanian era, as recorded in the Iranian Book of Kings, and versified by Ferdowsi in the post-Islamic period in the Shh-

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nma. Archetypal heroines of the various epic cycles are compared with parallel data from other early medieval works in prose and poetry, including various traditions preserved by court poets (such as Neâmi) and in semi-hagiographical accounts of various neighboring civilizations. Mahmoud Omidsalar’s “Editing the Shhnma: The Interface Between Literary and Textual Criticism” sketches the process of producing and transmitting literary works of art in the classical Persian tradition and illustrates the crucial need for textual scholarship as a preliminary to detailed literary analysis. He argues for an eclectic method of textual editing, noting that while many of the significant rules of textual criticism developed for European classics are also relevant in editing classical Persian texts, some are inapplicable and others must be somewhat modified. Jalal Matini’s Persian article “Kuš-e pilguš: pahlavâni degarsân” (Kush the Elephanteared: a different kind of hero) closes the section with a study of the role and attributes of the champion Kush in the popular verse epic Kush-nma. In section three, Religious Texts and Contexts, three papers examine various texts of literary and religious import. In “The Creative Compiler: The Art of Rewriting in ‘Ar's Takirat al-awly’,” Paul Losensky applies Lefevre’s concept of “re-writing” to provide a nuanced analysis of ‘Ar’s translation and arrangement of the Persian and Arabic sources he drew upon for his prose collection of the vitae of the Sufis. Wilferd Madelung sketches the life and offers an analysis of two works by a lesser-known Ismaili missionary active in Fars, Kermân and Yemen during the 11th century CE in his “Shahriyr b. al-asan: A Persian Ism‘l d‘ of the Fatimid Age.” A translation of one of the qasidas of Q’n and a discussion of the possibility that it is addressed to Sayyid Ali Muhammad Bb, provides an opportunity to examine Q’n’s attitude toward his patrons and their politics in Alyssa Gabbay’s “‘In Praise of One of the Deeply Learned ‘Ulam’: A Mysterious Poem by Qjr Court Poet Mrz „abb Allh Shrz Q’n.” In “The Poetic Text and Central Motifs,” section four, Iraj Afshar discusses a previously unknown manuscript of the Divân of the 13th-century poet Emmi of Herat in his Persian article, “Nosxa’i kohna az Divn-e Emmi-ye Haravi.” Julie S. Meisami examines the questions of ambiguity and intertextuality in a famous ghazal of âfe which may have been deliberately chosen to begin his Divân, and which may give valuable clues about the literariness of âfe’ poetic project. Meisami considers this famous poem through a dual lens in “A Life in Poetry: Hafiz’s First Ghazal,” juxtaposing a modern perspective with that of Sudi’s commentary in a way that elucidates the structure and meaning of this and other ghazals. A. Asghar Seyed-Gohrab’s “‘My Heart is the Ball, Your Lock the Polo-Stick’”: Development of the Ball and Polo-stick Metaphors in Classical Persian Poetry” traces the rise and wide-ranging development of a central image in Persian poetry and its metaphorical applications, the ball and the polostick, from the tenth to the beginning of the sixteenth centuries.

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In section five, “Center and Periphery”, Franklin Lewis’s “Sincerely Flattering Panegyrics: The Shrinking Ghaznavid Qasida” re-examines the question of sincerity and truthfulness in poetry with respect to the panegyric tradition, considering how poets at the Ghaznavid court might have modulated their praise to reflect changing political circumstances; the length of the qasida itself may be one way in which poets regulated the dynamic of encomiastic sincerity. Sunil Sharma’s “Novelty, Tradition and Mughal Politics in Nau‘’s ‘Sz u Gudz’” introduces a verse romance written by an Iranian émigré poet at the Mughal court in which the poet narrates an “exotic” Indian tale about sati; his analysis recovers the strong political subtext of the poem. Shifting from literary to linguistic concerns, Youli Ioanessyan’s “The Position of the Khorasani Dialects within the Persian-Dari-Tajiki Linguistic Continuum” provides a comparative study of a variety of specific linguistic features in different regional dialects, arguing that the earlier geographical division of the Persian dialects into Western and Eastern, with the Khorasani dialects being classified (along with Afghano-Tajiki) as one of the two major subdivisions of the Eastern group, does not adequately reflect linguistic realities. Rather, the Khorasani dialects should be seen as a distinct group of their own, reflecting features of both the Western (Tehrani) and Eastern (Kabuli) groups. For the Modern Period, Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti’s “The Political Realm's Literary Convention: The Examples of Ishq and Iqbl” provides a comparative study of two modern Persian poets (one Iranian and the other Indian) whose departures from tradition led to the forging of a new poetics. In her “Re-membering Amrads and Amradnums: Re-inventing the (Sedgwickian) Wheel,” Afsaneh Najmabadi documents the gendered nature of the debate over modernity and the nineteenth century preoccupation with the westernized male dandy (farangi-ma’b) as an emasculated, beardless man, arguing that the discourse of desire was feminized in an effort to replace male homoerotic affectivities, a marker of backwardness. Michael Hillman reviews the critical writing on âdeq Hedâyat in his “The Title of Hedyat’s Buf-e Kur [(The) Blind Owl)],” and explores the etymological and cultural significance of the two elements of the title of Hedâyat’s most famous work, as part of an evaluation of the European translation and understanding of the novel. Claus Pedersen’s “Sadeq Hedâyat, a Writer Ahead of Time” examines the strong elements of modernity in Hedâyat’s work, particularly the science fiction story, “Serum Gegen Liebes-Leidenschaft” from the collection, Sâyeh-rowshan (Chiaroscuro), and the ultimate synthesis of Iranian/American and male/female perspectives it offers. Mohammad Zarrin’s short story “A Fenceless Garden,” in Sholeh Quinn’s English translation, tells the story of an Iranian office worker grappling with issues in her marriage, her relationships, and her place in life. Her idealized image of one of her co-workers forces her to reassess some of the assumptions she had made about her own life. Fereydoun Vahman’s Persian article on the short story writer, Fayzi, “Fayzi: nevisanda-ye n-šens,” introduces the life and works of a

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twentieth century Baha’i short-story writer who deserves to be better known. Paul Sprachman’s “Refuting Rushdie in Persian” parses several translations of passages of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, which can only appear in Iran within the polemical context of refutations. Yet not all refutations are quite alike or perform the same cultural function. Michael Bylebyl, in “From Dawn’s Art,” offers a personal narrative recollecting his early encounter with the Ishrq philosophy of Shehâb al-Din Sohravardi, describing in a creative and sensitive manner the experiences of an American graduate student engaged in dissertation research in Tehran in 1976; it brings the volume to a close with a reminder of a time when American students and faculty could more easily travel to Iran to conduct or conclude their research. This volume would never have appeared if not for the timely intervention and assistance of a number of individuals. Chief among them are Michael Hillmann, who initiated the idea and the project of this festschrift, and Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, who played a decisive role in the final stages. Without their intervention, the volume would never have been possible. Others have also had a hand, including Siavash Samei, who turned the Persian articles into electronic text. Thanks are also due to Hossein Samei and Foruzan Lewis, and to Mr. Auke van den Berg of Rozenberg Publishers, and Purdue University Press for publication of these papers and shepherding the volume into print. Franklin Lewis, University of Chicago Sunil Sharma, Boston University

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A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WORKS OF HESHMAT MOAYYAD Books o Die Maqmt des aznaw, eine legendäre Vita Ahmad-i m’s, genannt Žandapl (441-536/1049-1141). Frankfurt a. M.: Goethe Universität, 1959. 138pp. o Die Blinde Eule (trans.). The first German translation of Sâdeq Hedâyat’s novel Buf-e Kur. Geneva: H. Kossodo, 1960. 167pp. o Maqâmât-e Zhandapil Ahmad-e Jâm (ta’lif dar sadeh-ye sheshom-e hejri). Editio princeps of a 12th-century text by Sadid al-Din Mohammad-e Ghaznavi about Shaykh Ahmad-e Jâm, with introduction and annotations. Tehran: Bongâh-e Tarjomeh va Nashr-e Ketâb, 1961. liv+280pp. o Polyglott Sprachführer: Persisch. A Persian language self-study text. With Johann Karl Teufel (Teubner). Köln-Marienburg: Polyglott-Verlag. 1965. 7th printing, München, 1983. 31pp. o Maqâmât-e Zhandapil Ahmad-e Jâm. A second and expanded edition, based on new findings. Tehran: Bongâh-e Tarjomeh va Nashr-e Ketâb, 1967. lxxxviii+401pp. o Rowzat al-Rayâhin. Editio princeps of a 15th-century text by Darvish Ali Buzjâni, with introduction and annotations. Series: Majmueh-ye motun-e fârsi, 29. Tehran: Bongâh-e Tarjomeh va Nashr-e Ketâb, 1966. 174pp. o Farâ’ed-e Ghiâsi. Editio princeps, with introduction and notes, of the 14th-century collection of letters in Persian compiled c. 836 A.H. by Jalâl al-Din Yusof-e Ahl. Series: Zabân va adabiyât-e Irân. 2 vols. Tehran: Bonyâd-e Farhang-e Irân. Volume 1 (1977): lxvi+839pp. and Volume 2 (1979): xvii+747pp. (Two further volumes of this text, consisting of about 900 pages, including indices and annotations, still remain in press). o A Nightingale’s Lament. Selections from the Poems and Fables of Parvin Etesami (ed. and trans.). Translated from the Persian, together with Margaret A. Madelung. Lexington, KY: Mazda Publishers, 1985. xxxviii+231pp. o Once Upon a Time (Yeki bud, yeki nabud) by Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh (ed. and trans.) The first collection of Jamalzadeh’s short stories in English, translated from the Persian, together with Paul Sprachman. Del Mar, NY: Caravan Press and Bibliotheca Persica, 1985. x+112pp. o Divân-e Parvin-e Etesâmi: qasâ’ed, masnaviyât, tamsilât va moqattaât (ed.), with an introduction and bibliography. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1987. xxxviii+286pp.

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o The Bahá’í Faith and Islam. Proceedings of a Symposium, McGill University, March 23-25, 1984 (ed.). Ottawa, Canada: Assocation for Bahá’í Studies, 1990. 146pp. o La Fe de Bahá’í y el islam (ed.). Spanish Translation of the above. Terrassa: Editorial Bahá’í, 1999. 237pp. o Stories from Iran. A Chicago Anthology 1921-1991 (ed.). Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers, 1991. 5th printing, 2002. 517pp. o Once a Dewdrop. Essays on the Poetry of Parvin Etesami (ed.). Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1994. vii+233pp. o Be-yâd-e Dust (“In Memory of the Friend”). Recollections and an essay in Persian on Abu’l-Qasem Faizi, with extracts from Faizi’s letters and eight of his essays, as well as his memoirs of nearly five years of living and teaching in Najafabad, Esfahan. Wilmette, IL: National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States, 1998. 206pp. o Black Parrot, Green Crow: A Collection of Short Fiction by Houshang Golshiri (ed.). The first collection of Golshiri in English, including a biography of the author, 18 short stories, and 3 poems. Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers, 2003. 241pp. o The Colossal Elephant and His Spiritual Feats: The Life and Legendary Vita of Shaykh Ahmad-e Jâm. English Translation with Franklin Lewis, of Maqâmât-e Zhandapil, with annotations and a detailed introduction on the Sufi Shaykh alIslam Ahmad-e Jâm (d. 1141 A.D.). Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publications, 2004. ix+460pp. Articles o “Moderne Persische Literature.” Lexikon der Gegenwartsliteratur. Freiburg, 1960, pp. 975-79. o “Introduction on the life and works of Zandapil Ahmad-e Jam” (Persian), Maqâmât-e Zhandapil Ahmad-e Jâm. Tehran, 1961, pp. 9-54. o “Nachtrag zum Deutsch-Persischen Worterbuch von Wilhelm Eilers.” Annali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli 12 (1962): 32-81. o “A biography and review of the works of Alessandro Bausani” (Persian). Râhnamâ-ye Ketâb 6 (1963): 504-14 and 647-60. o “Eine wiedergefundene Schrift über Ahmad-e m und seine Nachkommen: Betrachtungen und Ergebnisse.” Annali. Istituto Orientale di Napoli 14 (1964): 255-86. o “Some remarks on the Nasirean Ethics by Nasir ad-Din Tusi,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 31 (1972): 179-86.

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o “Parvin’s Poems (The Poems of Parvin Etesâmi: A Cry in the Wilderness).” In: Islamwissenschaftliche Abhandlungen: Fritz Meier z. 60. Geburtstag. Ed. Richard Gramlich. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1974, pp.164-190. o “Ab Na r Man r b. Moškn.” Encyclopaedia Iranica, v1: 352-353. o “A mad-e Jm.” Encyclopaedia Iranica v1: 648-649. o “Sargozasht-e ghamangiz-e Shâhnâmeh-ye Shâh Tahmâsebi” (The Sad Fate of Shah Tahmasb’s Shahnameh Manuscript). Iran Nameh 4 (1986): 428-432. o “ Attr, Fard al-Dn Muhammad.” The Encyclopaedia of Religion, pp. 500-501. o “Hazl o Tanz o Shukhi dar Sher-e Fârsi-ye Bahâr,” (Malek al-Shoarâ’ Bahâr’s Humorous and Satirical Poetry). Iran Nameh 5 (1987): 596-624. o “Be Yâd-e hashtâdomin Sâlgard-e tavallod-e Parvin Etesâmi” (Parvin Etesâmi’s 80th birth anniversary remembered). Iran Nameh 6 (1988): 116-142. o “On Parvin Etesâmi's 80th Anniversary” (Persian), CIRA Newsletter 3 (1987): 17-18. o “Lyric Poetry.” In: Persian Literature. Ed. Ehsan Yarshater. New York: Columbia University/Bibliotheca Persica, 1988, pp. 120-46. o “Boshq (Ab Es q) Aema.” Encyclopaedia Iranica, v4: 382-383. o “B zjn, Darwiš Al.” Encyclopaedia Iranica, v4:587-88. o “Ta’ammoli dar Kelidar” (Reflections on the Novel Klidar), Iran Nameh 7 (1988): 112-25. o “Alessandro Bausani” (An evaluation in Persian of his scholarly works, written on the occasion of his death in 1988), Payâm-e Bahâ’i, No. 114 (May 1989): 6-14. o “Jâygâh-e Parvin Etesâmi dar Sher-e Fârsi” (Parvin’s Place in the History of Persian Poetry). Iranshenasi 1 (1989): 212-39. o “Abu al-Fazl Golpâygâni debating with Prince Farhâd Mirzâ” (in Persian), Payâm-e Bahâ’i, No.122 (Jan.1990): 49-54 and No.123 (Feb.1990): 17-20. o “Response to Dr. Ahmad Mahdavi Damghani” (Persian). Iran Nameh 8 (1990): 328-32 (Reply to a critique of the article, "Reflections on the Novel Kelidar”) o “Dar Madâr-e Nezâmi. 1: Hasht Behesht-Haft Akhtar” (In the Orbit of Nezâmi I: A Comparative Analysis of Amir-Khosrow’s Hasht Behesht and Abdi Beg’s Haft Akhtar), Iranshenasi 2 (1990): 135-59. o “The Relationship between the Bahá’í Faith and Islam.” In: The Baha'i Faith and Islam. Ed. H. Moayyad. Ottawa, Association of Bahá’í Studies, 1990, pp.73-91. o “Scholarly Dilettantism and Tampering with History.” In YAD-NAMA, In Memoria di Alessandro Bausani. Ed. Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti and Lucia Ristagno. Rome: Bardi Editore, 1991, vol. 1, pp. 327-333. o “Dar Madâr-e Nezâmi 2: Maryam va Shirin dar Sher-e Ferdowsi va Nezâmi (A comparative study of two women characters in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and Nezâmi’s Khosrow va Shirin), Iranshenasi 3 (1991): 526-539.

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o “Târikh-e Adabiyât-e Fârsi: Moruri bar Savâbeq va Nazari darbâreh-ye Âyandehye ân” (On Histories of Persian Literature). Iranshenasi 3 (1991): 71-84. o “Nasabnâmeh-ye yek Ghazal-e Hâfez va Mokhammas-e ân dar Torki-ye Osmâni” (On the Genealogy of Hafez’ ghazal “zolf âshofteh” and its imitation in Ottoman Turkish). Iranshenasi 3 (1991): 337-344. o “The Persian Short Story: An Overview.” In Stories from Iran, A Chicago Anthology 1921-1991. Ed. H. Moayyad. Washington, D.C., Mage, 1991, pp.1329. Arabic Translation of this introduction by Najat Abu Samra, “al-Qissat alFrisiyya al-Qasra, Dirsat Fahisat,” al-Adab al-Ajnabiyya: Majalla Fa liyya Yu diruh Iti d al-Kuttb al-Arab (Adad Muzdawaj Kh bi al-Adab alFris). Nos. 77-78 (Damascus, 1994): 7-22. o “Yâdi az Sâlhâ-ye Javâni-ye Rahmat” (Reminiscences from the life of Dr. Rahmat Mohâjer), Payâm-e Bahâ’i, no. 143 (1991): 18-30. o “Dar Madâr-e Nezâmi 3: Naqdi bar Layli va Majnun-e Nezâmi” (A critical analysis of Nezami’s Layli va Majnun). Iranshenasi 4 (1992): 528-542. o “Man Yuhiruhu’llh” (On the frequency and significance of this Arabic term in the Bayân of Ali-Muhammad the Bb). In: Mahbub-e Âlam: be monâsebat-e bozorgdâsht-e sadomin sâl-e soud-e Hazrat-e Bahâ Allâh. Canada: Enteshârât-e Majalle-ye Andalib, 1992, pp. 94-101. o “Sarrâji Saggezi: Halqe’i Digar dar Nasabnâmeh-ye Ghazal-e ‘Zolf âshofteh’” (Another link in the genealogy of a poem by Hafez). Iranshenasi 4 (1993): 87981. o “Dar Madâr-e Nezâmi 4: Moqalledân-e Khosrow va Shirin-e Nezâmi” (On imitations of Nezâmi’s Khosrow va Shirin). Iranshenasi 5 (1993): 72-88. o “Badr-e Shervâni va Ashâr-ash. Nazari be Divâni Bâz-yâfteh” (On the poet Badr of Shirvan and his newly-discovered collection of poems). In: Persian Studies in North America. Studies in Honor of Mohammad Ali Jazayery. Ed. by Mehdi Marashi. Bethesda, MD: Iranbooks, 1994, pp. 60-115. o “Safar-nâme-ye Shâm” (Travelogue of Syria). Iranshenasi 6, 1 (1994): 1-17. o “Nâmeh’i az Varqâ-ye Shahid,” (A letter from the martyr Varqâ, edited). In: Khusheh-hâ’i az Kharman-e Adab va Honar (Switzerland, Landegg Academy). 5 (1994): 227-28. o “Âh-e Ensân” (On a poem by Sâdeq Chubak). Daftar-e Honar 2, 3 ( March 1995): Sadeq Chubak, pp.229-30. o “Fârsi râ Dorost va Shivâ Benevisim” (On Modern Persian prose). Payâm-e Bahâ’i no. 184 (1995): 19-23. o “Moruri bar Nasr-e Fârsi-ye Moâser” (On modern Persian prose and its development and shortcomings). Khusheh-hâ’i az Kharman-e Adab va Honar (Landegg Academy, Switzerland) 6 (1995): 239-58.

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o “Nasr-e Dâstân-nevisi-ye Fârsi” (On the prose style of novelists and short story writers). Khusheh-hâ’i az Kharman-e Adab va Honar (Landegg Academy, Switzerland) 6 (1995): 259-74. o “Parvin Etesâmi's Niche in the Pantheon of Persian Poetry.” In Once a Dewdrop. Essays on the Poetry of Parvin Etesâmi. Ed. H. Moayyad. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1994, pp.160-87. o “Dar madâr-e Nezâmi 5: Âtashi Qandahâri, Sarâyandeh-ye Gol-e Rangin” (Âtashi Qandahâri and his poem Gol-e Rangin, discovered in 1988 in India). Iranshenasi 7 (1995): 293-302. o “Gozide-ye Khâterât-e Nâser al-Din Shâh” (On the occasion of the anniversary of Naser al-Din Shah’s assassination in 1896). Iranshenasi 8 (1996):224-45. o “Sargozasht-e Zan-e Pârsâ-ye ‘Attâr (Tracing the background of one of ‘Attâr’s longest tales to its earliest known sources). Iranshenasi 9 (1997): 427-42. Reprinted in Jashn-nâme-ye Zabih Allâh Safâ. Tehran, 1998, pp. 434-53. o “Ketâbi dar hadd-e Farâ’ed,” Payâm-e Bahâ’i, no. 229 (1998): 12-18. o “Ete m, Mirz Yusof Khan štn, Ete âm-al-Molk.” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol 8. o “Ete m, Parvn.” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol 8. o “For , Besm (Basm), Abbs.” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol 9. o “Goethe dar Â’ine-ye Sadi” (Goethe’s adaptations from Sadi in his WestOstlicher Divân, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s birth). Iranshenasi 11, 1 (1999): 36-58. o “Goethe va Sadi” (an appendix to the former article). Iranshenasi 11, 2 (1999): 260-64. o “Dar Sug-e do Ostâd-e Bozorg” (Obituary for Professors Safâ and Zarrinkub). Payâm-e Bahâ’i, no. 240 (Nov 1999): 39-41. o “Tâ’us-e ‘Eliyin: darbâre-ye Zhandapil Ahmad-e Jâm va Shaykh Abu Said-e Abu al-Khayr” (On Shaykh Abu Said-e Abu al-Khayr and Shaykh Ahmad-e Jâm). Iranshenasi 11, 3 (1999): 549-57. o “Tâ’us-e ‘Eliyin: darbâre-ye Zhandapil Ahmad-e Jâm va Shaykh Abu Said-e Abu al-Khayr: II” (Part II of above). Iranshenasi 11, 4 (2000): 742-49. o “On Eradication of Religious, Racial, and National Prejudice” (in Persian, a chapter in Rowzane-hâ-ye Omid (Windows of Hope). Luxembourg, 2000, pp. 253-70. o “Persian Bahâ’i Poetry 1850-1950” (In Persian). Khusheh-hâ’i az Kharman-e Adab va Honar 12 (2001): 95-114. o “Ravesh-e Pazhuheshhâ-ye Enteqâdi-ye Adabiyât va Târikh dar Qarn-e Bistom dar Irân” (Methodologies of Academic Research in Literature and History in 20th Century Iran). Khusheh-hâ’i az Kharman-e Adab va Honar 12 (2001): 21-31.

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o “Pazhuheshgarân-e Adabiyât va Târikh az Qazvini tâ Kadkani” (Distinguished Scholars of Persian Literature and the History of Iran from Muhammad Qazvini to Muhammad-Reza Shafii-Kadkani). Khusheh-hâ’i az Kharman-e Adab va Honar 12 (2001): 33-54. o “Chahâr Nâmeh-ye Âsheqâneh az Avâkher-e Qarn-e Haftom-e Hejri” (Four love letters by Zayn al-Din-e Qodsi to an unnamed woman from ca. 1260-1300 AD, edited and analyzed). Iranshenasi 13 (2001): pp. 46-53. o “Torkân-e Pârsi-guy: Ashâr-e Pârsi-ye Shâerân-e Osmâni” (Persian-Speaking Turks: Ottoman Poets and their Persian Poetry). Iranshenasi 14, 1 (2002): 111122. o “Torkân-e Pârsi-guy: Ashâr-e Pârsi-ye Shâerân-e Osmâni. 2: Fozuli-ye Baghdâdi” (Persian-Speaking Turks 2: Fozuli of Baghad). Iranshenasi 14, 2 (2002): 291-99. o “Yâdi az Mehdi Akhavân-e Sâles (Omid) va Hushang Golshiri” (In Memory of Mehdi Akhavan-e Sâles and Hushang Golshiri). Iranshenasi 14, 3 (2003): 802809. o “Torkân-e Pârsi-guy: Ashâr-e Pârsi-ye Shâerân-e Osmâni, 4: Nefi” (PersianSpeaking Turks 4: Nefi). Iranshenasi 14, 3 (2003): 533-39. o “Torkân-e Pârsi-guy: Ashâr-e Pârsi-ye Shâerân-e Osmâni, 5: Nâbi” (PersianSpeaking Turks 5: Nâbi). Iranshenasi 16, 3 (2004): 671-77. o “Torkân-e Pârsi-guy: Ashâr-e Pârsi-ye Shâerân-e Osmâni, 6: Yâvuz Soltân Selim” (Persian-Speaking Turks 6: Yâvuz Sultan Selim). Iranshenasi 16, 4 (2005): 643-48. o “Torkân-e Pârsi-guy: Ashâr-e Pârsi-ye Shâerân-e Osmâni, 7: Sultân Suleiman Qânuni, motakhalles be Mohebbi” (Persian-Speaking Turks 7: Sultan Selim, “Mohebbi”). Iranshenasi 17, 3 (2005): 451-55. o “Tanz-e Molamma : Qasideh’i az Qâzi-ye Hajim” (A Macaronic Qasideh by Qâzi Hajim). Iranshenasi 18, 1 (2006): 32-42. o “Moqaddeme’i bar Now-e Shahr-âshub dar Sher-e Fârsi” (An Introduction to the Shahr-âshub Genre in Persian). Iranshenasi 18, 4 (2007): o “Sayyedâ-ye Nasafi, Moruri bar Zendegi va Divân va Matn-e Shahr-âshub-e U” (Sayyedâ-ye Nasafi, an Introduction to the Life and Poetry, Especially his Shahrâshub). Iranshenasi 19, 1 (2007): 58-64. Book reviews o E. G. Browne: A Literary History of Persia. Persian Translation, Vol. 1: Az Ferdowsi tâ Sadi. Sokhan 6 (1955): 944-47. o Walter Hinz: Persisch, Leitfaden der Umgangssprache. Oriens 8 (1955): 312-15.

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o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Hellmut Ritter: Das Meer der Seele. Sokhan 7 (1956): 215-18. Die Reise Zum Wonnigen Fisch. Sokhan 11 (1960): 609-11. C. G. Troeller: Persien ohne Maske. Râhnamâ-ye Ketâb 4 (1961): 93-104. E. Malle: Schroeder's Reisefuehrer Iran. Râhnamâ-ye Ketâb 4 (1961): 26-29. “Chand Ketâb darbâreh-ye Miniâtur” (Several Books on Persian Miniatures). Râhnamâ-ye Ketâb 4 (1961): 850-55 and 1071-77. Ruzbehân Baqli Shirâzi: Abhar al-Âshiqin (Le jasmin des fidèles d’amour). Ed. H. Corbin and M. Moin. Speculum 37, 4 (Oct. 1962): 651-54. Iraj Afshar: Index Iranicus, vol. 1. Annali dell’Istituto Orientale di Napoli 12 (1963): 316-18. Wilhelm Eilers: Deutsch-Persisches Woerterbuch, Lieferungen 1-4. Oriens 18 (1965-66): 407-10. Issa Chehabi: Deutsch-Persischer Sprachfuehrer. Oriens 23-24 (1970-71): 54446. Muhammad Iqbal: Book of Eternity (Javidnameh). English Translation by A. J. Arberry. Mahfel 7 (1971): 163-68. Bozorg Alavi und Manfred Lorenz: Lehrbuch der Persischen Sprache. International Journal for Middle East Studies 3 (1972): 375-80. John Andrew Boyle: Grammar of Modern Persian. Oriens 25-26 (1975): 387-91. H. Junker and Bozorg Alavi: Persisch-Deutsches Woerterbuch. Oriens 25-26 (1975): 396-99. Fakhr al-Din Gorgani: Vis and Ramin. English Translation by G. Morrison. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 34 (1975): 213-15. Farid al-Din 'Attar: Ilahinameh or Book of God. English Translation by John Andrew Boyle. Journal of the Society for Iranian Studies 10 (1977): 211-15. Fritz Meier: Abu Said Abu’l-Hayr...Wirklichkeit und Legende. Acta Iranica 1976, and Journal of the American Oriental Society 102 (1982): 381-82. Fritz Meier: Abu Sa'id Abu'l-Hayr...Wirklichkeit und Legende. Iran Nameh 1 (1983): 299-303. J. Kessler and Amin Banani (trans.): Bride of Acacias. Poems by Forugh Farrokhzad. Iran Nameh 1 (1983): 308-12. Nizami: Chosrov und Shirin. German Translation by Johann Christoph Buergel. Iran Nameh 1 (1983): 473-77. Michael Hillman, Editor: Major Voices in Contemporary Persian Literature. Iran Nameh 1 (1983): 649-62. Ehsan Yarshater, Editor: Encyclopaedia Iranica, Fascicles 1-5. Iran Nameh 2 (1984): 511-16. Ferdowsi: Das Koenigsbuch. Deutsch von Helmhart Kanus-Crede. Iran Nameh 2 (1984): 520-28.

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o Gilles Peress: Telex Iran. Aperture, NY, 1984. Iran Nameh 3 (1984): 175-78. o M. A. Jamalzadeh: Isfahan Is Half the World. Translated by W. L. Heston. Iran Nameh 3 (1985): 328-33. o E. G. Browne: The Press and Poetry of Modern Persia. Reprint, 1983. Iran Nameh 3 (1985): 536-539. o Farid al-Din 'Attar: The Conference of the Birds. Translated by Dick Davis. Iran Nameh 3 (1985): 529-533. o Gh. H. Yusofi: Kâghaz-e Zar. Tehran, 1983. Iran Nameh 3 (1985): 733-738. o Hasan Tahbâz: Yâdbudnâmeh-ye Sâdeq Hedâyat. W. Germany, 1983. Iran Nameh 4 (1985): 152-154. o alâ al-Din al-Munajjid: Al-Mufa al fi al-Alfâ al-Fârisiyya al-Muarraba. Tehran 1978. Iran Nameh 4 (1986): 498-510. o Thomas Ricks, Editor: Critical Perspectives on Modern Persian Literature. Washington D.C., 1984. Iran Nameh 4 (1986): 525-530. o J. Ch. Buergel: Steppe im Staubkorn. Texte aus der Urdu Dichtung Muhammad Iqbals. Freiburg, 1982. Journal of the American Oriental Society 107 (1987): 805806. o Nazir Ahmad: Divân-e Amid-e Loiki. Lahore, 1985. Iran Nameh 4 (1987): 36774. o Waris Kirmani: Dreams Forgotten. An Anthology of Indo-Persian Poetry. New Delhi, 1984. Iran Nameh 6, 1 (1987): 145-149. o Mostafâ Zamâniniâ: Râh-e Derâz-e Istânbol. Tehran, 1985. Iran Nameh 6, 2 (1988): 327-332. o Cyrus Ghani: Iran and the West. A Critical Bibliography. London, 1987. Iran Nameh 6 (1988): 509-511. o J. T. P. De Bruijn: Of Piety and Poetry. The Interaction of Religion and Literature in the Life and Works of Hakim San’. Leiden: Brill, 1983. Iranshenasi 1, 1 (1989): 160-170. o Annemarie Schimmel: Gärten der Erkenntnis - Texte aus der Islamischen Mystik. Dusseldorf, 1986. Journal of the American Oriental Society 109 (1989): 301. o Annemarie Schimmel (ed. and trans.): Nimm eine Rose und nenne sie Lieder Poesie der Islamischen Völker. Dusseldorf, 1987. Journal of the American Oriental Society 109 (1989): 301-302. o Cyrus Ghani, Editor: Nâmeh-hâ-ye Dr. Qâsem Ghani. London, 1989. Iranshenasi 1, 3 (1989): 569-74. o Ahmad Karami (ed.): Divân-e Shaykh Ahmad-e Jâm. Tehran, 1365/1986. Iranshenasi 2, 3 (1990): 642-648. o Abbâs Zaryâb-e Kho’i: Bazmâvard. Tehran, 1368/1989. Iranshenasi 2 (1991): 860-866.

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o Mohammad Bâqer Najm-e Sâni: Mawezeh-ye Jahângiri. Ed. Sajida Sayyed Alavi. Iranshenasi 3, 3 (1991): 621-628. o Iranica Varia: Papers in Honor of Ehsan Yarshater. Acta Iranica, Troisieme Serie, vol. xvi. Leiden: Brill, 1990. Iranshenasi 4, 4 (1993): 807-22. o H.B. Dehqâni Tafti: Masih va Masihiyat nazd-e Irâniân. Seyr-e Ejmâli dar Târikh. London, 1992. Iranshenasi 5, 1 (1993): 202-204. o Ali Dehbâshi (ed.): Yâdnâmeh-ye Parvin Eteâmi. Tehran, 1370/1991. Iranshenasi 5, 3 (1993): 627-32. o Kurt Scharf (ed. and trans.): Forugh Farrochsad, Jene Tage. Frankfurt a.M.: Bibliothek Suhrkamp, 1993. Iranshenasi 6, 1 (1994): 198-200. Reprinted in Daftar-e Honar, vol. 1, no.2 (Sep. 1994): Forugh Farrokhzad, pp. 114-115. o Angelo M. Piemontese (ed.): Catalogo dei Manoscritti Persiani Conservati nelle Biblioteche d’Italia. Roma, 1989. Iranshenasi 6, 1 (1994): 200-203. o Sheila S. Blair: The Monumental Inscriptions from Early Islamic Iran and Transoxiana, Leiden: Brill, 1992. Iranshenasi 6, 1 (1994): 203-209. o Mohammad Sawaie (ed.): Risla f Ta qq Tarb al-Kalimt al-Ajamiyya, by Ahmad ibn Sulaymn al-Marf bi ibn Kaml Psh al-Wazr. Damascus, 1991. Iranshenasi 6, 2 (1994): 354-59. o George Braziller (ed.): For Rushdie: Essays by Arab and Muslim Writers in Defence of Free Speech. New York, 1994. Iranshenasi 6, 2 (1994): 359-62. o Richard Gramlich (ed. and trans.): Das Sendschreiben al-Qušayrs über das S ftum. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner Verlag, 1989. Iranshenasi 6, 3 (1994): 628-33. o Shems Friedlander, The Whirling Dervishes. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992. Iranshenasi 6, 3 (1994): 633-36. o al-Adab al-Ajnabiyya. Majalla Fa liyya yu diruh Ii d al-Kuttb al-Arab. ‘Adad Muzdawaj Khss bi al-Adab al-Frs, no. 77-78, (Damascus, 1994). Iranshenasi 6, 4 (1995): 877-80. o J.E. Knoerzer (trans.): Ali Dashti’s Prison Days. Life under Reza Shah. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1994. Iranshenasi 7, 3 (1995): 664-71. o Annemarie Schimmel, I am Wind, You are Fire. The Life and Work of Rumi. Boston/London: Shambala, 1992. Iranshenasi 7, 4 (1996): 849-57. o Uto von Meltzer and Vincent Rosenzweig (trans.): Rumi, Nie ist wer liebt allein. Mystische Liebeslieder. Bearbeitet von Monika Hutterstrasser. Graz: Leykam, 1994. Iranshenasi 8, 1 (1996): 169-74. o Jürgen Ehlers: Die Natur in der Bildersprache des Shahname. Wiesbaden, 1995. Iranshenasi 8, 3 (1996): 610-18. o David Yerushalmi: The Judeo-Persian Poet ‘Emrani and His “Book of Treasure”, Leiden/New York: Brill, 1995. Iranshenasi 8, 4 (1997): 820-24.

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o Amnon Netzer (ed.): Pâdyâvand: Pazhuhesh-nâme-ye Yahud-e Irân, vol. 1. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 1996. Rahâvard 44 (1997): 331-35. o Amnon Netzer (ed.): Pâdyâvand, vol. 2. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 1997. Iranshenasi 11, 2 (1999): 445-52. o Homâ Sarshâr (ed.): Taruâ. Yahudiân-e Irâni dar Târikh-e Moâser, vol. 1. Beverly Hills, CA: Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History, 1996. Iranshenasi 8, 4 (1997): 794-800. o Homâ Sarshâr (ed.): Yahudiân-e Irâni dar Târikh-e Moâser, vol. 2. Beverly Hills, CA: Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History, 1997. Iranshenasi 10, 4 (1999): 83745. o Homâ Sarshâr (ed.): Yahudiân-e Irâni dar Târikh-e Moâser, vol. 3. Beverly Hills, CA: Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History, 1999. Rahâvard 51 (1999): pp. 5659. o Uto von Meltzer (trans.) and Wheeler Thackston (trans.): Nâser Khosrow’s Safarnâmeh in German and English translation. Safarname: Das Reisetagebuch des persischen Dichters N ir-i Husrau. Graz: Leykam, 1993; and Naser Khosraw’s Book of Travels. New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1986. Iranshenasi 9, 1 (1997): 198-202. o Fâtemeh Sanatiniâ: Ma’âkhez-e Qesas va Tamsilât-e Marnavi-hâ-ye Attâr-e Nayshâburi. Iranshenasi 9, 2 (1997): 328-33. o Emiko Okada (ed.): Vis o Ramin. 3 volumes: Text, Word Frequency, Vocabulary. Tokyo, 1991. Iranshenasi 10, 1 (1998): 182-88. o Udo Schafer, Nicole Towfigh, and Ulrich Golmer: Desinformation als Methode. Die Baha’i Monographie des F. Ficicchia. Stuttgart: G. Olms Verlag, 1995. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 8, 3 (Nov. 1998): 451-54. o Marianna Shreve Simposon: Sultan Ibrahim Mirza’s Haft Awrang. A Princely Ms. from 16th-century Iran. Freer Gallery of Art/Yale University Press, 1997. Iranshenasi 11, 1 (1999): 202-12. o Iranzamin. Echo der Iranischen Kultur. 11. Jahrgang no. 2/3, 1998-1999. Iranshenasi 12, 1 (2000): 194-200. o Wheeler Thackston, Jr. and Hossein Ziai (eds. and trans.): Arifi of Heart, The Ball and Polo Stick, or the Book of Ecstasy. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 1999. Iranshenasi 12, 2 (2000): 438-42. o Irân Darrudi. Dar Fâsele-ye do Noqteh. Tehran: Nashr-e Nay, 4th printing, 1377/1998. Iranshenasi 12, 3 (2000): 631-47. o Leonard Lewisohn (ed.): Divân-e Mohammad Shirin-e Maghrebi. Tehran/London: University of Tehran, 1372/1993. Iranshenasi 12, 4 (2001): 91015.

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o A. Bausani: Religion in Iran from Zarathustra to Baha’ullah. New York, 2000. Payâm-e Bahâ’i, no. 258 (2001): pp. 41-43. o Iraj Afshâr and Mahmud Omidsâlâr (eds.): Mojmal al-tavârikh va al-Qesas. Tehran: Talâyeh, 1389/2001. Iranshenasi 13, 2 (2001): 432-5. o Sayf al-Din Najmâbâdi and Siegfried Weber (eds.): Mojmal al-tavârikh va alqesas. Neckerhausen: Deux Mondes, 1379/2000. Iranshenasi 13, 2 (2001): 44045. o Fakhrezzaman Schirazi-Mahmoudian: Literarische Verwendung persischer Termini und Redewendungen im Werke deq Hedyats: Ein Kompendium. Wiesbaden, Harrasowitz, 1999. Iranshenasi 13, 2 (2001): 436-40. o Jürgen Ehlers: Mit goldenem Siegel: über Briefe, Schreiber und Boten im Shâhnâme. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000. Iranshenasi 13, 3 (2001): 671-77. o Shahram Ahadi: New Persian Language and Linguistics. A Selected Bibliography up to 2001. Harrasowitz, 2002. Iranshenasi 15, 1 (2003): 164-9. o A.A. Seyed-Gohrab (ed.): Jamâli-ye Dehlavi, The Mirror of Meanings. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2002. Iranshenasi 16, 2 (2004): 341-47. o Iraj Afshâr (ed.): Fehrest-e dast-nevis-hâ-ye Fârsi dar Ketâb-khâneh-ye Melli-ye Otrish va Ârshiv-e Dowlati-ye Otrish dar Vin. Tehran: Nashr-e Farhangestân, 1382/2003. Iranshenasi 17, 2 (2005): 389-94. o Nahid Mozaffari (ed.): Strange Times, My Dear: The Pen Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature. New York: Arcade, 2005. Iranshenasi 18, 2 (2006): 330-36. o Bahman Gâzpur: Resâleh-ye Qodsiyeh-ye Tariqat-e Seddiqân. Tehran: Horufiyyeh, 1384/2005. Iranshenasi 18, 4 (2007): 697-700.

Translations o Hellmut Ritter, “Die Anfänge der Hurufi Sekte.” Translated into Persian with an introduction. Farhang-e Irân-Zamin 10 (1962): 319-93. o “Mosibatnâmeh of Attâr,” from Hellmut Ritter’s Das Meer der Seele. Translated into Persian, Râhnamâ-ye Ketâb 7 (1964): 19-24. o “War Daqiqi ein Zoroastrier?,” by H. H. Schaeder. Translated into Persian with an introduction and notes. In: Yâdnâmeh-ye Habib Yaghmâ’i. Tehran, 1978. pp. 471-497. o “Motun-e bâz-yâfteh-ye arabi darbâreh-ye târikh-e emâmân-e Zaydi-ye Tabarestân va Daylâmân va Gilân,” by Wilferd Madelung, from the introduction to his Arabic Texts Concerning the History of The Zaydi Imams of Tabaristan,

17

o o o o o o o o o

Daylaman and Gilan (Beirut/Wiesbaden, 1987). Translated into Persian with an Introduction. Iranshenasi 2 (1990): 431-46. Gholam Hosayn Nazari, “Moths in the Night” (short story). In: Stories from Iran, A Chicago Anthology 1921-1991, pp. 229-30. idem: “The Cast” (short story). Ibid, 231-32. idem: “Adolescence and the Hill” (short story). Ibid, 233-34. idem: “Mr. Hemayat” (short story). Ibid, 235-38. idem: “Shadowy “(short story), ibid: 239-41. Mahshid Amir-Shahi, “The Smell of Lemon Peel, The Smell of Fresh Milk” (short story). Ibid: 433-45. “Dehkhoda’s Fiddle-Faddle.” Chanteh: The Iranian Cross-Cultural Quarterly, 8 (1994): 46-49. Parvin Etesâmi: Ten Poems. Translated together with Margret Madelung in: Once a Dewdrop (1994, see above), pp. 208-33. Gloria Faizi, “A Biography of Abu’l-Qasim Faizi” in Bahá’í World, vol. 18 (1986): 659-665. Translated into Persian as “Zendeginâmeh-ye Abu al-Qâsem-e Fayzi,” in Be Yâd-e Dust (see above), pp. 9-25. Work in progress

o Hâji Mirzâ Heydar-‘Ali Esfahâni, A Biography of Abu al-Fazl Golpâygâni. Editio princeps of the Persian text, with introduction and annotations. o The Letters of Hâji Mirzâ Heydar-‘Ali Esfahâni to his wife (ed.). From an uncatalogued manuscript in the editor’s possession. o Torkân-e Pârsiguy. A collection of Persian poetry by major Turkish poets, with introduction. o A Collection of unpublished letters by Abd al-Bahâ’ (d. 1921) to the Bahâ’is of Germany.

18

I. Alexander Romance

On Some Sources of Niz$m%'s Iskandarnma J. Christoph Bürgel University of Bern

Professor Heshmat Moayyad was my first teacher of Persian, in the early fifties, when he was writing his dissertation on Zhindapl with Hellmut Ritter and I was just a beginner in the Orientalisches Seminar of the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt on the Main. Since then, we have been in friendly contact, and have also been sharing a veneration for the Persian poet Nizm, who ranked foremost in Prof. Ritter’s scholarly work. Ritter’s “Die Bildersprache Nizm’s” remains a classic. The following remarks, mainly footnotes to my German translation of Nizm’s latest and longest epos, 1 incomplete and unsatisfying as they are,2 are here presented in token of my long friendship with Heshmat Moayyad and our mutual love for Nizm. I. As was already shown by Bertels, the way Nizm made use of his sources was arbitrary, in the sense that he did not refrain from changing his sources to accord with his own ideas.3 However, when it comes to the goals that Nizm pursued by introducing these alterations, there is nothing at all arbitrary. Where Nizm altered his sources, it was to illustrate his humanistic ideas. In considering Nizm’s sources, one has to make a division between two different types: first, the general source from which a basic idea or overall plot stems, and second, sources employed only for certain particular events, or inserted stories, etc. Thus the general idea for Makhzan al-asrr, a didactic epos dealing with twenty moral topics each illustrated by one little story, came from San’’s Hadqat al-haqqa, as Nizm

1

Nizami, Das Alexanderbuch – Iskandarname. Übertragung aus dem Persischen, Nachwort und Anmerkungen von J.C. Bürgel (Zürich: Manesse 1991). 2 A complete survey of his sources in this epos is a desideratum I would love to realize, but it would cost me much more time than was at my disposition, when I was invited to contribute to this Festschrift. Rather than delving into the details of source criticism, I plan to write a monograph on the poet, provided the circumstances of my life allow me to do so. 3 See E. Bertels, Twor˜eski put’ poeta (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1956), and idem, Izbrannye trudy: Nizami i Fuzuli (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo vostochnoy literatury, 1962).

J. Christoph Bürgel

himself suggests in the beginning of this epos by his reference to San’, without however naming the Hadqat expressly.4 The strict structural device, however, was apparently his own contribution.5 Three of the four following epics drew their subject matter from the Shhnma, namely Khusraw and Shrn, Haft Paikar and Iskandarnma. 6 Lail and Majnn was inspired by Arabic sources, probably the long chapter in the Kitb al-aghn. Yet, nowhere did Nizm restrict himself to just one source. The mere intention to surpass his models, to outdo his predecessors, as he often claims to have done, implied the necessity of using more than just the one source from which the initial impulse had come. Thus while following San’’s structural idea of illustrating didactic chapters by inserted stories, Nizm borrowed none of San’’s stories, but found his own twenty examples mainly from places as yet unidentified. 7 In Khusraw va Shrn, he not only greatly modified Firdaws’s story of the Sasanian ruler and his Armenian wife, but enriched the plot by another love story, that between Shrn and Farhd, thus gaining an inner tension, a dramatic development absent in Firdaws’s version. At the same time, he wrote this epos, which has so many features of a drama, as a literary contravention of Gurgn’s Ws and Rmn.8 In Nizm’s eyes, Ws had acted immorally by yielding to Rmn’s desire. This is why the young Shrn, his model of proper female behavior, is exhorted by her aunt not to behave like Ws, so as not to fall into disgrace. She follows this counsel throughout the narrative, whose structure is thus clearly influenced by Nizm’s idea of correcting a model that he found morally objectionable. We may assume that his sources here were already not exclusively literary, but also included philosophical or ethical material. The obvious evidence for this is the summary of Kalla wa Dimna in forty verses as given by Khusraw’s wise counselor Buzurgmihr towards the end of the epos.9 Nizm’s Shrn is also a correction of Firdaws’s, as well as of the historical Shrn, both figures being far below the high-flown moral standard of Nizm’s heroine. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for Nizm’s Khusraw, who is not shown as the tyrant he has apparently been historically, nor as the conqueror and womanizer he is in the Shhnma, but as a human individual, who, even though the heir of a throne, has to develop from an

4

Cf. Nizm, Makhzan al-asrr, ed. V. Dastgird%, 364ff. For this epos see now the thorough analysis by R. Würsch, Nizamis Schatzkammer der Geheimnisse. Eine Untersuchung zu Mahzan al-asrar (Wiesbaden: L. Reichert, 2005). 6 For these three epics see the respective introductions (“Nachwort”) in my German translations: Chosrou und Schirin (Zürich: Manesse, 1980), and Die Abenteuer des Königs Bahram Gur und seiner sieben Prinzessinnen (München: C.H. Beck, 1991). 7 See the above-mentioned analysis of R. Würsch. 8 See my “Die Liebesvorstellungen im persischen Epos Wis und Ramin,“ Asiatische Studien 33 (1979): 6598. 9 See Khusraw u Shñrñn, ed. Dastgirdñ, 406-410; German translation, 309-312. 5

22

On Some Sources of Nizm's Iskandarnma

immature, uncontrolled youth into a responsible ruler and sincere lover.10 In this process of maturation women play an important role, as again in the development of Nizm’s later princely heroes, Bahrm G r and Alexander the Great. Actually, Nizm’s three epics dealing with kings may be read as some sort of Fürstenspiegel.11 But the question remains whether, for this dimension, Nizm himself was influenced by some Fürstenspiegel material or manuals on ethics, or if all this came from himself, or perhaps, at least in part from his first wife pk, a Kipchak slave whom the prince of Darband had sent him as a present and reward for his first poem. According to Bertels, the totally unIslamic figure of Shrn is only explainable by the influence of pk, whose loss Nizm bewails in a moving personal note after having related the death of Shrn. 12 pk, apparently a Christian, would thus have been the living model behind Shrn, this unique figure in medieval Persian literature of a loving woman and a noble lady. On the other hand, the fact that Nizm inserted a summary of the fables of Kalla wa Dimna in Khusraw and Shrn, with the moral point of each fable expressed in one verse, and that he borrowed the stories of the seven villains in Haft Paikar from the Siysatnma of Nizm al-Mulk, are clear indications that he was familiar with works of the mirror for princes genre. In Haft Paikar, the hero’s identity and the main features of his life are again taken from the Shhnma. One story, that of Bahrm and his harp-playing slave-girl Fitna, for whom he performs the breath-taking hunting feat, is a famous example (already highlighted by Bertels), of how Nizm would change his source material with a view toward working out their ethical dimensions.13 But where does the basic idea of the seven story-telling princesses come from? That Nizmi had conceived this structural device already at the beginning of his literary career is suggested by a line in the introduction of the Makhzan al-asrr: haft khalfa bi-yik khna dar / haft hikyat bi-yik afsna dar “Seven caliphs within one palace, seven tales within one story” It seems quite clear to me that here, in addition to the Shhnma and the source, or probably sources, that inspired the seven stories frame, other non-literary sources have contributed to his picture of the world. Thus, e.g., I would surmise that he had already 10

See the introduction to my translation of this epos. Chosrou und Schirin, 331-367. Cf. J. Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), Chapter V: “Allegories of Kingship and Justice,” 180-236. 12 ed. Dastgird, 429-30, German tr., 326-27. Bertels, Nizami i Fuzuli, 118. 13 For a detailed analysis, cf. my contribution in Ehsan Yarshater, ed., Persian Literature. Columbia Lectures on Iranian Studies 3 (Persian Heritage Foundation/Bibliotheca Persica, 1988), 172-76. 11

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read by this point at least sections of the Ras’il Ikhwn al-saf’, “The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity,” which were certainly used by him in the Iskandarnma, as I shall presently expound. II. Coming now to the Iskandarnma, it is clear that I shall not be able to do justice to the problem of the sources of this longest and most complex of all the five epics of our poet, apart from the fact that I am still far from having studied it as thoroughly as a complete analysis of the sources would require. My findings are rather preliminary and somewhat random. First of all, it is quite clear that the first impulse here, as in the case of Khusraw and Shrn and Haft Paikar, came from the Shhnma. A second important impulse for the Iskandarnma is to be found, however, in a source which could yield nothing in the two previous cases, i.e. the Koran, with its mention of Dh al-Qarnain, the DoubleHorned, in Surah 18. Nizm himself refers to the source problem time and again in his introductory remarks. One aspect is his relationship to Firdaws. With all due respect, our poet utters his decision not to repeat things Firdaws had already written, except were it was inevitable. Another general deliberation concerns his attitude vis-à-vis the miraculous, the mirabilia, already so conspicuous in Pseudo-Callisthenes and much of the Greek Alexander tradition. In dealing with this problem, Nizm uses the terms lie/falsehood (durgh) and truth (rst) which, of course, evoke the time-honored Arabic debate about the permissibility of lying in poetry, which had, however, usually addressed the problem of hyperbole or the issue of fiction.14 Nizm does in fact touch upon the question of fiction and clearly pronounces himself in favor of it, yet only with certain restrictions, particularly concerning the notion of shigiftî, the miraculous or astounding (ultimately going back to the thaumaston of Aristotle's Poetics):15 I want now to empty the stage and start a magician’s shadow-play, to evoke the image of a figure as has never been shown by any player. I made its beginning so as to enchant by the melody of its music. Everything I found miraculous I told in a manner which made it believable to the mind (l:heart). 14

Cf. my “‘Die beste Dichtung ist die lügenreichste’ Wesen und Bedeutung eines literarischen Streites des arabischen Mittelalters im Lichte komparatistischer Betrachtung,”Oriens 23-24 (1970-71): 7-102. 15 Cf. l.c., 12ff.

24

On Some Sources of Nizm's Iskandarnma

Any account that is separated from reason, I did not erect my poetry upon it.16 A few pages later he takes up the topic again: Yes, everything that I found incredible, I decided not to include. (Unless) I gave it such an expression that the readers would find it agreeable. To roam in (the realm of) the miraculous (shigift) too far, leads poetry into absurdity. If however you strip poetry altogether of the miraculous, the old books will gain no novelty. Keep poetry in a measure that one may trust it by analogy. Even if poetry shimmers like a jewel, if it contains incredible things, it will appear as lie. (and yet) a lie that resembles the truth (rst), is better than a truth that is severed from (moral) correctness (durust).17 The principle here developed by Nizm is highly revealing. Actually, it appears like a reconciliation of the two opposing stances of the above-mentioned conflict, the one pleading for lying and the other claiming truthfulness in poetry. It also reminds one of the Aristotelian rule given in the Poetics: “What is convincing (eikos, likely, plausible), even though impossible, should always be preferred to what is possible and unconvincing.”18 Here, however, instead of the impossible Nizm has the lying (also admitted by Aristotle under certain circumstances),19 and instead of the convincing, he has the morally correct. In other words, Nizm has observed a rule of Aristotelian Poetics with Platonic spirit. At the end of the Sharafnma, Nizm repeats his principle in a short statement which runs as follows: In places where I found untruth (n-rst) (i.e. in my sources), I wove into it the ornament of truth. Poetry that does not march on the way of truth, 16

Iskandarnma I (Sharafnma), 68.4-8. Iskandarnma I (Sharafnma), 74.9- 75.4. 18 Aristotle, Poetics XXIV,19 19 Cf. “Die beste Dichtung,” 13. 17

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J. Christoph Bürgel

is abject, even if it carries its fundament up to the moon. Where the old pioneer (meaning Firdaws) led poetry away from correctness, I amended his errors. With this excuse, I retold what he had already told.20 However, Nizm also talks about the sources he used, even though in a rather general way, both at the beginning of Sharafnma21 and in the Iqblnma:22 The works of this king, who traveled to the horizons, I did not find treated in one (particular) volume. The words, even though (as rich) as a filled treasure house, were scattered in many a manuscript. From every manuscript I gathered material and imprinted upon it the ornament of poetry. Furthermore from modern chronicles Jewish, Christian and Pahlavi, I selected from every book its cream, from every shell I extracted its marrow. Language by language I gathered the treasure, and from that all I created a whole. Whoever knows all these tongues, his tongue will refrain from reproach.23 It emerges from these remarks that Nizm was familiar with several languages. Of course, he knew Arabic. He expressly mentions middle Persian. But as for Christian and Jewish sources, we may only guess what he means in terms of languages. Did he perhaps know Georgian or Armenian? Or does he simply refer to Arabic sources written by Christians and Jews? In addition to these general remarks on his sources, he mentions a number of authors and book titles, probably pointing to sources he used. First of all, at the beginning of Iqblnma, he speaks of Alexander’s interest in the sciences and mentions three books, even though again in a somewhat vague manner befitting his poetical style. The first book is qualified as gîtî-shinâs, “world-knowing,” which in all

20

Iskandarnma I, 523.12-524.1. i.e., the first part of Iskandarnma. 22 i.e., the second part of Iskandarnma. 23 Iskandarnma I, 69, 4-9. 21

26

On Some Sources of Nizm's Iskandarnma

likelihood refers to either Ptolemy's Geography,24 or to his Megale Syntaxis (known in Arabic as al-Majist = Almagest).25 The second book is called Daftar-i ramz-i rhnyn (“Register of the symbols of the spiritual beings”), by which is meant beyond any doubt a work, or the works, of the famous Neo-Pythagorean magician of the first century Apollonios of Tyana, whose writings had been translated and were well-known in the medieval Muslim world. 26 The title evoked by Nizm's verse is in fact the Risla f ta’thr al-rhnyt, which deals with talismans and the conjuration of demons. In its Arabic form, Balns, Apollonius figures as advisor to Iskandar during his expeditions in Nizm's Iskandarnma. The third book is first introduced as sifr-i Iskandar, by which: the people of R m rendered iron as smooth as wax by which they found knowledge about love and hatred and what the sky has (conceals) in the seven spheres. He goes on to say: Now, of these pearl-strewing shells one finds no sign except for Istamkhis.27 This of course refers to the Kitb istamkhs, another famous book on talismans, quoted by the Ikhwn al-saf’ and the anonymous author of the Ghyat al-hakm. It was reported to have been given by Aristotle to Alexander before his Indian expedition.28 Finally, in the chapter on the reasons why Alexander was called the Double-Horned, 29 Nizm mentions the Kitb al-ulf, a famous text on Astrology by Ab Ma´shar al-Balkh, written between 840 and 860.30 In other words, Istamkhis and K. al-ulf are the only two book titles mentioned unmistakably by our author. It is strange that he should have singled out these two works, the former one of the most renowned Greek sources of magic, the other a well-known text on astrology. I have not yet been able to investigate either of them. But there is at least one story that is in all likelihood taken from the Istamkhis, namely the report about the sar-parastn, or skull-adorers, a group of people who would procure themselves soothsaying skulls by forcing a man into a jar filled with 24

Cf. M. Plessner, s.v. “Batlamiyus” in Enclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. Cf. M. Ullmann Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam. Handbuch der Orientalistik I, VI, 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 282ff. 26 Cf. “Balinas,” in EI2; M. Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam, 389. 27 Iskandarnma II (Iqbalnma), 38. 28 Cf. Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam, 374ff. 29 Iskandarnma II, 44, last line. 30 Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam, 317ff. 25

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J. Christoph Bürgel

boiling oil and leaving him there until, after 30 or 40 days, his head could easily be severed from the body and would be put into a niche in the wall, where it answered questions about the future.31 This procedure is mentioned in the Ghyat al-hakm, (“Goal of the Sage”), known to the Latin Middle Ages as Picatrix, whose author probably took it from the Istamkhs.32 The Istamkhs or the K. al-ulf might also be the sources for some other stories concerning occult sciences, such as the two stories about alchemy, the one about Mary the Copt, and the one about the false alchemist from Khurasan, who successfully cheated a caliph with a shrewd trick, or the stories about astrology. One of these stories about occult knowledge however, comes obviously from another source, as I already indicated in my paper on the occult sciences in Nizm’s Iskandarnma,33 namely the story about the shepherd and the ring. This is one of the stories already well known in Greek antiquity. Plato mentions it in his Republic and it became known under the title of “Gyges’ ring.”34 The Brethren of Purity took it from an Arabic version of that work, and quoted it in the Chapter of their Epistles dealing with magic, expressly mentioning the second maqla of Plato's Republic as their source. Now, in his rhymed version of this story, Nizm uses a very rare Arabic word of obscure meaning, rarely used even in Arabic and almost never met with in Persian. This same word, khasf, occurs in the Arabic version of the Brethren. One other detail gives further evidence of Nizm's having used an Arabic source here. At the end of the story, the shepherd, who has found the magic ring which makes him invisible, mingles with a group of rusul, ”messengers,” with whom he enters the palace of the king and kills him. Now, rusul also means “prophets.” In Nizm's version, the shepherd appears before the king and pretends to be a prophet, referring to his becoming invisible as the miracle (mu‘jiz) proving his prophethood, whereupon the king and his people submit to him. Returning to more general aspects, the general plan of Nizm's Iskandarnma–its tripartite structure as announced in the foreword–is almost beyond doubt inspired by Frb’s political philosophy. Following his announcement, Nizm shows Alexander in the three stages of conqueror, philosopher and prophet: At first I'll knock at the door of the kingdom and speak about the conquering of countries.

31

Iskandarnma II, 189ff. Pseudo-Majriti, “Picatrix.”Das Ziel des Weisen von Pseudo-Majriti, translated into German from the Arabic by Hellmut Ritter and Martin Plessner. Studies of the Warburg Institute, 27 (London: Warburg Insitute 1962), 146ff. 33 See my “Occult Sciences in the Iskandarnameh of Nizami,” in Kamran Talattof and J. W. Clinton, eds. The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 129-139. 34 Plato, Republic, Second Book, 359b-360d. 32

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On Some Sources of Nizm's Iskandarnma

Then I'll adorn my word with philosophy and renew its old strife. Finally, I'll talk about his prophethood, for God himself calls him a prophet.35 This corresponds exactly with Frb's view of the ideal sovereign, as developed in his work on the perfect state (al-madna al-f ila), where he explains that this office requires that one combine the qualities of a political and military leader, a philosopher and a prophet.36 I will not go into the details of Iskandar’s expeditions. But it is clear that even though using much of Firdaws’s material, Nizm rearranged it so as to abolish its geographical confusion, mainly by dividing Iskandar’s travels into two separate enterprises, first the military expedition and then the non-violent exploration of the world as a prophet. The contest between the two painters, the Greek and the Chinese, is a slightly modified version of a story told by Ghazl in his Mzn al-´amal, which, after Nizm, was also used by R m in his Mathnaw.37 The story about the musical contest between Aristotle and Plato is probably inspired by the Ikhwn al-saf’, who mention a similar somniferous influence of music as the one first mastered by Plato and then emulated by Aristotle;38 it also occurs in a wellknown anecdote about Frb.39 Another complex problem, where a whole set of sources have to be considered, is to do with the geographical aspects of Iskandar’s expeditions and journeys. Here, books like the Murj al-dhahab by al-Mas´ d, the Kitb al-tjn by Ibn Hishm, the geography by Ibn al-Faqh,40 the Risla by Ibn Fadln,41 etc., have probably been drawn upon by 35

Iskandarnma I, 55,2-4 Farb, F mabdi’ r’ ahl al-madna al-fdila, ed. and German trans. by F. Dieterici, Der Musterstaat (Leiden: Brill, 1900), 28th chapter. English ed. and trans. by R. Walzer. 37 Cf. Priscilla Soucek, “Nizami on Painters and Painting” in Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: MMA, 1972), 1-21. 38 Cf. H. G. Farmer, The Influence of Music: From Arabic Sources, A lecture delivered before the Musical Association (London, 1926); J.C. Bürgel, The Feather of Simurgh. The Licit Magic of the Arts in Medieval Islam (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 101ff. 39 Ibn Khallikan’s Biographical Dictionary, 4 vols., trans. McGuckin De Slane (Paris, 1842-71; repr. New York, 1961), 3:309. 40 See M. Bridges and J.C. Bürgel, eds., The Problematics of Power. Eastern and Western Representations of Alexander the Great. Schweiz.Asiengesellschaft, Monogr. 22 (Bern and Berlin, etc.: P. Lang, 1996), particularly the articles by F. Doufikar-Aerts, “Alexander the Great and the Pharos of Alexandria in Arabic Literature” (191-202); Ch. Genequand, “Sagesse et pouvoir. Alexandre en Islam” (125-133); F. de Polignac, “Cosmocrator: L’islam et la légende antique du souverain universel” (135-148). 36

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J. Christoph Bürgel

Nizm. As an example I mention the appearance of a monster-like warrior in the army of the R s, the like of which is described in Ibn Fadln's Risla 42 (The R s were not Russians, but Normans or more exactly, the Varangians who migrated down the Volga in the 9th century and founded a dynasty).43 Already Georg Jacob has shown that Nizm was influenced by these rather recent historical events in his description of the seven battles with this tribe.44 Another detail probably stems from the same source: Nizm tells us how impressed Alexander was when he learnt that the R s used marten skins as currency.45 Now, Ibn Fadln mentions, that the R s of his time used sable skins for this very aim.46 Still another set of sources concerns philosophical issues. Apart from Aristotle and Apollonius, who are present throughout the epos respectively as minister and counselor of Alexander, Nizm mentions the names of Hermes, Thales, Socrates, Plato, Porphyry, and briefly summarizes their doctrines about the origin of the world. 47 Of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates (in this order!), he quotes those hikam or gnomes, which his Alexander is taking along after he has become a prophet.48 All of this points to a keen interest in Greek philosophy. Actually, the second and third part of the Iskandarnma may be read as a defense of that heritage so threatened in the time of Nizm, as may be gleaned already from his programmatic announcement quoted above: I'll renew the old strife of philosophy.49 Many similar questions still await detailed investigation. One thing, however, is beyond doubt: Nizm's exploration and exploitation of sources has never been deeper, broader and more complex than in his last epos, the Iskandarnma.

41

Z.V. Togan, Ibn Fadlan’s Reisebricht (Leipzig, 1939). Togan, Par. 72 43 This, along with the Alans, seems to be one of the more frequent references of Rus, at least in Persian sources. For more information about the very complicated and contested meaning of this term, see the article “Rus” by P.B. Golden in EI 2. 44 G. Jacob, “Iskenders Warägerfeldzug – Ein iranischer Heldengesang des Mittelalters aus Nizami’s Iskendername,” Auszug metrisch nachgebildet (Glückstadt, n.d.). 45 Iskandarnma I, 479-80. 46 Togan, Par. 56 47 Iskandarnma II,123ff. 48 Iskandarnma II,142-164. 49 Iskandarnma I,55; cf. my “Conquérant, philosophe et prophète. L’image d’Alexandre le Grand dans l’épopée de Nizami,” in Christophe Balaÿ, Claire Kappler and Ziva Vesel, eds. Pand-o Sokhan. Mélanges offerts à Charles-Henri de Fouchécour. Bibliothèque Iranienne, 44 (Tehran, 1995), 65-78. 42

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Sources and Art of Amir Khosrou’s “The Alexandrine Mirror” Angelo Michele Piemontese University of Rome, ‘La Sapienza’

Amir Khosrou Dehlavi (1251-1325), who inherited the military rank of amir from his father, a Turkish archer and knight, was the most talented Persian poet of India. He was versed in various arts and sciences, such as historiography, linguistics, rhetoric, and music. His Âyene-ye Eskandari, “The Alexandrine Mirror” (dated Delhi 799 H./1299 A.D.), is a little known but prominent Persian variation of the Alexander Romance that Khosrou wrote in response to the renowned “Alexander” poem (Eskandar-nâme, circa 1197-1203) by Nezâmi of Ganja.1 Khosrou was an exact contemporary of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), who among other things dealt with the figure and the person of the emperor according to European canons (De Monarchia, 1311). There is a certain resemblance between the two authors with respect to artistic versatility, encyclopedic knowledge, liveliness of dramatic pathos and cosmic representation, research and conception of a universal empire. Amir Khosrou’s “The Alexandrine Mirror” represents the Roman king civilizer of the world in Alexander’s clothes. This universal king is portrayed as a wise strategist, equanimous ruler, industrious scientist, explorer and conqueror of the world, intrepid navigator of the unknown ocean, all by the grace of God and the favor of Fortune. Alexander “was born in Rome and died in Syria” (bar âmad ze Rum o foru shod be Shâm, line 3975). As the king of Rome (Rum, means its empire and country), having annexed Africa (Zang) and the Persian kingdom of Darius, he conquers China and Russia (Rus) and explores the Western Sea (daryâ-ye Maghreb), both the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Alexander represents the new Darius, the navigator (Dârâ-ye daryâ1

On Amir Khosrou, see: M. Habib, Hazrat Amir Khusrau of Delhi (Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons & Co., 1927); M. M. Wahid Mirza, The Life & Works of Amir Khusrau (Calcutta: Baptist Mission PressPunjab University Oriental Publications, 1935); C. A. Storey, Persian Literature. A Bio-Bibliographical Survey. Section II. Fasciculus 3. History of India (London, 1939), pp. 495-504; Shri Hasnuddin Ahmad (ed.), Life, Time and Works of Amir Khusrau Dehlavi. Seventeenth Centenary Commemoration Volume (Bombay: Leaders Press, 1975). Majles-e Amir Khosraw-e Balkhi [!] (Kabul: Vezârat-e Ettelâât va Kultur, Bayhaqi Mo’assese, 1354/1976); H. Suleimanov & F. Suleimanova, Miniatures Illuminations of Amir Hosrov Dehlevi’s Works, ed. by E. Y. Yusupov (Tashkent: Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR, H. S. Suleimanov Institute of Manuscripts); Mumtaz Husain, Amir Khusrow Dehlawi. A monography of Amir Khusrow’s life & works based on his own writings and those of his contemporaries (New Delhi: National Amir Khusrow Society-Aiwan-i Ghalib, 1986).

Angelo Michele Piemontese navard, line 3666), and ‘the universal emperor’, jahândâr, the lord of the world (jahân, meaning also ‘space’ and ‘empire’). This Persian term corresponds to kosmokrátôr in the anonymous Greek Alexander Romance, which is said to be a work by pseudoCallisthenes (about 200 A. D.). Khosrou seems to be animated by the memory of a Roman legal order in contrast to his own contemporary climate of cruelty. Turkish archers, the main body of the Chinese imperial army, as well as the pirates of Cyprus, some Franks (Farang), are all polemically included by Khosrou among people connected with violence and robbery. The Alexandrine code of behavior as related by Khosrou calls to mind the juridical Roman axiom unicuique suum “to each one his own.”2 Alexander implements this rule of justice, which concerns the correlative measure of the right of everybody to be aware, to work, to act, and to eat; and of the artist to strive to observe competence and virtue (honar, also “talent, skill, craft”). The Roman Emperor closest to this figure of Alexander seems to be Hadrian (117-138 A.D.). He was an industrious traveler, jurist and builder. He built the stone wall that bears his name and was, according to Tertullianus (3rd century), “an explorer of everything that was to be seen” (curiositatum omnium explorator).3 The same year that Khosrou composed “The Alexandrine Mirror,” the Mongol commander Qutlugh Khwâja had reached the gates of Delhi, which were defended by ‘Alâ’ al-Din, the Sultan of a Turkish dynasty, the Khalji (1290-1320), and the political dedicatee of Khosrow’s Khamse, or quintet of narrative poems. Khosrow composed his quintet in reply to the prestigious quintet of Nezâmi (1141-1209). ‘Alâ’ al-Din annexed some regions of central-southern India to the Sultanate of Delhi and cultivated the idea of conquering the world and establishing a new religious doctrine. The protagonist of “The Alexandrine Mirror” exhibits all the requisites of chivalry, conquers China and proves himself through clemency and the institution of law to be more civilized. Imposing his authority in legitimate forms, he orders the restitution of war booty to the vanquished and acquires the dignity of a universal emperor. Khosrou was perhaps taking his revenge on the Mongols in “The Alexandrine Mirror” by relating the conquest of the empire of China by Alexander. Under Qubilay Khan (1274-1294), who had assumed the Chinese name Yüan for his dynasty in Khanbaliq (Peking), the Mongol Empire was in diplomatic relations with Europe and menaced the Sultanate of Delhi, where Khosrou lived. During one of the Mongol incursions in the region of Multan, Khosrou had been taken prisoner but managed to escape (1285). He describes

2 3

Cicero, De Natura Deorum, III 15; Iustinianus, Institutiones, liber I, titulus 1. Apologeticus adversus gentes pro Christianis, V.8-9, cfr. J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, I (Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1866), col. 347.

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Sources and Art of Amir Khosrou´s `The Alexandrine Mirror` war and the sufferings of military life in some of the more impressive scenes from “The Alexandrine Mirror.” The current edition of the poem contains 4416 lines (plus an addendum), though the author himself states that there are 4450 lines. The editorial apparatus includes both a preface (lines 1-648) and an afterward, a self-apologia (lines 4292-4416). 4 Khosrou acknowledges “the artist of Ganja” (honar-parvar-e Ganje), that is Nezâmi, as a masterly poet, though the heights of his artistry are not matched by his wisdom. Nezâmi erroneously raises Alexander to the rank of prophet in his Eskandar-nâme (lines 387, 391-395, 406-411, 1631-35), whereas Khosrou says that in reality Alexander became king and world conqueror solely through the help of God and of “angels and scientists” such as Plato and Aristotle (lines 414-422). Khosrou takes up this topic (cho naw kardeam sekke-ye pish r, line 372), having studied it carefully, after having referred to various old historical and scientific sources (cho kardam ze har nâme-i bâz jost, line 3973). He deals (lines 385-387) with the parts of “the Alexandrine reign” (molk-e eskandari) that Nezâmi had skipped over, beginning with the campaign in China “that I saw in some ancient histories” (ke didam be ta’rikh-hâ-ye kohan, lines 696-698). “The Alexandrine Mirror” is divided into 35 “speeches” (goftâr) with a didactic purpose. Frequent moral digressions and instructive anecdotes (exempla) are interspersed with these “speeches” in Alexander’s story. They concern the behavior of the prince and of every man, as well as the ethology of animals. These moral instructions and the exploits of Alexander constitute two sections of the poem, perhaps not perfectly coordinated. The principal subject dealt with is the Alexander Romance. The author marked each of its fifteen sequences5 with suitable formulas of incipit, repeated now and then.6 1. Introduction by the author (verses 280-427). This concerns the art of poetry, the insidious profession of criticism, providing an introduction to the work, the mythography of Alexander and its character.

4

Amir Khosrou Dehlavi, Â’ine-ye Eskandari, ed. Dj. Mirsaidov (Moscow: «Nauk», 1977). This defective edition lacks any explanatory note about the original text, which often contains rare words and controversial names. The same edition, stripped of the textual variants, appears in Amir Khosrou Dehlavi, Khamse, ed. Amir Ahmad Ashrafi, (Tehran: Shaqâyeq, 1362/1983), pp. 405-573. 5 Cf. Amir Khusrau, Lo Specchio Alessandrino, trans.and introd. by A. M. Piemontese (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbetino, 1999), and my article “Le submersible Alexandrin dans l’abysse, selon Amir Khusrau,” in Alexandre le Grand dans les littératures occidentales et proche-orientales. Actes du Colloque de Paris, 27-29 novembre 1999 [: 1997], réunis par L. Harf-Lancner, C. Kappler and F. Suard (Nanterre: Centre des Sciences de la Littérature, 1999), pp. 253-271. 6 Cf. lines 649, 701, 908, 1369, 1623, 1945, 2209, 2443, 2586, 2825, 3347, 3659, 3880, 4064.

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Angelo Michele Piemontese 2. Alexander’s itinerary by land and sea (verses 649-700). This describes “the conquest of the horizons” (fath-e âfâq, line 690) as the aim of the Alexandrine parable, that is the discovery of the world and its universal dominion. 3. The confrontation of the two emperors (verses 701-839). This relates the conquest of China, “the land of the regal lords” (keshvar-e khodâyân, line 1499), then the military, political and moral confrontation of Alexander with the Chinese emperor, “sovereign of the four horizons” (khâqân-e âfâq, line 1459). This section contains the message of Alexander to the emperor of China (vv. 720-731), the oration of his wise counselor, and that of the khâqân in reply to him (vv. 745-766, 768-784). The author meditates with keen description on the warriors awaiting death in the night encampments of both fronts (vv. 819-831). 4. The imperial tension (verses 908-1308). Here we have a narrative of knightly tournaments. A disguised Amazon, Kanifu, the daughter of a Turkish archer serving the Chinese emperor, is defeated in a duel and enslaved by Alexander. Here the author masterly portrays the two tragic panels of any war, the senseless violence of battle and the lethal effects of different weapons (vv. 916-946, 1174-91). This tension is then broken in the subsequent scene of the undressing of the Amazon and her contemplation by the victorious warrior, Alexander himself (vv. 1126-37). The Amazon relates her autobiography in a monologue (vv. 1251-89). 5. Alexander’s authority (verses 1369-1554). Having defeated the Chinese emperor in a duel by the strength of his arms (niru-ye bâzu, line 1410), Alexander gives him back the treasure and appoints him as the regent of China. The new emperor of the world establishes juridical order in the country. This includes a message to Alexander addressed by the khâqân (vv. 1380-95), Alexander’s edicts concerning the surrender of China (vv. 1418-21), the restitution of booty (vv. 1461-63, 1468), and the gifts presented to the emperor (vv. 1498-99). There are two further orations, the first one delivered by Alexander before the Chinese king he had defeated, and the second one in reply to the same king. By that time he is named the vice-regent of the country (vv. 1484-97, 152142). The text also includes an inventory of the imperial Chinese treasure (vv. 1505-09). 6. Alexander’s expedition towards the Northern region (verses 1623-1884). It records the disaster in the Aphotic Zone (zolomât), the angelical gift of a rescuing bunch of grapes, the conquest of Mount Yâjuj, the building of the wall against the primitive and harmful people living there. A series of monologues: the oration of the angel donor (vv. 1656-71), the petition of the Mount Yâjuj dalesmen in front of Alexander (vv. 1709-15), the report of the informer describing the Yâjuj people (vv. 1723-43). The heroicomic turn-up: Yâjuj springs from the hole and launches an assault (vv. 1754-67), then his ravenous meal, a bestial self-tearing to pieces, and his intoxication by wine (vv. 1801-07, 1812-16). A happy end: the fine edict concerning the surveillance over Yâjuj by means of the wall, the liberation from the Menace. This fine text looks like the inscription placed

34

Sources and Art of Amir Khosrou´s `The Alexandrine Mirror` on the site (vv. 1876-82). All this demonstrates the mercy and astuteness of Alexander as a strategist. 7. Alexander’s wedding with Kanifu, the Turkish Amazon, whom he had enslaved as a captive of war (verses 1945-2132). The rejoicing includes the spring feast in the park (vv. 1949-67), the epithalamium sung by the bride, a live contrast between the qualities of man and woman (vv. 2021-92), the wedding night, which is like that of Solomon and Belqis, the queen of Sheba (vv. 2099-2117). But this time it is the union of “the Moon of China and the Sun of Rome” (mâh-e Chin o khvorshid-e Rum). 8. Alexander's innovations and institutions (verses 2209-2390). His scientific achievements, the invention of the astrolabe by Aristotle, the competition between the Graeco-Roman and Chinese painters, the building of the Pharos to overthrow the Frankish pirates who were disturbing maritime traffic and the merchants from Syria across the Mediterranean Sea. An oration uttered by the chorus of the Chinese glassmakers (vv. 2281-93). The text of the announcement of the painting competition (vv. 2294-99). The denunciation of the pirates expressed by the Syrian merchants (vv. 223045). An inner monologue, Alexander pondering the Pharos stratagem (vv. 2349-56). The text of his edict providing for the navy against the Franks (vv. 2373-76). 9. The burning of the Zoroastrian temples and books (vv. 2443-2523). A powerful ode describing the physical properties of Fire (vv. 2455-82). Alexander consults with his learned men about the Zoroastrian doctrine (from a Muslim point of view, vv. 24842510). The edict concerning the destructive fire of the main Zoroastrian temple (vv. 2512-14). 10. The cataclysm of Greece (vv. 2586-2767). The digging of an isthmus in its strategic promontory provokes the submersion of the earth, the ruin of the population and the disappearance of the atheistic philosophers, except Plato, who escapes the drowning (vv. 2696-2709). Message of Alexander to the leaders of the Greek philosophers (vv. 2600-06) and their reply (vv. 2623-40). Another inner monologue of Alexander meditating on the tactics to choose against the army of the enemy (vv. 2682-84). A war bulletin on the defeat Alexander had suffered previously (vv. 2772-74). An author’s idyll contemplates the seascape, where a submerged town can be seen (vv. 2757-67). 11. The art of ruling by Plato (vv. 2825-3281). His life as a hermit in a cave and the visit of Alexander. A schedule of the Plato adventure (vv. 2826-36). The memorandum of Alexander’s plan with regard to the philosopher and scientist (vv. 284651). Alexander addresses an oral message to Plato, ‘the divine sage’ (hakim-e elâhi, line 2836), who is invited to join the Alexandrine court of learned men. The philosophers’ replies (vv. 2855-56, 2857-65). Grand dialogue between Alexander and Plato (vv. 28832991, 3236-77). The vade mecum of Plato concerning the political doctrine, a concise mirror of princes in 237 lines (2993-3234). Plato will participate in the oceanic expedition.

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Angelo Michele Piemontese 12. Alexander’s oceanic expedition (verses 3347-3603). At first his inquiry into the nature of the ocean and its mysterious abyss. Alexander consults with the oligarchs, the skilled helmsman, the old pearl diver (vv. 3356-3412, 3440-46, 3449-53). On embarking on the risky voyage Alexander dictates his testament (vasiyat, vv. 3464-78). During the navigation he sends an epistle (101 lines) by means of a carrier-eagle to the Crown Prince Eskandarus, Alexander junior. The deeply affected letter relates the navigator's wasting experience (vv. 3502-70). 13. The observation of the unfathomed deep through a glass submarine (verses 3659-3871). Before the immersion Alexander dictates another testament (vv. 3709-15). He holds various dialogues with the luminous angel who was the guardian of the sea (vv. 3691-3701) and his guide in visiting the oceanic abyss (vv. 3738-64, 3774-3803, 382549). 14. Alexander’s last will and his death in the midst of a court plot (verses 38804006). Also the text of this testament is documented (vv. 3935-64). The story of the golden caftan of Alexander and of his premontory vision (vv. 3979-4001). 15. The succession of the first Diadochus (verses 4064-4197). The abdication of Eskandarus, his death, Alexander’s exequies. The message sent by the loyal State officers to the Crown Prince Eskandarus asking for his investiture (vv. 4088-4100). The refusal of Eskandarus (vv. 4101-24). The torturing despair of Alexander’s mother, “the lady enclosed in the haram” (ghidâ-ye parde-neshin), in front of the dead son’s coffin (vv. 4158-69). The mourning ordinance issued by the heads of the army (mehtarân-e sepâh, vv. 4180-82). An author’s interview with “the old men” (pir-e kohan) about the true site of Alexander’s sepulchre, which is stated to be extant in Eskandarun (vv. 4185-91). As the action progresses, Alexander displayed eight types of thrones. They are: I. the royal one (takht-e shâhi), which he inherited from the empire of Rome (Rum, lines 651, 654), and which then became the Alexandrine imperial throne (awrang-e eskandari, line 1068); II. one of ivory (‘âj, line 1503), from Africa, the realm of Candace, as Alexander meanwhile was its ruler, farmânde-ye Rum o Zang (line 3705); III. the golden throne from Persia, established by the mythical king Jamshid (takht-e Jamshid) as a tribute for the Sun (lines 1374, 1445), and the chair of the legendary Kayanid dynasty ruling over the ancient Persian country (sarir-e Kayân, line 1974), but inherited by Alexander (vâres-e molk-e Jâm, line 1521); IV. one ‘of ivory studded with precious stones’, from Asia, a costly tribute imposed on China (lines 1503, 1673); V. a golden one (takht-e zar; line 1870), sepulchral, the proper throne arranged like a coffin according to the testamentary dispositions; VI. a wooden one (takht-e chub, line 3462), the throne placed on the admiral-ship during the oceanic expedition;

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Sources and Art of Amir Khosrou´s `The Alexandrine Mirror` VII. an imperial one (awrang, line 2211), the ancient Persian throne, concealed by Kay Khosrou in his mysterious cave (ghâr) and tested by Alexander, who left it there; VIII. a symbolic one, the flying throne (sarir) of Solomon, instrument of his ruling over “all bird and fish” (lines 2160, 2680, 3126). Thus Alexander is the owner of 6 thrones (I-VI), the same number as the sides of the world (hexahedron), according to the tradition. Moreover he is the usufructuary of one secret throne (VII) and the heir of the astonishing one (VIII). In all they are four thrones for the empires of Rome, Africa, Persia, China, which is to say the three continents of the terra cognita; plus four more, in relation to the primordial elements of nature: Water (the sea, V), Earth (VI), Fire (the beyond, VII), and Air (VIII). Thus Alexander is the emperor of the four horizons and the four elements.7 As a navigator and ruler Alexander “became Solomon and soon he steered the wind that was both a wind and a demon” (line 1172): Solaymân shod o bâde râ rânde zud che bâd-i ke ham div o ham bâde bud The legend of Solomon appears connected to that of Alexander. Both characters are sometimes joined as they represent the sovereign of the universal and monotheist kind.8 Nezâmi’s Eskandar-nâme, a philosophical romance in poetry, surpassed in structural shape, dimension and ideology “The reign of Alexander”, the book deriving from pseudo-Callisthenes that Ferdousi had incorporated into his own poem on the ancient monarchy of Persia (Shâh-nâme, circa 1000 A.D.). Ferdousi qualifies Alexander as the ‘Caesar of Rome (Qaysar-e Rum).’9 Among the early specimens preserved there is

7

The figure 8 represents the perfect constructive number, the octagonal plane of paradise and the symbol of the salvation in “The Eight Paradises” by the same author (701 H./A. D. 1301). Cf. Amir Khousrou Dehlavi, Hasht behesht, ed. Djafar Eftikhar (Mosow: «Nauk», 1972), pp. 34-35, 295; Amir Khusrau da Delhi, Le otto novelle del paradiso, transl. by A. M. Piemontese (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1996), pp. 9-10, 78, 159-163. For more details, see my essay, “Gli «Otto Paradisi» di Amir Khusrau da Delhi. Una lezione persiana del «Libro di Sindbad» fonte del «Peregrinaggio» di Cristoforo Armeno,” Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche. Memorie, s. IX, vol. VI, fasc. 3, 1995, pp. 313-418. 8 W. Jacob van Bekkum, “Alexander the Great in medieval Hebrew Literature,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes XLIX, 1986, pp. 218-226. F. de Polignac, “Echec de la perfection, perfection de l’inachevé. Le renversement du sens dans la légende arabe d’Alexandre,” Mélanges de l’Ecole Française de Rome. Moyen Âge 112 (2000), pp. 75-84. 9 John Andrew Boyle, “The Alexander Romance in the East and West,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 60 (1977), pp. 13-27. Iskandarnamah: A Persian Medieval AlexanderRomance, trans. by M. S. Southgate (New York, 1978), pp. 167-199 (Amir Khosrou's text is not

37

Angelo Michele Piemontese the Persian retelling of the Arabic general history by Tabari (b. Amol 839, d. Baghdad 923), which is ascribed to the minister Bal‘ami (c. 963). A Persian Alexander Romance abounding in archaic features is the voluminous “Darius” (Drb-nme) by Tarsusi, who perhaps was of Hebraic origin (Tarsos, about 12th century). He takes into account the noble achievements of Darius the Navigator, the most illustrious ancestor of Alexander, who at the end of this book is called “the second Solomon.”10 The texts by Tabari-Bal‘ami, Ferdousi, Tarsusi, and Nezâmi were works wellknown to Khosrou, who used them in some passages that can be considered of secondary importance to the plan of his poem. Khosrou presents the plan of an ‘Alexandrine Empire’ (molk-e eskandari, line 385) that includes the first historical phase of the Diadochi and synthesizes several elements of the Alexandrine-Roman Empire civilization. Khosrou borrows from Ferdousi some details concerning Alexander the king of Rome, his troops of blacksmiths, the building of the wall, the invention of the mirror, the diplomatic exchange of missions in China and the catalogue of the gifts to the Chinese emperor. Features deduced from Tabari-Bal‘ami concern the anthropological characterizing of Yâjuj (almost Gog, but a pair of twins, Yâjuj and Mâjuj, in the source), the building of the wall (vallum) and the figure of the vanguard-explorer Khezr, the “wise man dressed in green”, a native of the Caspian forest, says Khosrou (lines 676, 2686, 2695). In Tabari-Bal‘ami we can moreover find Africa as the first conquest of Alexander, some of his titles, King of Rome and Syria, King of Ray, the word ‘Diadochus’. This word that indicates Alexander's ‘successor’ in Greek is distorted in the source: ughus, yughus, dinus.11 It is dughus in Khosrou's text (line 4131) and seems to refer also to ‘Duke’ (Greek genitive inflection doukós). Ducas was the name of the dynasty of the Emperors who reigned in Costantinople from Costantin X (1059-1067) to Johannes Ducas Vatatze (1222-1254). Solomon's regal heritage, the Turkish slave able to seduce the king, the definition of Yjuj as ‘cavernicolous’ people, the iron door of the wall / vallum, the size ‘10×10 m’ of the radar-mirror that was the pharos, the mention of the cataclysm of Greece and the immersion into the abyss, the individuation of Plato as the supreme Greek philosopher and the hidden hermit of the mountain, the impossibility for Alexander to circumnavigate

mentioned at all in this book). Cf. my article “La figura di Alessandro nelle letterature d'area islamica”, in Alessandro Magno storia e mito (Roma: Fondazione Memmo, 1995), pp. 177-183, 385. 10 Cf. my article “Alexandre le «circumnavigateur» dans le roman persan de Tarsusi,” Mélanges de l’Ecole Française de Rome. Moyen Âge 112, 2000, pp. 97-112. 11 Târikhnâme-ye Tabari gardânide-ye mansub be Bal‘ami, ed. M. Roushan (Tehran, Sorush, 1374/1995), I, pp. 342, 485, 491-497, 546-547; II, pp. 965-967. Cf. Tabari, Chronique, French trans. H. Zotenberg, I (Paris, Imprimerie Impériale, 1869), pp. 510-525.

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Sources and Art of Amir Khosrou´s `The Alexandrine Mirror` the world without the support of Plato's knowledge of the seas, all these are elements borrowed from Tarsusi.12 Concerning the submersion by means of the glass submarine, “The Alexandrine Mirror” has common features with Historia de preliis Alexandri Magni, a Latin work by Leo from Naples (about 950), that introduces in the Alexander Romance variations according to Greek-Byzantine manuscripts. The evidence of the connection is based upon a characteristic terminology concerning the hull, to measure the sea-bottom, observing in it wondrous beasts, the figures of various fishes. 13 On the topic of the submersion, Khosrou's work is also in correlation to the fragmentary Mongol Alexander-Romance (1312), deriving from a Turkish version.14 As to the present of the paradisiacal cluster of grapes (angur-e ferdous, line 3718), the oceanic expedition and the three carrier-eagles, the connection can be found with the Ethiopic version of the romance (about 14th-15th century), that is in relation with an old Arabic one.15 The present of the grapes is attested in an Arabic-Persian source from the 7th-8th century. 16 The Arab historian and cosmographer Mas‘udi (d. 946) connected the gift to the exploration of the Nile springs.17 As to the description of the terrestrial itinerary of Alexander's travels and conquests, Khosrou made use of “the story of his rank (qesse-ye shân-e u),” the part of a text that “did not mention Kayomarth and Kay Qobâd at all,” the first mythical king and another one of ancient Persia (line 692). Khosrou seems to bear in mind the similarities with Dinawari, the Persian man of learning who wrote a history in Arabic (second half of the 9th century). Dinawari gave the largest space to Alexander among the kings of ancient times and did not mention Kayomarth.18 Accomplishing his itinerary Alexander conquered the word and turned around it “from Q to Q” (line 684), that is to say from one to the other edge of the mountain chain surrounding the Earth like a belt at the horizon, in the shape of a Q, qâf (Arabic name of the alphabetic letter). This expression seems to be

12

Abu Tâher al-Tarsusi, Dârâb-nâme-ye Tarsusi, ed. by Dh. Saf (Tehran: B. N. T. K, 2536/1977), II, pp. 283, 335, 378, 394, 533, 579-582, 594. 13 Friedrich Pfister, Der Alexanderroman des Archipresbyters Leo (Heidelberg, 1913), pp. 126-127. 14 Francis Woodman Cleaves, “An Early Mongolian Version of the Alexander Romance,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 22, 1959, pp. 1-99. 15 The Life and Exploits of Alexander the Great being a series of translations of the Ethiopic Histories of Alexander by the Pseudo-Callisthenes and other writers, by E. A. Wallis Budge (London,1896), 259263, 280-286. 16 Mark Lidbarski, “Zu den arabischen Alexandergeschichten,” Zeitschift für Assyriologie und Verwandte Gebiete 8 (1893), pp. 263-312, particularly pp. 303-304. 17 Mas‘ûdî, Les prairies d'or, French trans. Charles Pellat, (Paris: Société Asiatique, 1965), I, p. 111. 18 Ab anfa A mad ibn Dwud Dnawr, Akhbr al- uwl, Persian trans. M. Mahdavi Dâmghâni (Tehran: Nay, 1371/1992), pp. 53-65.

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Angelo Michele Piemontese taken from the Persian cosmography by M. Hamadâni (about 1165-1175) who says: “Alexander conquered the world and turned around it from Q to Q”.19 Another source, with regard to the dissertation about the invention of the astrolabe, was perhaps M. Tabari, a Persian scientist, who in his own treatise (about 1110) explains the Greek etymology of the word astrolabe.20 Its explanation would be târâzu-ye khvoršid “Sun balance”, as in ostorâb < ostor`âb: târâzu ‘balance’ is the Persian synonym of ostor, and âftâb ‘sun’ the meaning of lâb (lines 2231-34). When Alexander cuts the strategic mountain of Greece (Yunân), three miles large, thus provoking the flood of the whole Greek land, to punish the atheism of the old thinkers, Khosrou relates the story of an old oracle (râzdân-e kohan, lines 2710-30). The poet seems to have read and then refashioned the legend of the cataclysm of Greece, which is quoted in an anonymous Persian cosmography (1126), noticeable also as text of the ancient world history.21 Old Greek atheists were the Thoes Akrothoikai from Trace (Mount Athos). The small peninsula Aktaia of Mount Athos, nowadays about 2.3 km large, was dangerous to navigation. There the imperial Persian fleet was shipwrecked (482 B. C.). Then Xerxes decided to cut the isthmus in Aktaia (Herodotus VII 22-23). The cataclysm (kataklismós) was related in the Greek tradition of the Stoic philosophical school. The same end of the Earth flooded with water was present in legends of Celtic and Scandinavian peoples.22 Khosrou refers to Nezâmi's poem explicitly; he criticizes, integrates and changes it in order to extend “The Alexandrine Mirror” in a different direction. An example of variation concerns the competition between the Roman and the Chinese painters. Khosrou narrates this episode in a finer fashion than the different versions by Nezâmi and other Persian authors.23 An interesting variation of the same story is introduced by the Turkish polygrapher M. ‘Â. Effendi in his treatise on calligraphy (1587), where Mani, the founder of the Manichean religion (about 215-275 A. D.) is called the inventor of the 19

Mohammad-e Hamadâni, ‘Ajâyeb-nâme, ed. by J. Modarres Sâdeqi (Tehran, Markaz, 1375/1996), p. 196. Definition of Mount Q, p. 366. Submersion of Greece, pp. 43, 58, 89. 20 Mohammad b. Ayyub Tabari, Ma‘refat al-ostorlâb ma‘ruf be shesh fasl, ed. by M. A. Riyâhi (Tehran, 1371/1993), p. 2.t 21 Mojmal al-tavârikh va al-qesas, ed. by Malek al-Sho‘arâ’ Bahâr & M. Ramazâni, (Tehran; Khâvar, 1318/1939), pp. 127-128. The Angelical gift of the paradisiacal bunch of grapes at the head of the Nile, p. 476. The Western Sea, Mediterranean and Atlantic, extended from the land of Rome to Ethiopia, pp. 448, 472. Cf. Mojmal al-tavârikh va al-qesas, facsimile of codex Or. 2371 of the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, ed. by M. Omidsâlâr & I. Afshâr (Tehran: Talâye, 1379/2001). 22 H. Usener, Die Sintfluthsagen (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1899), p. 39. 23 Cf. my article “La leggenda persiana del contrasto fra pittori greci e cinesi”, in L'arco di fango che rubò la luce alle stelle. Studi in onore di Eugenio Galdieri per il suo settantesimo compleanno, ed. M. Bernardini et alii (Lugano: Edizioni Arte e Moneta, 1995), pp. 293-302.

40

Sources and Art of Amir Khosrou´s `The Alexandrine Mirror` kinetic effects in painting. Mani, the highest painter of the Chinese school according to the Persian literary tradition, won the competition in decorating the imperial gallery Artang in China. He polished one of its four walls like a mirror. When the curtain was opened, the pictures of the three other artists were reflected on it.24 Khosrou's poem introduces the exemplary behavior of the legendary Alexander as a prestigious model of the righteous king. The title “The Alexandrine Mirror” heralds this general aspect of the poem that characterizes itself also as a technical disquisition of various disciplines and arts, particularly the mirror industry. Alexander, a mortal man, is a meditative king, the researcher excogitating stratagems, “the calculator of each work”, called by Plato “the sage (dânâ) who recognizes the wise man” (dânâ-shenâs, lines 3252, 3281). Alexander also represents the great homo sapiens. But he was tormented by a sorrow: he wanted to find the water of life in the Northern Aphotic Zone in order to become eternal or simply to take care of a disease. Alexander was parched with thirst (teshne), perhaps he suffered from polydipsia, a frequent need of drinking healthy, sweet water, available in that arctic zone. Four pairs of basic topics accompany the narration of the poem. They are existence and death, nourishment and hunger, friendship and enmity, sea and abyss. Alexander reached Mount Yâjuj after his failure in the arctic region and having learned the hardest lesson for mankind, i.e., suffering starvation. This is the theme concerning the contrast between hunger and nutrition. Starvation was decimating the army; salvation was in the fresh, perennial fruit of the vine, a paradisiacal gift. The king delivers the grapes to his army, as in a rite of Christian communion. In the following confrontation with Yâjuj, the ravenous consumer of a tasteless berry, the king proved to be a fine connoisseur in gastronomy, ordering “red roast and yellow cake” washed down with the wine, to whet the appetite of the Yâjuj prisoners and to subdue their people. The author himself reveals a connoisseurship in gastronomy, of which this book is full of examples. Khosrou wrote his book with great difficulty because of criticisms addressed by malevolent persons (lines 328, 356). The poet created the poem like a medicine that could take care of his injured heart. The author, who worked at night and rested by day (line 366), conceived his poem like a fragrant table (khvân-e man), an exquisite literary banquet that he prepared in a garden for his faithful and learned friends (dustân, line 306). Friendship, protected from enmity, forms a main topic of this work, reappearing in the lyrical breaks that often close or comment on the narration. Alexander and his fellow soldiers were linked by a close bond of friendship (line 1061, 1210, 3880). A friend in need (sakhti) is a friend indeed, and life without the companionship of dear friends is not

24

Mostafa ‘Ali Effendi, Manâqeb-e honarvarân, Persian transl. by T. H. Sobhâni (Tehran: Sorush, 1369/1991), pp. 108-112.

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Angelo Michele Piemontese worthwhile (lines 1212, 3879). “It is better to die in prison together with friends than to live a long life alone in a nice garden” (line 3873): be zendân darun marg bâ dustân

beh az ‘omr-e sad sâle dar bustân

Through this theme, the author's personal feelings rejoin the adventure of Alexander, the man who succeeds with the help of prodigious personages, like the vanguard Khezr (that is ‘Silvester’), two archangels appointed as guardians of Paradise and the Ocean, the great scientists Aristotle and Plato. Alexander assists his fellow soldiers at night during the war truces, in beautiful scenes that represent the uncertainty of life and death. In the army, the king is attacked by his enemies, envious warriors and rival knights. In one hard battle he could not have saved himself without his friends’ help. For many years the king is distracted from his aspiration for knowledge and exploration. Only on his return from the oceanic expedition does the king, by this time consumed and moribund, remember his home. At last he embraces his son, Eskandarus (Alexander, the junior). Such a restless emperor was anyway an universal civilizer who isolated the invader through the wall (vallum), renewed the customs, invented the balance, the steelyard, the metre, the pharos, and established a new world order (nou â’in-e besât, line 3359) in Asia, Africa and Europe. He chose Alexandria in Egypt as his regal residence (line 3964). But he had to settle accounts with doctrinal matters, concerning the hated Zoroastrian, Indian and pagan worshippers. The Zoroastrians are punished, with the burning of their temples, books, priests and faithful in Âzarâbâdegân, their capital-region. No repressive action is taken against the Indian cult of the Sun, as its worshippers themselves burn to damnation on the piles. The Hellenic immanentism is suppressed, submerging Greece in the artificial flood provoked by the cutting of the isthmus. In the end, the cosmography must be explained, by solving the enigma of the Ocean. The sea is the author's main scientific theme. He declares that he has kept in mind the wave-motion as a model for the composition of his work (be dastur-i tab‘-e daryâneshân, line 386). Among the fundamental elements of nature, sea water required delimitation of its extent and the sounding of its mystery. The king, a scientist, faced death in order to explore the unknown terraqueous space extending into the Western Ocean (Atlantic) and keeping its gloomy and uncontaminated nature at the bottom. The exploration of the Oceanic space requires a very long navigation, seeking out the right place to accomplish the deep submersion. The king's secret purpose was to search for a tunnel under the sea, a passage permitting circumnavigation and a way to come out of the abyss, the escape from death. The exploration of the abyss is the target of the last and greatest Alexandrine expedition, for which a suitable invention is required, a transparent glass box (darafshande sanduq-i, line 3429). It is the submarine named âyene-ye Eskandari, “The

42

Sources and Art of Amir Khosrou´s `The Alexandrine Mirror` Alexandrine Mirror” (line 3785), from which the navigator king will observe the deep nature of the Sea. Among other wonders appear the huge antediluvian whales, the submerged continent (pol-i mostaqim, line 3770) Atlantis and its survivors, who had evolved into aquatic men, “anthropomorphs” (âdami-paykarân, line 3781). Otherwise they are primitive human marine creatures. The exploration of the sea reaches the antipodes of the terrestrial globe (line 3818). The surface of the submarine is simultaneously the screen reflecting the mirabilia of the deep ocean. Due to the author’s constant sense of humor and theatrical perspective, the king becomes the spectator of a puppet performance or a shadow play under the projection of a sensitive light which is the real substance of the guardian angel of the Ocean. The angel, the second passenger in the submarine, is the guide performing the function of a headlamp. With intermittent clicks, the Angel of light (Lucifer) attracts, illumines or scatters the images hidden in the darkness. The images represent the geological and zoological nature of the abyss. Through the glass screen the Angel exposes the nature of the sea, anticipating filming or photography. Then the king navigator takes to the surface what “was an image illustrated in the mirror”: mosavvar khayâl-i dar â’ine bud (line 3857). It was in the guise of a plate ante litteram, to the great surprise of the mates embarked on the ship and waiting for the re-emersion of Alexander, like a modern Jonah. The oceanic mission could not be completed without Plato's help, who reemerged from the sea and resurrected in his mind after the cataclysm. Living in a cave of the mountain, he was the highest expert on the secrets of the Sea, and its effective deepness. As the guardian angel of the Ocean is defined as body of light and examines the king in the submarine, so Plato is defined both as human angel and body of wisdom, and examines the king in the cave. The true Plato deals with the projection of shadows on the enlightened cave in his art of politics (Republic, book 7). The prehistory of Atlantis, that Solon drew from an Egyptian source and that was transmitted to Plato (Plutarch, Solon, 26, 31-32), has been lost. The passages about Atlantis in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias are interrupted or incomplete. Pliny states that if we trust Plato's word, Atlantis was the first of the lands submerged by the sea, and it corresponds to the huge space occupied by the Atlantic Ocean today (Naturalis Historia, II.XCII.1). Khosrou develops with descriptive breadth, conceptual depth and dramatic arrangement the scenes of the oceanic expedition and the exploration of the abyss. The two sequences constitute a textus amplior on this important topic since in no other European or Asiatic text of the Alexander Romance does it form a considerable part of

43

Angelo Michele Piemontese the narrative. European texts offer some glimpse into the submarine and the connected description of the abyss, but they are lacunose, rudimentary and even puerile.25 Khosrou supports his work by documentary quotations from various texts, inserting them among the narrative, dramatic or lyrical episodes. For example he quotes the procedure of a notarial ascertainment of the treasure returned to the Chinese emperor, the inventory of the gifts sent to him by Alexander, the philological explanations of the word astrolabe, the atheistic theory of the Greek philosophers, the interview of an old seaman. The seaman is an eyewitness to the site of Alexander's grave in Eskandarun, Alexandria ad Issum, close to where Alexander defeated Darius III (333 B. C.). The vade mecum of the art of governing, told to Alexander by Plato in the cave, is situated at the true center of Khosrou's book. This long text must be added to the numerous aphorisms and wise sayings ascribed to Plato in Arabic and Persian literature. They date back to Hellenistic sources, in addition to Arabic and Latin ones like the Secretum Secretorum (12th century), a well-known pseudo-Aristotelian work. 26 Plato's traditional life and aphorisms also date back to medieval collections of sayings and facts of renowned sages, on the basis of Arabic sources interrelated with Hellenistic and Latin ones. The story of the golden caftan, joined to the astrological horoscope “Moriturum ipsum in loco cujus coelum, aurum esset, terra ferrum” – that is, the hero “shall die in the same place where gold is the sky and iron the earth” – is related by Sa‘d b. Bitrq (Eutychius, 236-328 H./A.D. 877-940) in his Arabic history Kitb al-ta’rkh al-majm‘.27 A variant of this prediction was written by the Egyptian physician Ab al-Waf’ Mubashshir b. Fatik (d. 445 H./A.D. 1053) in his book Mukhtr al-hikam. 28 It was translated into Spanish, Bocadas de oro (about 1257), and by Johannes à Procida (about 1269-1280) into Latin, Liber Philosophorum moralium antiquorum.29 The Nawdir al-

25

G. Cary, The Medieval Alexander, ed. by D. J. A. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), pp. 31, 179, 222, 237, 321, 340-341. D. J. A. Ross, Alexander Historiatus. A Guide to medieval illustrated Alexander literature (London: Warburg Institute, 1963), pp. 37-41. 26 Ch-H. de Fouchécour, Moralia. Les notions morales dans la littérature persane du 3e/9e au 7e/13e siècle, (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les civilizations, 1986), pp. 70-82, 463-464. Patrologia Graecae, ed. J-P. Migne, CXI, (Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1863), col. 972. Eutychii Patriarchae Alexandrini Annales, ed. L. Cheicho S. J. (Beryti-Parisiis: C. Poussielgue, 1906), p. 82 (“Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, Scriptores Arabici”, s. III, t. VI). 28 B. Meissner, “Mubašširs Abâr el-Iskender,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 49 (1895), pp. 583-627. 29 H. Knust, “Mitteilungen aus Eskurial,” Bibliothek des Literarischen Vereins in Stuttgart CXLI (Tübingen, 1879), Bocadas de oro, pp. 298-299. E. Franceschini, “Il Liber philosophorum moralium antiquorum,” R. Istituto Veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti. Atti 91 (1931-32), II, pp. 393-597, particularly p. 522, and thereafter “Castigationes Platonis Deum cognosces et time,” pp. 463-488. Cf. The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, ed. by C. F. Bühler (London: Oxford University Press, 1941). 27

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Sources and Art of Amir Khosrou´s `The Alexandrine Mirror` falsifa by unayn b. Is q (b. Hira 808, d. Baghdad 873) was the source of Mubashshir’s work.30 “The Alexandrine Mirror” contains some further evidence of Alexander's memorable actions and his institutional behavior. In fact, there are approximately two dozen verbatim sentences and quotations: twelve oral orders given to subordinates, a halfdozen edicts concerning affairs of state (the surrender of the Chinese, the restitution of booty, the interception of the Franks, the Zoroastrains, the surveillance of the Yâjuj, etc.), four personal messages (to the Chinese emperor, the congregation of the Greek philosophers, to Plato, and to Eskandarus), three testaments (as Alexander leaves on his oceanic expedition, as he is submerged into the abyss, and when he returns to court with death impending) – all this in addition to numerous other orations, dialogues, and monologues. Besides the above range of styles/modes that appear in dramatic description and documentary narration, the poet develops three further forms of elaboration, which are the change of scenes, pauses, and arias. Changes of scene announce a change in dramatic action; for example, the passage from night to day, or the poet’s shift from the heavenly to the terrestrial world are accomplished in a couple of lines or phrases. Khosrou personifies psychophysical elements and points out the interaction between moral and corporal sensations. The psychological perspicacity is peculiar to the author, as well as his exactitude in the measure of buildings and instruments. The pauses, short breaks, and moral interludes are the author's direct interventions on the scene in the course of the narration. The arias modifying the rhythm of the narration open the poem to higher levels of art, as in the scenes representing the battles in China and on Mount Yâjuj (a dramatic picture – the first one naturalistic and the second one satirical), the epithalamium, the Fire, the idyll. Symmetry is “the measure of the work” itself. The poet aimed to establish a balanced connection between reason and speech in order to create harmonious expression. “The Sovereign Prodigy,” a treatise on epistolography in five books (resâle, 1319) dealing with all aspects of the art of speech, was written by Khosrou and revised by Shehâb al-Din, an eminent collaborator in his literary circle at Delhi. Above all, the rule concerning ‘the visual proportion (tanâsob-e ‘ayni)’, the evidence of the correlation between objects and forms and their symmetry, should be steadily respected in any part of the work.31

30

J. Kraemer, “Arabische Homerverse,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 106 (1956), pp. 259-316: 292-302. 31 Amir Khosrow Dehlavi, E'jâz-e Khosravi (Lacknaw: Nawalkishore, 1868), I, p. 209.

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II. The Epic Cycle

Rostam and Zoroastrianism Dick Davis Ohio State University

Though it is rarely baldly stated as such, one can find an implicit assumption in much writing about Rostam, which is as follows: “Rostam is the greatest pre-Islamic hero of Iran; pre-Islamic Iran was Zoroastrian; ergo Rostam was a Zoroastrian hero.” Rostam’s strong identification with the defense of Iran, the intertwining of his legend with six generations of Iranian kings in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and the often emphatic identification of the Iranian monarchy and polity with Zoroastrianism by the country’s pre-Islamic dynasties (most emphatically by the Sasanians) have provided the background to this assumption.1 But it is of course the kings identified by Ferdowsi as pre-Zoroastrian, and unknown to the historical record, whose persons and possessions Rostam protects. Zoroaster’s appearance in the Shahnameh, and the royal family’s adoption of Zoroastrianism as its faith, mark the moment when Rostam turns away from the Iranian court, and retreats once and for all to his appanage in Sistan. This fact, together with the striking absence of his name from Zoroastrian sources, suggests that the assumption that Rostam was a Zoroastrian hero may well be an unwarranted one.2 As others3 and I myself4 have suggested elsewhere, the figure of Rostam is, like that of many legendary and mythological figures, in all probability a composite one, combining features from various sources, and from various historical (and prehistoric) periods. There are indications that one source for the Rostam legend was a figure whose legend not only did not identify him with Zoroastrianism but in all likelihood saw him as an anti-Zoroastrian hero, and indeed perhaps as the tragic leader of pre-Zoroastrian Iran’s last stand against the new faith. Although the suggestion is obviously highly speculative, it is not perhaps wholly a coincidence that the leader of the Zoroastrian forces, when their turn for a tragic last stand comes at the end of the Shahnameh, is also called Rostam. It is not unknown for a historical event, particularly one thought of as highly significant for 1

I would like to thank my colleague at Ohio State University Parvaneh Pourshariati for reading through this paper and for making a number of valuable suggestions, almost all of which I have adopted. 2 The implications of Rostam’s absence from the Avesta and of the “traces of initial hostility to him among the (Zoroastrian) priesthood” in the Shahnameh and elsewhere are discussed by Ehsan Yarshater in his article “Iranian National History,” The Cambridge History of Iran, v. 3 (1) (Cambridge, 1983, reprinted 1996), 359-477; see in particular 454. 3 I am thinking particularly of Mehrdd Bahr, who has written eloquently of Rostam’s origins in his Az ostureh t trikh (Tehran, 1376/1998). 4 E.g. in “Rustam-i Dastan”, Iranian Studies 32, 2 (Spring 1999): 231-242.

Dick Davis the fate of the peoples involved, to be presented in terms of a previous event that might be thought to parallel it. For example, the accounts of the flight eastward of the last Achaemenid king before the forces of Alexander, and his death at the hands of his own subjects, are strikingly similar to the literary accounts of the flight eastward of the last Sasanian king before the Arab forces of the 7th century, and his death at the hands of his own subjects.5 That a text was seen by its author and audience as historical does not of course preclude its being written according to such narrative structures. But the fact that Rostam shares his name with the leader of the Sasanian forces defeated by the Arab invasion is hardly sufficient evidence to categorize him as an antiZoroastrian hero. Stronger indications for this also exist, although they are both scattered and scanty. Taken together, however, they are I think suggestive and intriguing, and I wish to examine them in this paper. I shall group the evidence according to three broad considerations. These are: first, Rostam’s provenance, and what this says about him to us and, equally importantly, to the characters with whom he interacts in the Shahnameh; second, his actions in the Shahnameh; and third, the (surprisingly few) remarks made about him by authors previous to, or more or less contemporary with, Ferdowsi. Rostam’s provenance In the Shahnameh, his appanage is Sistan, which lies to the east of the modern province of that name, and is bordered to the north by the River Hirmand (modern Helmand, in Afghanistan). Esfandyar and his son Bahman recognize that by crossing this river they are entering Rostam’s homeland. His territory is thus on the eastern boundary of the Iranian world, and abuts onto what was considered to be, in ethnic and religious terms, Indian territory. His mother, Rudabeh, is from Kabol, and he dies in Kabol, which is always thought of in the Shahnameh as belonging to India culturally. This is particularly so in the legendary section of the poem, but it persists even into the Sasanian period.6 We can say then that his beginning (his mother) and his end (his murder, plotted by Shaghad and the king of Kabol) tie him to India, or, if this is felt to be too extreme a formulation, to the borderland between India and Iran represented by Kabol. Jalal Khaleghi-Motlagh

5

Another example of such literary-historical repetition concerns the suicide of Panthea over the corpse of her husband in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the suicide of Cleopatra over Anthony’s body in Plutarch’s Lives, and the suicide of Shirin over her husband’s body in Nezami’s Khosrow o Shirin. The first two of these suicides are presented as historical, and the third as what we may call quasi-historical, and yet they share details and an overall structure which strongly suggest that they are narrated according to the conventions of a shared literary topos. 6 E.g. when the Indian king Shangal visits Bahram Gur he is accompanied by seven of his client kings, one of whom is the “King of Kabol”, Shhnmeh, v. 7, ed. M. Osmanov and A. Nushin (Moscow 1968), 4412, lines 2410-2413.

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Rostam and Zorastrianism has drawn attention to the probable Indian provenance of his “babr-e bayn,” 7 and Mehrdad Bahar has indicated the many similarities between features of Rostam’s legend and those of the Vedic god of war, Indra, suggesting that at least one origin for Rostam is to be found in an epic elaboration of the Indra myth, one which Bahar believed to be traceable to the Sindh valley. Bahar also suggests that a number of Rostam’s exploits parallel, and may be derived from, those of Krishna. 8 Whether or not we accept as significant all the parallels adduced by Bahar between Rostam’s legend and those of Indra and Krishna, it is clear from the Shahnameh itself that Rostam occupies literally and culturally a border area between India and Iran. It also seems likely that parts of Rostam’s legend may well link him with Vedic material. It has been clear for some time that there are close ties between the mythology of pre-Islamic Iran and those of Vedic India, and that they may be regarded as two branches of a shared Indo-European mythology. One noticeable property of the two mythologies, when we compare them, is that shared features tend to reverse their ethical attributes as they shift from the one system to the other. 9 Thus the benign devas of Vedic myth become the malign divs of Iranian myth, Usas the beautiful Vedic goddess of the dawn becomes an Iranian demon, and the Indian lord of the demonic underworld Yama becomes the Iranian bringer of civilization to mankind, Jamshid. Jamshid also has a noticeable demonic side in the Shahnameh, one which Ferdowsi seems to play down but does not eliminate entirely.10 As well as being a subduer of demons, areas of his myth, especially his hubris, link him to the demonic world as a participant in its values rather than as its unequivocal conqueror: his Iranian avatar retains a shadow of his Indian demonic identity. Rostam presents a similar case. He too is a subduer of demons, but his lineage also marks him as a participant in the demonic world, since his mother Rudabeh is a descendant of the demon king Zahhak. Rostam’s demonic ancestry is not to be ignored as a distant irrelevance, nor is it obliterated by his deeds on behalf of the Iranian polity, since Esfandyar explicitly taunts him with it before their fateful duel, saying that he has heard that Zal, Rostam’s father, is “Demon born, of evil lineage.”11 Rostam defends Zal’s lineage, but then in a strange volte-face, which grants Esfandyar the substance of his accusation (that he, Rostam, is descended from demons), claims descent through his 7

See Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Babr-e bayn”, in Gol-e ranjh-ye kohan: bar gozideh-ye maqlt darbreh-ye Shhnmeh-ye Ferdowsi (Tehran 1372/1993), 275-342. 8 Mehrdd Bahr, Az ostureh t trikh, 28 and 236-237. Also, Pazhuheshi dar astir-e Irn (Tehran, 1375/1997), 491. 9 Bahr, Pazhuheshi dar astir-e Irn, 492. 10 I have referred to this in “Interpolations to the Text of the Shahnameh: an Introductory Typology”, Persica 17 (2001): 35-49; see esp. 40. 11 Shhnmeh-ye Ferdowsi, v. 6, ed. M.N. Osmanof and A. Nushin (Moscow, 1967), 255, line 627.

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Dick Davis mother from the demon-king Zahhak, adding that there can be no nobler lineage than this.12 Zabihollah Safa has plausibly suggested that the demonic enemies in the Shahnameh represent the indigenous peoples whom the Iranians were forced to conquer when they entered the Iranian plateau. 13 These demonic creatures are presented as uncivilized, given to practicing magic, and dressed in animal skins. 14 Both these last points are of interest when we consider Rostam. Once we move beyond the generation of Keyumars and those of his immediate descendants, there is only one “Iranian” in the whole Shahnameh who is habitually described as dressed in an animal skin: Rostam. And Rostam and his family, like the divs, are associated with magic. Sudabeh accuses Seyavash of having escaped the fire she hoped would destroy him because of magic arts learned from Zal and Rostam; 15 the accusation is untrue but it is plausible, because Rostam and his father are involved with magic. It is apparently (since he brings it up almost in the same breath) Zal’s association with the magical Simorgh that leads Esfandyar to say that he is of demonic ancestry: this is an association that will, by magical means, encompass Esfandyar’s death. Concerning magic and its practitioners, Safa goes on to say, “The Iranian religion was opposed to magic, and for this reason we see that in the Iranian national epic magic and the black arts are rarely ascribed to Iranians, whereas we everywhere see non-Iranian peoples, and those who did not believe in the Mazdean faith, described as practicing magic.” 16 This is borne out by the early stories of the Shahnameh, which in general 12

Ibid., 257, lines 660-662. Zabih Allh Saf, Hamseh sar’i dar Irn (Tehran, 1369/ 1990), 24. 14 Ibid., 604-605. 15 Shhnmeh-ye Ferdowsi, v. 3, ed. O. Smirnova and A. Nushin (Moscow, 1965), 37, line 540. 16 Op. cit., 604. This ascription of magic to non-Iranians (in particular but not exclusively to Indians; e.g. later in the poem Bahram Gur refers to India as “the soil of magic” [khk-e jdusetn], Shhnmeh, v. 7, ed. M. Osmanof and A. Nushin [Moscow, 1967], 422, line 2069) can be seen as one aspect of a fairly consistent anachronistic religious sense present in a number of the mythological and legendary tales of the Shahnameh. There is a real irony in the fact that in the West, throughout the Classical period, Iran was seen as the home of magic, despite the Zoroastrian condemnation of it, and the very word “magic” comes from a word for a Zoroastrian priest. Realistically, Zoroastrianism cannot enter the Shahnameh until Zoroaster does, but in the same way that the Magian prohibition of magic is transferred to the preZoroastrian era, so the positively presented kings and heroes who live before Zoroaster are often presented as Zoroastrians avant la lettre. References to the Zoroastrian scriptures, and to Zoroastrian concepts like Ahriman, before Zoroaster’s appearance are not uncommon. In the later sections of the poem the implication is that Iran has always been Zoroastrian: for example, when Anushirvan’s son Nushzad abandons Zoroastrianism for Christianity he is accused of abandoning “the faith of Keyumars, Hushang and Tahmures” (i.e., the faith of the earliest kings, who according to the poem itself lived long before the advent of Zoroaster: Shhnmeh, v. 8, ed. Rostam Aleyev and A. Azar [Moscow, 1970], 105, line 893). Further, the poem’s battles (particularly those involving divs) are famously presented in an at 13

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Rostam and Zorastrianism ascribe magic to those fighting against the Iranians, with the exception of Rostam who, with the help of the Simorgh, practices magic both on his own behalf and on behalf of the Persian throne. When Rostam dies (and it is magic that ensures the success of his last major deed before his death - the killing of Esfandyar), magic virtually leaves the poem; the infrequent supernatural events after his death are in general angelic rather than chthonic. Both Rostam’s liminal geographical status (as a denizen of the in-between area of Sistan, and one who seems to have as many ties to India as to Iran), and his quasidemonic heritage, set him apart from the Iranians as such. In so far as demons are identified in the Shahnameh as the evil servants of Ahriman, this latter association also gives him a tangential relationship to Iranian religion, in that he seems to be at least partly implicated in the world of its enemies. The same can be said of his immersion in the world of magic: this is most graphically presented in his confrontation with Esfandyar. The Persian prince is armed with the self-righteousness of the new Zoroastrian faith, while Rostam depends for his success on the magical protection afforded him by the simorgh. Esfandyar has killed a simorgh in the course of his haft khwn, as a representative of a world which his new faith will destroy. Another question of provenance seems to be relevant here, not one concerning the provenance of Rostam himself so much, but rather the route by which his legend reached Ferdowsi. To put the problem at its simplest: we think of Rostam as the greatest hero of pre-Islamic Iran, but he is scandalously absent from pre-Islamic Iranian texts, and especially from explicitly Zoroastrian texts. As Mehrdad Bahar has put it, “In the whole of the Avesta there is no discussion of Rostam, and his battle with Esfandyar is not mentioned. Esfandyar is in the Avesta, but not Rostam...and when we look at Pahlavi texts, at the Zoroastrian literature of the Sasanian period, again, to an incredible extent, Rostam is pushed to one side. Rostam is mentioned perhaps four or five times in Pahlavi texts: twice in non-religious texts which were originally Parthian...”17 Why, if Rostam is the great Zoroastrian hero of ancient Iran, do Zoroastrian texts virtually never mention him? And why do Sasanian texts virtually never mention him? And, incidentally, if Sasanian and Zoroastrian texts do not mention him, where did Ferdowsi get the stories about him from?

least crypto-Zoroastrian light, i.e. as a struggle between good and evil. This last might be thought conventional for an epic, but the ethical dimensions of conflicts in the Shahnameh are much more heavily emphasized than in, say, Homeric epic, and the most obvious explanation of this is the presentation of the material in implicitly Zoroastrian terms, even before the appearance of Zoroaster. It is to this implicit Zoroastrianism that Rostam seems to have a somewhat indirect relationship: when Zoroastrianism becomes explicit, Rostam’s opposition to its proselytizers also becomes explicit. 17 Bahar, Az ostureh t trikh, 227.

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Dick Davis Bahar’s answer18 to this last question is as follows: We have to understand that all our epic stories which Ferdowsi collected and which appear in the Shahnameh, take place in the east. To come at the question another way, did Ferdowsi gather all the narratives in the Shahnameh from among the people of Khorasan, (meaning that) they have no particular connection with the Khodai-nameh, or is it rather that that the Shahnameh is a rewriting in Persian of the Khodai-nameh? In my opinion, the subject matter of the Shahnameh was inspired by the stories of the people of eastern Iran...19 That is, he rejects the notion that Ferdowsi’s principle source, for the mythological and legendary section of the Shahnameh, was the (Sasanian and Zoroastrian) Khodai-nameh, either in its original or in translation. He further comments that the material had been preserved because, “each person recited / sang (mi-sorudeh) a part of it, or committed it to memory.”20 Ferdowsi’s stories then, at least as far as they concern Rostam, were outside of the purview of the official, written, Zoroastrian and courtly literature of Sasanian Iran. In Bahar’s opinion, Rostam’s legend begins in the Sindh valley and enters Iran via the Parthians.21 The stories that make up this legend did not appear in Sasanian literature because they were considered to be Parthian, and the Sasanians tried strenuously to

18

His answer is in effect similar to conclusions I proposed in a paper published in 1996: “The Problem of Ferdowsi's Sources,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 116, 1 (Jan-March 1996): 48-57. I mention my own article only because its suggestions were greeted with considerable skepticism by some, and I was naturally pleased to find that, quite independently, Bahar essentially agreed with them. 19 Bahar, Az ostureh t trikh, 441. While avoiding the question of whether details of Rostam’s legend point to an Indian origin, Yarshater is in agreement with Bahar as to the Parthian provenance of many of the tales associated with Rostam, seeing it as reasonable to assume “...that Rustam was indeed, as his frequent title Sagzi (the Saka) indicates, a Saka hero, whose legends were brought to Sistan by the invading Saka tribes and which spread to Iran in Parthian times and eventually were combined with the Kayanian cycle as part of the national epic tradition.” Cambridge History of Iran, 3 (1), 455-456. 20 Bahar, Az ostureh t trikh, 443. 21 This supposition seems to be supported by Ma‘sudi’s claim that there were “many tales of Rostam” in a book called “Sakisaran”, a name which appears to be derived from “Saka” (i.e. Parthian): Ma‘sudi adds that the book was translated into Arabic by Ibn Moqaffa’; in Ma‘sudi, Moruj al-Zahhab, translated into Persian by A. Pyandeh, 2nd printing, (Tehran, 1360/1981), 1:221. The derivation of “Sistan”, the name of Rostam’s appanage, from “Saka”, is indicated by, among others, Christensen: “Des tribus sacs, chassées de la Ferghane, envahissaient la Bactriane, l’arachosie...et la Drangiane, pays qui fu appelé des lors la Sacastene, Sakastan, et dont le Sistan de nos jours n'est qu'une partie...”; in Arthur Christensen L'Iran sous les Sassanides (Copenhagen, 1944), 28.

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Rostam and Zorastrianism obliterate Parthian culture from the national memory. 22 They did not appear in Zoroastrian literature because their hero could be considered Zoroastrian only by coopting him to narratives in which his anomalous character remained recalcitrantly visible. Nevertheless they persisted as a folk memory among the people of eastern Iran, and it is from these people that Ferdowsi collected them. In Ferdowsi’s work Khorasan, and Parthian / eastern Iran, reasserted a heritage that Sasanian Iran, centered on Fars, had been at pains to marginalize. Rostam’s actions If Rostam’s provenance, and the provenance of his legend, place him somewhat outside of the main stream of Sasanian and Zoroastrian mythology, what relationship to this mythology do his actions, as they are presented in the Shahnameh, suggest? The opening stories of the Shahnameh represent the emergence of civilization from a surrounding milieu of magic and the demonic. The thrust of the stories is ethical; in general, success depends upon ethical behavior and unethical behavior guarantees ultimate failure, even though it might bring initial triumphs. When we consider the stories of Iraj and Seyavash we see that, according to the ethics advocated by their tales, it is better to be straightforward, righteous, and defeated (to be, that is, a martyr to moral integrity) than to flourish because of unrighteous behavior. Rostam however remains largely outside this morality. Elsewhere 23 I have drawn attention to the “trickster” quality of his legend, which involves a pragmatic, not to say at times piratical, morality, rather than a commitment to the kind of elevated and earnestly espoused ethical principles we find informing the lives of the poems’ self-consciously virtuous characters. Rostam is devious, he lies, he disguises himself, he goes on unauthorized raids, he sleeps with his host’s daughter, he gets drunk and when drunk he can be angry and overbearing, he sulks in his appanage like Achilles in his tent. All these things (except perhaps sleeping with his host’s daughter and getting drunk) are done for the Iranian cause as it were, and this justifies them. But they are not things that would be done by Feraydun, Kaveh, Iraj, Seyavash, or Kay Khosrow, that is by those characters who establish the elevated moral tone of the poem’s mythological and legendary sections. Rostam belongs to a different and coarser moral world from that inhabited by its avant la lettre Zoroastrians24 (one that is closer incidentally to the moral world of heroes of non-Iranian epics: the otherworldly morality of Iraj and Seyavash is quite absent from the Homeric poems, but Odysseus and Achilles would recognize Rostam as one of their own immediately).

22

See for example the remarks of Ehsan Yarshater, The Cambridge History of Iran, v. 3 (1), xx. Dick Davis, “Rustam-i Dastan,” Iranian Studies 32, 2 (Spring 1999): 231-242. 24 See footnote 14 above. 23

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Dick Davis Rostam’s one apparent concession to this more elevated ethical ideal is his solicitude for the young men who cross his path. We see this in his admonishments to the young firebrand Sohrab, in his care for Seyavash, in his anxiety that Esfandyar’s priggish pigheadedness (which is what his behavior seems to Rostam to indicate) not trap him in a situation from which there is no escape. It is perhaps significant that whenever Rostam shows such nobility of purpose it is always unsuccessful: Sohrab, Seyavash and Esfandyar all die violently, despite Rostam’s best efforts. And if we may ascribe Sohrab’s death to fate and his own youthful impetuosity, it is to a considerable degree the moral intransigence of both Seyavash and Esfandyar that leads to their undoing. Moral intransigence is not a quality that Rostam especially understands or has much time for: it is part of the Zoroastrian world view, but not part of Rostam’s. Rostam’s tangential relationship with the poem’s morally driven characters becomes overt with the advent of Zoroastrianism, and it is of course Esfandyar, the Zoroastrian proselytizer par excellence, who is his last victim. The details of their confrontation suggest that this is ultimately a conflict of world views and religions, and perhaps an ethnic one too. As we have seen, Esfandyar taunts Rostam with his demonic lineage, and Rostam, far from denying the demonic element in his past, embraces it by glorying in his mother’s ancestry. Esfandyar’s justification for his actions, to himself, to Pashutan his brother, and to Rostam, is his absolute Zoroastrian duty to obey his king and father. Rostam kills Esfandyar by drawing on the world of magic (in the form of the Simorgh), with which he has retained an intimate connection and which Esfandyar’s religion would finally extirpate from Iran. After Rostam dies, his son Faramarz rises in rebellion, threatening the Persian throne (as Rostam’s other son, Sohrab, had also done), and is killed by Esfandyar’s son Bahman. Each generation of Rostam’s family (Sam, Zal, Rostam, Faramarz) has found loyalty to the Iranian throne to be more difficult than the previous generation had done, but it is only with the advent of Zoroastrianism that this latent and increasing opposition becomes open and irreversible. Rostam in medieval texts other than the Shahnameh But if this is what Esfandyar’s tale tells us, that Rostam and Esfandyar belong in different moral and religious universes, it is not what Ferdowsi himself explicitly tells us: we can glean the opposition I have just described from the tale’s details, but Ferdowsi does not openly state it. Indeed, he seems to go to some pains to mitigate it, or to deflect attention from it. For example, he makes Rostam and Esfandyar into parallel figures (by their haft khwn), and he characterizes the opposition between Rostam and Goshtasp’s court not by religious differences but by Rostam’s objection to the newness of Goshtasp’s dynasty. He prepares us for this by the scene in which Zal makes exactly this objection when Kay

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Rostam and Zorastrianism Khosrow nominates Lohrasb as his successor, and Zal is finally won over.25 But Rostam, it is implied, is not, and he refuses to pay homage to either Lohrasp or Goshtasp. This, Goshtasp says, is the argument between himself and Rostam, that Rostam says “His (i.e. Goshtasp’s) crown is new, mine is ancient.”26 The argument is presented as one about legitimacy rather than religion. Some of the prose historians who touch on this material and who preceded Ferdowsi, or who were his approximate contemporaries, tend to agree with him, or they are silent on the matter. Tha‘alebi (5th century AH / 11th century CE) presents the opposition exactly as Ferdowsi does, but this is not surprising as Tha‘alebi in general sticks very close to Ferdowsi’s version of events. Tabari (3rd century AH / 9th century CE) gives what is basically the same version of events: “Bishtasb (Tabari’s version of Goshtasp) . . .said, ‘This man Rustam is in the very midst of our land, he is disobedient because he claims that Qabus has released him from submission to the empire. Therefore go to him and bring him to me.’ Isfandiyar rode out to Rustam and fought him, but Rustam killed Isfandiyar.”27 Ma‘sudi (4th century AH / 10th century CE) simply says that Rostam killed Esfandyar,28 but does not say why. He also claims that Esfandyar’s son, Bahman, killed Rostam’s father as well as Rostam29 (in the Shahnameh he imprisons Zal but then relents and frees him: Rostam is killed by his brother Shaghad). Hamzeh of Esfahan 30 makes no mention of any confrontation between Rostam and Esfandyar, or Rostam and Goshtasp, and in fact only mentions Rostam once in his whole text. But if Tha‘alebi and Tabari basically agree with Ferdowsi, a number of writers do not. The first historian to mention the encounter is the biographer of the Prophet Mohammad, Ebn Eshaq; I shall come back to his brief and (apparently) non-committal account in a moment. Shortly after Ebn Eshaq’s mention of the story, the 9th century CE historian Dinawari refers to it. His account is significant because, despite the fact that he wrote in Arabic (no-one wrote in Persian in the 9th century), his family background was Persian, and his concerns are often centered on Persia specifically, rather on than the wider Islamic world. Given his milieu and the focus of his interests we may assume that the version he records had some currency in Iran during the 9th century. He unequivocally says that the reason for the conflict between Rostam and Goshtap’s family was Rostam’s violent refusal to accept the religion of Zoroastrianism: “...When he heard news of

25

Shhnmeh-ye Ferdowsi, v. 5, ed. R. Alyef and A. Nushin (Moscow, 1346 /1967), 406-408. Shhnmeh-ye Ferdowsi, v. 6, ed. M. Osmanov and A. Nushin, 224, line109. 27 Moshe Perlmann, trans,, The History of al-Tabari, v. 6, The Ancient Kingdoms (New York, 1987), 76. 28 Ma‘sudi, Moruj al-Zahhab, Persian trans. by A. Pyandeh, l:221. 29 Ibid., 221, 225. 30 Hamzeh ebn Hasan Esfahni, Trikh seni moluk al-arz wa al-anbia translated into Persian by Dr. Ja‘far She‘r as Trikh–e Paymbarn o Shhn (Tehran, 1367 / 1988). 26

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Dick Davis Boshtasef’s (i.e. Gostasp’s) becoming a Zoroastrian, and that he had left the faith of his fathers, he (Rostam) became extremely angry about this matter and said, ‘He has abandoned the faith of our fathers, which has come down to us as an inheritance from former times, and turned to a new faith’ And he collected the men of Sistan together and recommended that Boshtasef be dethroned, and openly incited them against Boshtasef, who summoned his son Esfandyad (Esfandyar), the strongest man of his time, and said to him, ‘I shall soon give you the throne, and there will be no more tasks for you, except that you kill Rostam...’”31 Of particular interest is the relatively obscure Arab history Nihayat al-irab fi akhbar al-Furs wa al-‘Arab,32 partially translated by E.G. Browne, assigned by him to the same approximate period as Dinawari’s Tarikh, and sharing a number of sentences with this work. The text is perhaps especially noteworthy since it specifically claims that it takes its account of the Esfandyar – Rostam conflict from the works of Ibn Moqaffa‘, the great 8th century translator of Pahlavi texts into Arabic, and because of the detailed and circumstantial nature of its account. Even if we regard its claim of ibn Moqaffa‘ as a source with scepticism, the details of the conflict, which are close to those given by

31

Dinawari, Al-akhbr al-tiwal (Cairo, 1960), 25. See also the Persian translation of the Akhbr al-tiwal by Dr. Mahmud Mahdavi-Dmghni (Tehran, 1364 / 1985), 50. 32 E.G.Browne, “Some Account of the Arabic Work entitled ‘Nihayatu’l-irab fi akhbari’l- Furs wa’l-‘Arab’, particularly of that part which treats of the Persian Kings”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, n.s. 32, (1900): 195-259. The relevant passage in Browne’s translation is as follows: “Says ‘Abdu’llah ibnu’l Muqaffa’ : ‘I find in the books of the Persians the conflict of Rustam and Isfandiyad: and that the cause of this was that Bushtasf...when King (sic) Zaradusht came to him saying, “I am an Apostle from the Lord of Worlds unto thee...to invite thee unto the Religion of the Magians”...he (Bushtasf) went over to the religion of the Magians, and induced the people of his country to do the same, so that, willing or no, they acquiesced.…And...Bushtasf...crowned Rustam with a crown, and made him king over Khurasan and Sajistan, and permitted him to sit on a throne of gold...and so he (i.e Rostam) returned to Sajistan. But when it came to his ears that Bushtasf had abandoned the religion of his forefathers, and had agreed to that whereunto Zoroaster invited him of the Magian religion, he was angered thereat with a great anger, and said, “He hath left the faith of our forefathers, which the last of us have inherited from the first, and hath inclined towards the religion of Zoroaster, the infidel”.’” Rostam then rises in rebellion against Goshtasp, and Esfandyar is sent to quell the rebellion. When he and Rostam meet face to face, Rostam repeats his charge against Goshtasp, “I am displeased at what he hath done in abandoning his faith and the faith of his forefathers, and in following Zoroaster in the religion of the Magians...neither will I return to his allegiance until he renounces the religion of the Magians and returns to the faith of our fathers.” Regarding its relationship with Dinawari’s text, Browne writes, “I do not think...that its materials were derived directly therefore (ie from Dinawari), but rather that both books were drawn from a common source. In some cases…when D. has some expression like ‘concerning this the Persians relate many stories,’ the Nihayat gives in full narratives which are presumably the stories in question. In other cases it contains incidents otherwise known to us only from single sources...,” op. cit., 258.

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Rostam and Zorastrianism Dinawari, make it a fascinating document. Like Dinawari, this text makes Goshtasp’s acceptance of Zoroastrianism the cause of Rostam’s disaffection.33 The Tarikh-e Sistan (5th century AH / 11th century CE) gives a similar if much briefer account: “The reason for the battle between Rostam and Esfandyar was because when Zardosht appeared, and brought the Mazdean religion, Rostam repudiated it (n-r monker shod), and did not accept it, and for this reason turned away from King Goshtasb, and never paid homage to his throne. And since Jamasb had said to Goshtasb that Esfandyar’s death would be at Rostam’s hands, and he was afraid of Esfandyar, he sent him to fight against Rostam, so that Esfandyar was killed.”34 Goshtasp’s difference with his son Esfandyar is presented more or less as in the Shahnameh, but Rostam’s turning away from the court is given a specifically religious, and anti-Zoroastrian, cause. A slightly later, rather populist compendium of knowledge, the ‘Ajayeb nameh (6th century AH / 12th century CE), by Mohammad ebn Mohammad Hamadani, relates the following anecdote: “It is said that when Zaradosht first appeared, he did conjuring tricks (hoqeh bzi kardi). They brought him before Rostam the son of Zal, and he did some astonishing tricks. Rostam gave him something (as payment). As he became more successful, he made claims of being a prophet, and instituted fire-worship. Kings became his followers. But not Rostam the son of Zal. He said, ‘I saw that he started out doing conjuring tricks, and sleights of hand (mosh‘abedi). I will not accept that he is a prophet’.”35 Hamadani’s strong anti-Zoroastrian bias, which is evident elsewhere in his book, 36 should make us cautious in using it as a source about anything to do with Zoroastrianism, but it does confirm that at a popular level, and by some people at least, Rostam was seen as having rejected Zoroastrianism, as the less sensationalist Tarikh-e Sistan also claims. The story of Rostam’s opposition to Zoroastrianism appears then to have survived at a local and folk level, to surface in regional or relatively marginal texts that existed outside the mainstream of the historical record. Tabari, Ferdowsi, and Tha‘alebi, seem to be reproducing an “official” version, deriving from Sasanian sources, which, in tune with 33

The text has been edited by Mohammad Taqi Dneshpazhuh, Nehyat al-arab fi akhbr al-fors wa al‘arab (Tehran, 1375 / 1996). The editor briefly discusses the work’s probable date, assigning it, despite the preference of some scholars for dating it to the 11th century C.E (5th century A.H.), to the 7th-8th centuries C.E. (1st century A.H.). The uncertainty of the text’s date has obvious implications for its relationship to Dinawari’s text, but this relationship does not affect the fact that the two histories agree on describing the cause of Rostam’s quarrel with Goshtasp as the latter’s turning away from the land’s ancestral faith in order to adopt the new religion of Zoroastrianism. 34 Trikh-e Sistn, ed. Ja‘far Modarres Sdeqi (Tehran, 1373 / 1994), 12. 35 Op. cit., 47. 36 E.g., op. cit, 121, where Hamadani describes fake miracles by Zoroaster and concludes, “There is no religion more shameful (rosvtar) than the Magian religion”.

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Dick Davis the Zoroastrianism avant la lettre of some parts of the Shahnameh, sought to homogenize the national history, and to make the conflict between Rostam and Goshtasp’s court not a religious or ethnic one, but something more personal (and thus less indicative of divisions within the polity as a whole). Ferdowsi may well, as Bahar suggests, have returned Rostam, who had been marginalized in Sasanian texts, to the center of Persian legendary history, but he also, faute de mieux, had to work with whatever materials were available, most of which must have been overwhelmingly Sasanian in orientation. Nevertheless, details of the conflict as it is presented in the Shahnameh, especially the way that Rostam’s links to the demonic and the world of magic are emphasized throughout his encounter with the new faith’s most ardent representative, suggest that this homogenized Sasanian version was not the whole story, and this is confirmed by the more “marginal” texts that present the conflict as a religious one. If we accept the above analysis, two other texts may also be of interest. A moment ago I mentioned the earliest extant life of the Prophet Mohammad, by Ebn Eshaq (died 767 CE). In this text we find the story of how one Nazr ebn Hareth scoffed at the Prophet’s claims, and in particular how he would “...begin the story of Rostam and Esfandyar, and tell stories of the kings of Persia (‘ajam), and men would gather round him, and then he would say to them, ‘Aren’t my words better than those of Mohammad? By God, isn’t this story finer than what he is saying?’”37 Narrated in this unadorned way there seems no especial reason why Ebn Eshaq should single out the tale of Esfandyar and Rostam as his example of stories used by Ebn Hareth to make fun of the Prophet’s claims. But if the story was known as one that embodied a clash of religions and cultures, one that was concerned with the appearance of a new religion, and that ended with the death of the man who proselytized for it, the singling out of this story with which to mock Mohammad’s words takes on a specific meaning. Ebn Hareth is presenting a historical parallel to the Prophet’s claims; he is pointing out that those who introduce new religions and go around actively proselytizing for them, and irritating others in the process, can come to a sticky end. He is both devaluing the prophet’s claims (we, or the Persians at least, have heard all this before) and obliquely warning him of unpleasant consequences. A detail that otherwise seemed meaningless (why this story rather than another?) becomes the most significant feature of the anecdote. Modern folk versions of the Rostam-Esfandyar tale sometimes incorporate a curious detail which perhaps points to the same conclusion, that the tale has been known at the popular level as one that involved a clash of faiths. In the three volumes of his Ferdowsi Nameh, Anjavi-Shirazi records a number of folk versions of the Esfandyar-

37

Sirat Rasul Allh, (the medieval Persian translation of the Sirat of Ebn Eshaq), ed. Ja‘far ModarresSdeqi (Tehran, 1373 / 1994), 141.

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Rostam and Zorastrianism Rostam story,38 three of which end in the same way, and one that is quite different from the end of the story in the Shahnameh. In these versions Rostam’s arrow blinds Esfandyar but does not kill him. Esfandyar, who is now completely dependent on Rostam, asks Rostam to build him a stone house (or “kiosk”) with a single central supporting pillar, and to lead him to this pillar so that he can touch it. When Rostam does so, Esfandyar exerts his strength to bring down the pillar, so that the whole stone house will fall on himself and Rostam, and kill them both. Rostam has however foreseen what he intends to do and flees in time, so that when the house comes down only Esfandyar is killed. The intended strategy is essentially that of Samson in the Bible (Judges 16), but why should Samson’s strategy against the Philistines turn up in the story of Esfandyar and Rostam? The appearance of the motif may of course be serendipitous, but it may also be connected with a perception that both stories are about the same thing – a clash of faiths, ethnicities, and world-views, and the death of a religious hero in the process. Interestingly, these folk versions of the story seem to be told from Rostam’s point of view, in that, as is typical of the trickster hero, he sees through his enemy’s stratagem and escapes to tell the tale. The evidence for Rostam’s tangential relationship to both the Iranian polity and its culture, and to the religion which became most strongly identified with Iran, is diffuse but I believe pervasive in the Shahnameh. Although mainstream “universal history” texts like Tabari’s tend to support the view of the conflict between Rostam and Esfandyar as one that was largely to do with lineage and royal amour propre, more marginal texts suggest that the clash was also seen as a specifically religious one, provoked by Rostam’s rejection of Zoroastrianism. Cumulatively, there seems to be strong evidence that Rostam was not in origin a Zoroastrian hero, and that, despite Sasanian efforts to co-opt him to the cause, he continued to be perceived by many as a figure who emphatically rejected Zoroastrianism. It is not perhaps an exaggeration to see in him the Shahnameh’s last shadowy representative of a magical and animist pre-Zoroastrian world, one which disappears forever with his death.

38

Seyyed Abu al-Qsem Anjavi-Shirzi, Ferdowsi Nmeh: Mardom o Shhnmeh (Tehran, 1363 / 1984), v. 2, 3-27. The versions that include the detail of the pillar in the stone house are, revyat-e avval (23), revyat-e dovom (23-25), and revyat-e chahrom (25-27).

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Reflections on Re-reading the Iliad and the Shahnameh Amin Banani University of California at Los Angeles

Weakening eyesight in the last few years had robbed me of the pleasure of reading books. A happy consequence of going on dialysis in recent months has been the welcome acquaintance with audio books. I can relieve the boredom of twelve hours of immobile confinement a week by listening to books. More than forty years ago in an introduction to an English translation of the Shahnameh, in the hope of making that book familiar to the western reader, I made some comparisons between the epic of Ferdowsi and the Iliad of Homer. In that comparison I drew upon the generic similarities of the two works, pointing to the outer features of the two poems as celebrations of martial virtues. The inevitable formulaic repetitions, the detailed and personalized descriptions of weapons and armor, the crucial role of the heroes’ horses, the attachment and loyalty of younger acolytes to their older masters, the superb poetic descriptions of sunrise, and the imaginative similes drawn from the world of nature to depict the dying of heroes were noted as the uncanny affinities between the Shahnameh and the Iliad, affinities that point to the remote origins of both in oral epics. Recently I listened to the Iliad in the magnificent translation of Robert Fitzgerald and was struck anew by comparisons with the Shahnameh, but this time by the stark dissimilarities of the inner dimensions and the intellectual core of the two poems. Lest the reader take issue with comparison of a work versified in the 10th century of the C.E. clearly based upon a prose written source of only decades earlier with a work composed nearly two millennia earlier, I should hasten to point out that the basic subject of the early mythological episodes of the Shahnameh belong roughly to the same preantiquity as the Iliad. They are rooted in the Avesta and are the reflections of Mazdean and Zoroastrian creation myths. They constitute for the Iranian people the same attempt at self-recognition and identity as the Iliad does for the Greeks. And as I had noted in my essay of forty years ago, it is that mythological part of the Shahnameh that evokes valid comparisons. Underlying the narrative of Shahnameh is a cosmic scheme that reflects a paradigm shift in man’s coping with the enormity and ubiquity of evil in the universe, in distinguishing good from evil, and in the moral responsibility of making a choice between the two. The same ethical concerns underlie the kindred Indian epics of Mahabarata and Ramayana in roughly the same time frame. This is the same shift that in the form of divine law had come to the children of Israel about a thousand years earlier

Amin Banani and, through subsequent centuries of metaphysical refractions, ended with the crisp rational formulation of Kant’s moral imperative. In the Iliad this moral dimension is totally absent. When it arises in Greek thought some three hundred years after the Iliad – suddenly and without precedent – with Socrates and Plato, it has a brilliant but brief life. Although Socrates, Plato and Aristotle left a deep impact on philosophy and ethics of classical Islamic East (IX to XIII centuries, C.E.) and on Medieval and Renaissance periods of the Christian West, their notions of justice, duty, citizenship, responsibility and ethics were trumped by the deeply ingrained Homeric traits in Greek public behavior and personal relations. Socrates was deemed to be a subversive and corrupting influence and was put to death. Every one of the dramatists of the Attic golden age tried to shock the Athenian citizens into realization of their self-destructive behavior, with no success. The bitter sarcasm of Aristophanes is the best exposition of the failure of ethics in Greek polity and the Peloponnesian Wars of Thucydides is a historical re-enactment of the Iliad’s myths. The gamut of motivations depicted in the Iliad is a virtual catalog of human depravity. Anger, vanity, greed, revenge, violence, arrogance, aggression, deceit, perfidy, treachery, lust and thievery are unrelieved by any trace of compassion, mercy and forgiveness. Except for two brief instances of display of human sensitivity by the Trojan women, Hecuba and Andromache, the rest is an interminable tale of testosterone-driven mayhem and strife. Honor is talked about but it is strictly in the context of encroached upon sexual possessiveness, the same notion of honor that survives in primitive patriarchal societies and is the basis for justification of murder of women. The actions arising from these base motives are recounted without any compunction. The tediously long muster call of the Achaean fleet and identities of the invading coalition under the command of Agamemnon not only tells us of the number of ships in each flotilla with the number of men in each ship and the land of their origin, but it also identifies their leaders with a list of their priors. Sheep stealing, cattle rustling, horse thieving, barn burning, kidnapping, rape, murder and usurpation are remembered and glorified as the distinguished legacy of the past. If the mortal heroes of the Iliad are to emulate the heroic ideals and actions of their gods, they find nothing but magnified examples of their own foibles. The Olympian family strongly resembles the structure and dynamics of a mafia clan. Godfather Zeus is acrimoniously obeyed, but resented by his younger brother Poseidon. His wife Hera, ever resentful of her husband’s philandering, seeks every opportunity to undermine his will. His favorite daughter, Athena, ever since her birth has been the cause of a splitting headache for him. She is by far the most treacherous and vengeful of the gods who secretly disobeys Zeus and advances her own agenda. Yet on the surface none of the gods dares to openly oppose Zeus, perhaps because Zeus knows when to relent or look elsewhere before things come to an open revolt.

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Reflections on Re-reading the Iliad and the Shahnameh It is in the realm of interaction of gods and mortals that the Iliad removes all need for humans to shoulder responsibility for their actions. At every crucial moment of the struggle when the mortal hero acts to resolve the battle by dint of his own valor, the capricious gods interfere to reduce him to a mere pawn. By pulling of the not-so-invisible strings the gods reduce the epic struggle to a mere puppet show. No wonder then that no one in the Iliad is willing to admit to a mistake and to accept responsibility for it. At the moment of reconciliation between Agamemnon and Achilles when admission of the wrongful first act that led to the shedding of so much blood is required of Agamemnon, he says flatly, “It wasn’t my fault, Zeus made me do it.” Except for Hector, the counter hero of the Iliad, who arouses the reader’s sympathy, the rest are not appealing figures. Achilles, the prime hero, is a singularly unlikable person. Only in the dragged-out, anticlimactic funeral games for Patroklos does he show some signs of mellowing and magnanimity. And Hector who has displayed all the signs of manliness throughout the war is humiliated in the end by running scared of Achilles four times around the walls of Troy before he makes a fatal stand. Of Brisseis, the captive girl, whose possession is the heart of Iliad’s plot, hardly a word is said. In contrast with the chaotic and capricious order of things in the Iliad, there is a grand governing principle in the cosmic struggle between good and evil in the Shahnameh. The battle lines between the forces of light and darkness, good and evil, Ahuramazda and Ahriman are sharp and unmistakable. It is a war of humans – with Iranians as the standard-bearers for the human race – against demons (divs), i.e. the multiple gods (devas) of Indo-Iranian myths, who were demoted and demonized by Zoroaster. But the demons do not remain the sole possessors of evil. In an elegant pattern of tri-generational tragic martyrdom, triumphant revenge and restoration the gradual process of internalization of evil is demonstrated. In the tales of Kayumars, Siamak and Tahmures; Fereydun, Iraj and Manuchehr; Kaykavus, Siavash and Keykhosrow; Goshtasp, Esfandiar and Bahman, we witness first a pure encounter between humans and demons, then envy leading to fratricide, then alienation of an innocent son by a foolish father and finally the willful dispatching to death of an ambitious son by a scheming and fearful father. Step by step evil is internalized and the ethical dimension of the epic is broadened and deepened. Siamak is slain by the divs and Tahmures defeats the divs and restores the primacy of the humans (i.e. Iranians); Salm and Tur are envious of their younger brother, Iraj, and murder him in cold blood and are in turn hunted and defeated by Iraj’s grandson Manuchehr, thus giving birth to centuries of blood feud between nephew and uncles, grandsons and grandfathers. Ferdowsi, reflecting the realities of his own time, depicts this as a struggle between Iranians and Turks, but in fact it is an allIranian family quarrel. Through the paramount Zoroastrian sins of envy and greed, further compounded by hubris, overreaching ambition, pride and fear, innocent and

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Amin Banani guileless youths are slain, kings are disgraced, heroes compromised, leaving no doubt that the grand struggle against evil has shifted from an outer battlefield into the breast of men. In the Iliad there is nothing as profound and ethically compelling as the design of the Shahnameh. The closest thing in the Iliad, which imparts a sense of reaching for a panorama of the universe around us and of our place in it, is when Thetis, the mother of Achilles, using her Olympian connections, asks Haiphestos to hurriedly make a shield for Achilles. The cosmic panorama depicted on that shield is meant to help Achilles overcome his anger and realize the wider dimensions of his predicament. But Achilles shows little aptitude for grasping the lesson. Like Agamemnon, there are many kings in the Shahnameh as infected by folly, greed and pride, like Jamshid, Kaykavus and Goshtasp. Their folly, however, results in the loss of their divine aura of kingship, and brings on horrendous tragedies and long periods of darkness and cruelty. But there are no righteous and blessed kings like Fereydun and Keykhosrow in the Iliad. Nor are there such tragic, lovable and piteous heroes as Iraj, Siavash and Sohrab, whose tragic deaths crush the reader with an inconsolable grief that comes from triumph of evil over good, and leaves one with the most painful and unresolved paradox of human existence. These reflections and comparisons between the Iliad and the Shahnameh give rise to other related subjects. I am reminded of the pervasive message of the early nineteenth century European Romantic philhellenism, born in the context of the Greek struggle for independence from the decaying Ottoman Empire, but engendered and propagated by the ideals of European Enlightenment, the French Revolution’s cry of liberty and Romantic, rebellious antiauthoritarianism. It gave birth to an idealized, illusionary recreation of a democratic ancient Greece. A necessary counter-ploy to this idealized Greek democracy was a servile oriental despotism represented by Persia. The fundamental contrast was between the free upstanding Greek individual looking down on the prostrate Persian hordes before the great King of Kings. So oft-repeated and widely propagated has been this comparison in the last two hundred years, and so little has been done to expose the exaggerations and the untruths of this illusion, that it is generally accepted as the proof of distinction and superiority of Western civilization. Western civilization has achieved a number of superior distinctions in the past four hundred years, but they do not arise out of the Romantic image of ancient Greece. The ideals of Greek democracy and individual freedom are crystallized in the oration of Pericles, made to contrast the Athenian polis not with despotic Persia, but with oligarchic and militarist Sparta. It is helpful to remember that the Athenian state had arrived at a fragile and ephemeral quasi-democratic stage by the mid-fifth century B.C.E., not through an enlightened progress toward democratic goals. There were no cries for equality of rights of all citizens or respect for freedoms of fellow-citizens, nor of

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Reflections on Re-reading the Iliad and the Shahnameh willingness to abide by the will of the majority, full protection of the rights of the minority and tolerance for civil opposition. It was, rather, an unsettled and acrimonious state of coexistence among competing persons and factions. For an Athenian citizen of the “golden age” the idea of equality can best be stated as, ‘if I cannot be superior to you, I reconcile myself to equality.’ The oration of Pericles, with all its glowing praise of Athenian virtues, can also be interpreted as a psychological device to urge on the Athenian citizens precisely what they critically lacked, and to shame them into abandoning their self-destructive political behavior. Moreover, in the thousands of college and high school text books which for the last two centuries have implanted this ideal image of Athenian democracy in the minds of students, there is hardly ever a word about slavery in Athens. Students were not made aware that a polis of ten thousand free citizens lived on the labor of twenty thousand slaves. And very few scholars – except in places like ante-bellum Athens, Georgia, where it was used as justification for slavery in the cotton plantations of the South – spent any time researching the subject. That fragile and precarious moment of Athenian democracy, lasting hardly three decades, was ultimately destroyed not by Spartan force of arms but by the Athenians’ own tyrannical exploitation of their allies and, above all, by a display of all the Homeric vices chronicled in the Iliad. In the end the Athenians’ political behavior resulted in the loss of their cherished elutheria (liberty.) It is perhaps time for us in the West to re-examine the Romantic dream of Greek democracy and Persian despotism. I can think of no better way than to invite the Western reader to embark upon a thoughtful reading of the Shahnameh. Along with the breathtaking beauty of its overall design and structure, the compelling profundity of its ethical message, and the heart-breaking fates of its guileless youthful heroes, the Shahnameh informs the code of Persian kingship. The alert reader will soon discover that legitimacy of authority and rulership is conditional. The king must rule with justice. If he does not he loses his right to rule. It is an honest assessment of the human condition and a cause for sorrowful reflection that there are so many kings in the Shahnameh who lose their farrah (divine aura of rightful kingship), and so few who reach a happy end. That the model of behavior of Homer’s heroes in the Iliad could not but have dire consequences for the men of Hellas cannot be disputed. The question that arises– especially for the Persian reader—is why, with the elegant pattern of ethical behavior and tragic consequences of departing from good thoughts, good deeds and good words that are enshrined in the Shahnameh, there are so few episodes of good rule and justice in the two and half millennia of Persian political history? It would be foolish of me to pretend to know the whole answer. But, in so far as the Shahnameh and its impact is concerned, I can venture only a few observations. Perhaps nothing is more revealing than the selfmocking popular Persian saying, “Shahnameh akharesh khoshe” (The sweet part of

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Amin Banani Shahnameh is its end), remembering that that the end of the epic is the tragic demise of all that glory and the triumph of the desert Arabs over the Sasanian Empire. On a superficial level this may be like throwing up of one’s hands at the operation of inscrutable fate and admission of human impotence on this plain of existence. But a deeper examination makes it clear that, indeed, the final parts of the Shahnameh are a far cry from the early mythic parts. The sunny cosmos of Mazdean and Zoroastrian ethical order and responsibility, where humans had the choice of fighting on the side of Ahuramazda against Ahriman, gives way to a gloomy and debilitating pessimistic Zurvan (a school of the priestly caste that dominated late Zoroastrianism) world view where a tyrannical Time dooms everything to a tragic fate. Is this not the fountainhead of the deep divide that exists in the mentality, the sense of identity, and ultimately the experience of being a Persian? Irreconcilable opposites that forever vex the mind and rob one of resolute action. A culture that can produce a Sadi with his most humane view of interdependence of the human family, his courageous condemnation of tyranny and misrule of kings who, at the same, time approves of expedient lies, of pandering to the king at all times lest one lose one’s head, and of killing the non-Muslim without hesitation and compunction. For a Persian today the choice is either to give in to the same fatalistic outlook that allows the contradictions in his historical experience to condemn him to recurrent failure, or to look for a healing, whole-making remedy which is certainly not lacking in the best of his inherent values.

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Shrn and Other Female Archetypes in Firdaus’s Shhnmah Kinga Ilona Markus-Takeshita Japan Dite-moi où, n’en quel pays, Est Flora la belle Romaine, Archipiades, ne Thaïs, Qui fut sa cousine germaine, Écho parlant quand bruit on mène Dessus rivière ou sur étang, Qui beauté eut trop plus qu’humaine Mais où sont les neiges d’antan? (François Villon, Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis)

As has been asserted by some scholars, the major theme of the Shhnmah is the struggle for the possession of the farr (royal glory). 1 Shrn, the widow of Khusrau Parvz, proclaimed in front of the new shah, her stepson Shr yah, that she was “the head of the ladies (sar-i bnuvn) and the glory of the king (farr-i shh).” She also boasted about her virtues when her stepson harshly accused her of witchcraft. In her speech before the chosen nobles of Iran, she tried to rebut, as Helen had once done in front of all the Trojans, accusations against her honor and showed her illustrious beauty to the Iranian nobles who once so strongly opposed her marriage to Khusrau. First, she recounted all virtues a married woman may have: Three things make / The worth of women that bedeck the throne Of greatness: one is modesty and wealth Wherewith her husband may adorn his house; The next is bearing blessed sons, that she May e’en exceed her spouse in happiness; The third is having beauty and fine form, Joined with the love of a sequestered life. When I was mated to Khusrau Parviz, And entered on seclusion, he had come Weak and dispirited from Rum to live

1

F.W. Buckler, Firdausi’s Shahnamah and the Genealogia Regni Dei. Supplement to the Journal of the American Oriental Society 1 (September 1935): 1-21.

Kinga Ilona Markus-Takeshita Within our land, but after reached such power As none had heard of or had looked upon. Moreover I have had four sons by him To his great joy—Nastur, Shahriar, Farud, And Mardanshah, blue heaven’s coronal. Jamshid and Faridun had not such sons;2 When the great Kayanian king of mythical times, Kay Khusrau, reminisced at the end of his reign about the ideal women of the past, he evoked the memory of four women, namely, the two sisters of Jamshd: Mhfard, the daughter of T r, and his own mother, Farangs, the daughter of Afrsiyb. Shahrnz and Arnavz, the sisters of Jamshd, were forced after the fall of their brother to marry the tyrant Zahhk who corrupted them through his evil magic. They were rescued by the young hero Fard n who defeated Zahhk and married them. To Fard n they bore three sons, Salm, T r and raj, the ancestors of the three big nations of the world. Not much is known, on the other hand, about Mhfard, though a namesake of hers also became an ancestress of the Pishdadian dynasty. Mhfard was the wife of raj and the mother of a girl who was later married to Pashang, a relative of her grandfather, Fard n, and bore Man chihr, the future shah of Iran. Chronologically it is not impossible that she is identical with the daughter of T r, as Iranians often practiced next-of kin marriages in antiquity. An earlier royal ancestress is Farnak, the mother of Fard n. She brought up her son in hiding from the vengeance of Zahhk who had killed her husband, Abtin. The miraculous cow Birmaye acted as a nurse for Fard n. The story of persecuted mother and son is repeated later, during the Kayanian epoch, in the fate of Farangs, the widow of the innocently murdered Siyvush, and her son Kay Khusrau, who were saved from the wrath of the cruel grandfather Afrsiyb by the intercession of the wise Prn. Jarrah, the daughter of Prn, the chief counselor of Afrasiyb, was the mother of Fur d, the elder son of Siyvush. She lived with her son in the castle of the White Mountain (Sifdkh) which was besieged by the army of T s. When Fur d was killed, she set fire to the fortress and committed suicide over her son’s dead body. Katy n, the daughter of the Roman emperor chooses her own husband, Gushtsp (whom she had seen previously in a dream), in a bold act of svayamvara, against the wish of her father. She supports her husband by selling her jewels until Gushtsp proves his worth in the court of his father-in-law and can return triumphantly to Iran.

2

The Shahnama of Firdausi, done into English by A. G. Warner and E. Warner (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1925), vol. 9, p. 39, corresponding to SN (Moscow ed.) vol. 9, ll. 529-539.

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Shrn and Other Female Archetypes in Firdaus’s Shhnmah Humy, the daughter of King Bahman, was espoused to her father, and after the death of her father she threw her new-born child in the waters of the river Firt (the Euphrates) and ruled alone until her son Drb – who was brought up by a washerman –returned as a hero to save her kingdom from an attack by the army of Rum. Nhd, the daughter of Faylaq s, the Emperor of Rum, was married briefly to Drb but was disgraced because of her foul smell. She bore their son, Sikandar (Alexander the Great), in the house of her father. Her foul smell is perhaps a trace of the demonic nature in her ancestry. Olympias, the historical mother of Alexander, kept snakes around her, and there are legends concerning Nectanebos, the fugitive king of Egypt, who approached Olympias in the form of a dragon. In this version Nhd may be an aquatic ill-smelling avatar of the goddess Anahita, and she is here incarnating the monstrous aspect of Alexander’s ancestry. Zl, the father of Rustam had a totemistic foster-mother, the wondrous bird smurgh. Exposed as a child because of his unusual white hair, he was brought by the mother bird to her nest and reared together with her children until his father, Sam, fetched him home again. The romance of Rustam with Tahmnah, the princess of Samangan, who meet while Rustam searches for his lost horse, Rakhsh, is a typical genealogical legend which has its parallel in the legend of Hercules, who fathered Scythes, ancestor of the Scythians, in similar circumstances. The heroines of the love romances – Rudbah, the daughter of Mihrb, king of Kabul, and Manzhah, the daughter of Afrsiyb – show steadfastness and devotion to their lovers against paternal opposition. Qaydafa, the queen of Andalus from the chapter of Sikandar, is one of the few independent female rulers of the Shhnmah. With her wisdom and diplomatic sense she makes the world-conqueror Sikandar her ally. She is called N shbah in Nizm’s romance, and her Amazon-like nature is probably a topos for the historic Queen Ada, a Carian ruling lady who developed friendly ties with the young Macedonian conqueror. In the Sasanian cycle, Ardashr, the founder of the new dynasty, comes to power through the help of Gulnr, the favorite of his sovereign, Ardavn. She eloped with Ardashr taking along treasures from Ardavn, and they rode away on swift horses from the king’s stable. The royal glory (farr-i kayn) accompanied them on their flight, so that Ardavn was unable to capture them. Soon Ardashr succeeded in his revolt against his overlord and founded a new empire after slaying Ardavn. Both in the episode of the daughter of Ardavn and in the episode of the daughter of Mihrak, the brides of the kings are from a vanquished royal family. The daughter of Ardavn is caught in a conflict between her role as a dutiful daughter and sister on the one hand, and as spouse on the other, when her two fugitive brothers call on her to poison her husband, Ardashr. Through divine intervention, Ardashr foils her attempt and condemns her to death. She confesses that she is pregnant, and the mubid who was supposed to put her to death conceals her in his own home and brings up her son in secrecy, eventually winning a

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Kinga Ilona Markus-Takeshita pardon for them, but at the cost of his own bodily mutilation. Other Sasanian leading ladies fall into the stereotyped category of helpers of heroes, like the maidens connected with the legend of Shp r Dh al-Aktf, or they are mere decorative figures, as in the love-exploits of Bahrm G r. In the legend of Bahrm Ch bn, the mighty general has two women as the pole stars of his fate. The first, the sorceress in the forest – his bakht, or fate – encourages him to rise against his own king, and the other, his own sister Gurdiyah – a veritable virago in her own right – embodies moderation and submission toward the rightful king, Khusrau Parvz. The narrative of the reign of Khusrau Parvz (590-628 AD) is the second longest chapter of the Sasanian part of the epic, extending to 4083 verses (as compared to the 4468 verses on his grandfather, Khusrau An shrvn). His youth is described in the chapter of Hurmuzd, his father, and his downfall and execution in the chapter of his son, Shruyah. His celebrated love-affair with Shrn is narrated toward the end of his reign (verses 3368 to 3518, approximately) extending thematically also into the next chapter, that of Shruyah, where it actually reaches its climax. As compared to the 6500 couplets of Nizm’s epic, or even to the other similar love stories of the Shhnmah, like the amorous exploits of Bahrm G r, or the romances of Zl and R dbah, Bzhan and Manzhah or Gushtsp and Katy n, it is sober in tone and gives little details of their love. Unlike Nizm, Firdaus does not describe her beauty in its usual details, except that once he calls her “the sun” (khrshd), and compares her figure to a “silver pillar” (smn sutn in verse 3024). Her beauty is indicated only, as in the case of Helen in the Iliad, by the astonishment of the onlookers, when she takes off her veil in front of Shr yah and the nobles (Reign of Shr yah, verses 539-545). It is narrated that their love began when Khusrau was still young, and his father still alive. “He did not care for anyone from among the beauties and the daughters of the grandees, but for her [Shrn]” (verse 3385). Later, however, because of the war with Bahrm Ch bn, they got separated, and Shrn was left to grieve alone (3388). In the earlier parts of the narratives, we hear about Khusrau’s marriage to the Roman princess Mariam, and afterwards to Gurdiyah, the sister of Bahrm Ch bn. These two highborn women are the rivals of Shrn, and the probable cause of her abandonment. In an earlier chapter Shrn tries to verbally challenge Gurdiyah in front of Khusrau, but she is unable to prevent her endearment to the king, and her elevation to a high position in the royal harem (3033-3047). Shrn wins back her husband with feminine subtlety, appearing in front of him with sweet words and tears, decked in splendid attire and jewelry, to remind him of their old love when he ventures out in great pomp on the royal hunt (3410-3425). While Nizm depicts Shrn as an Armenian princess, in the Shhnmah nothing is told of her background, except that she is not considered worthy of the position of the royal consort by the priests and the nobles. One final question remains, whether this lovely and

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Shrn and Other Female Archetypes in Firdaus’s Shhnmah trusted and proud wife of Khusrau was indeed a Christian or not. The Shahnmah does not mention her religion, but talks of great opposition preceding her entrance into the king’s household. When Khusrau must answer the clerical and popular opposition to her elevated station (verses 3437-3483), he demonstrates to his priests and nobles his love and esteem for Shrn, his beloved and now official consort, by showing them a vessel full of fresh blood, and then slowly purifying it with water, earth (khk), wine (nabd), rose-water and musk. In this way he indicates clearly to his courtiers that she is a mere vessel for noble procreation, not a source of impurity. There are no objections among the courtiers to her other than her lowly origin. She is later charged with murdering her rival by poison in the Shhnmah and in other sources as well, though Noeldeke dismisses the notion.3 Contemporary Christian sources (of the early Middle Ages) also emphasized her religion and charity toward her creed, as she was a Monophysite Christian from the Southwest of Iran, namely Beth Khuzaye, the modern Khuzestan. She was an Aramaic-speaking Christian according to these sources. Shrn also had another mighty rival in the person of the Parthian princess Gurdiyah, who was the sister of Bahrm Ch bn, the rebel general of both Khusrau and his equally ill-fated father, Hurmuzd. Both Mariam and Gurdiyah were supposed to have children from Khusrau. Mariam bore the crown-prince Kavd, alias Shr yah (Shr yah was the name whispered into the baby's ear by his father when he was born (3172-3173), and also the future wise and beautiful queen, Burn. Altogether Khusrau had sixteen or more sons, all slain by the crown prince Kavd Shr yah after, or at the same time, as the execution of his ill-fated father, Khusrau Parvz, the Invincible. In her farewell speech to the great assembly of fifty wise elders of various orders, Shrn claimed that she had four sons. After two months of mourning for her royal husband had passed, Shr yah actually proposed marriage to her, and she set her own condition to the new master of the royal throne. First she proudly rejected charges of witchcraft (jd’) that had previously been brought against her by her stepson, the son of her bitter Byzantine rival, Mariam (Shr yah, 515-590). In a majestic funerary sermon before entering the mausoleum (dakhmah) and taking the deadly poison (halhil)4 at her own hand, she glorifies herself as follows:

3 4

Noeldeke, Geschichte, 283-284. The poison called halhil is the same type which the brothers of Ardavn’s daughter sent to their sister to poison the king during the reign of Ardashr. Halahil is a Sanskrit word, which was the original poison of the world-snake, and also appeared in later Iranian popular lore (it is used, for example, against the Imam Hasan in the Rauzat al-shuhad, and in the folktale Bulbul-i sargashtah). Tha‘lab also knows of Shrn’s suicide by poison, and the corresponding story of her sin of poisoning the Emperor’s daughter. It sounds like some type of poetical justice rather than an actual event, perhaps influenced by the similar legend of Cleopatra of Egypt.

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Kinga Ilona Markus-Takeshita I was many years the mistress (bnu) of Iran I was in every cause behind the brave nobles (dilrn) The grandees acknowledged in the presence of Khusrau that from Shrn came right guidance… There is no other woman in the world, neither hidden, nor a public figure, like she. Shrn was called in church history Sire (Syra in Greek), meaning a Syriac- (rather than Aramaic-) speaking woman. It is Nizm who takes her for an Armenian, probably because of Parthian connotations in their story: the name of Farhd, the sculptor (sangtarsh) and her alleged lover (or relative?), appears on the list of the Parthian-Armenian royal names (Phraates). The Shhnmah does not speak of Farhd’s existence, but the contemporary Mujmal al-tavrkh does. In the Persian translation of Tabar's world chronicle, the so-called Chronicle of Bal‘am, Shrn is a mere kanzak, or slave-girl, though an epitome of beauty, listed together with the other treasures of her master Khusrau Parvz, alias Kisr. In that version, she died much before Khusrau. There are of course, the persistent rumors about the religion of the late Sasanians, as the last king, Yazdagird, was called by the Christian Catholicos (jthiliq) a grandchild of the godfearing (tars) Shrn, through the father Shahriyr. The accusation that she was a murderess and a shrewd dowager queen like Cleopatra were already disproved by Noeldeke, who doubted the historicity of her arch-rival, the Byzantine Mariam, the daughter of Emperor Mauricius, who was born himself as an Armenian commoner in a village called Madaura.5 History is complex, and defies literary analysis. Probably Shrn’s dramatic suicide in Khusrau’s mausoleum, as depicted by early Neo-Persian poets and writers, has no historical basis. Kisr, the king, always remains an epitome of vainglory, while the other tragic hero, the young and innocently slain Farhd, and their queen, Shrn, continue to live in the modern folklore of the Middle East and Central Asia.

5

The Cambridge History of Iran, 3 (1): 322-323.

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Shrn and Other Female Archetypes in Firdaus’s Shhnmah Works Cited ‘dil, Muhammad Riz, Farhang-i jmi‘-i nmh-yi Shhnmah (Tehran: Chpkhnahyi Akhtar, 1372/1993). Bal‘ami, Trikh, ed. Malik al-Shu‘ar Bahr (Tehran: Zavvr, 1353/1974). Christensen, A. L’Iran sous les les Sassanides (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1944). Coyajee, J.C. Studies in Shahnameh (Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons. & Co, n.d.). Dihkhud, Al-Akbar. Lughatnmah (Tehran: University of Tehran Press, 1349/1970). Firdausi, Shah-name. Kriticheskij tekst. Sost. teksta A.E. Bertel`s. Pod. red. A. Nushin (Moscow: Nauka, 1971). Mu’ayyad, Hishmat. “Maryam va Shrn dar shir-i Firdaus va Nizm,” Irnshensi 3, 3 (1991): 526-539. Nizm Ganjav, Kulliyt-i Khamsa. ed. Shiblñ Numn (Tehran: Jvidn, 1377/1998). Noeldeke, Theodor, Geshichte der Perser und Araber zur Zeit der Sasaniden. Aus den arabischen Chronik des Tabari. Ubersetzt von Th. Noeldeke. Photomechanischer Nachdruck. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973). Shahd Mzandarn, Husayn (Bzhan), Farhang-i Shhnmah. Persons & Places (Tehran: Nashr-i Balkh, v-bastah ba Bunyd-i Nshb r, 1377/1998). Sukhanrnih-yi nakhustin dawrah-i jalast-i sukhanrn va bahs dar brah-yi Shhnmah-yi Firdaus (Tehran: Farhang va Hunar, 1350). Yarshater, Ehsan, ed. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3 (1-2). The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian periods (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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Editing the Shhnma: The Interface between Literary and Textual Criticism Mahmoud Omidsalar John F. Kennedy Memorial Library California State University, Los Angeles

All authors communicate in the intangible medium of language. Old authors, whose works have survived as manuscripts, present special problems of communication. Although the exact works of these authors may not be recoverable, documentary texts of their works, that is versions that have survived in manuscripts, may be studied and manipulated in order to reconstruct a reasonable approximation of them.1 This enterprise, although by nature inexact, is by no means so uncertain as to allow total confusion. Furthermore, although one cannot be always certain that one has re-established the exact words of a Virgil, a Shakespeare, or a Sa‘di from the surviving textual evidence of their works, this absence of certainty should neither lead to despair nor to doubt as far as the essential validity of the enterprise is concerned. Textual criticism of classical texts, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is much like paleontology. 2 One may not be able to reconstruct the precise form of a dinosaur or an early primate from scant fossil evidence, but one can make a pretty good guess about the form based on that evidence. Therefore, the uncertain nature of the fossil evidence invalidates neither the inferences drawn from it, nor for that matter the discipline of paleontology. By the same token, although we may not always be able to determine the exact form of a classical Persian poem from its manuscript evidence, it is not true that we can therefore say nothing worthwhile about it. As textual scholars, we are more fortunate than the paleontologist. Those who work with fossils of flora and fauna know that one tyrannosaurus rex is anatomically pretty much like another. But those of us who work with the creative activity of literary geniuses, by contrast, have the luxury of knowing that the object of our study is unique. No other poet’s words are quite like those of a Ferdowsi or a Hfez. Our task therefore, is

1

For a discussion of the distinction between “work” and “text” see G. Thomas Tanselle, “Texts of Documents and Texts of Works,” in Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing, ed. G. Thomas Tanselle (Charlottesville/London: for the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia by the University Press of Virginia, 1990), 3-24, and also his A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). 2 Mahmoud Omidsalar, “Editing the Garshaspnama in the Light of Shakespearean Scholarship,” Iranian Studies 33, 3-4 (2000): 403-410.

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easier than the mission of paleontologists because it is more confined. We know for example that Ferdowsi describes a certain dark night in these words:3 {1 " #  *  " ; > E! "K >   = > / " Q " F0G > /  +* H No one who understands Persian in the marrow of his bones could possibly confuse the diction of these three poets. Ferdowsi, by virtue of his poetic genius, stands apart and above all who came before or after him. Consider, for instance, his description of the hero Sm’s reaction to seeing a picture of the infant Rostam: {1497 2 } W/ – W[ –   Y #R    W @   *  X > 7  R*R The same image in the hand of a lesser poet (Shahrirnma, p. 155) is expressed as follows:  W/ ! Y > Y; * ` Such examples may be multiplied ad infinitum.

/  ;  ] \ ^0* _ +*

The textual critic who aspires to approximating Ferdowsi’s words has thus the luxury of tuning his ears to Ferdowsi’s unique voice, which like a beacon calls him out of the wilderness. All he has to do is to learn to listen. Jacob Bronowski was aware of the special quality of a genius’s voice when he wrote: Christopher Columbus discovered the West Indies, and Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. We do not call their achievements creations because they are not personal enough. The West Indies were there all the 3

All references to the Shhnma are from Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh’s critical edition of the Persian text, 6 of the 8 volumes of which have appeared (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1988- ), along with two further volumes of notes on the edited text, Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh, Yd-dshth-yi Shhnma, 2 vol. (New York: Persian Heritage Foundation and Bibliotheca Persica, 2001 and 2006). However, the full eight volumes of the Khaleghi-Motlagh edition (v. 6, ed. Mahmoud Omidsalar; v.7, ed. Abol-Fazl Khatibi) has now appeared in an Iranian edition (Tehran: Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopedia, 2007). I refer to verses by putting the name of the story followed by the verse number in parenthesis. This way, regardless of what edition of the Shhnma may be available to the reader, he will be directed to the general vicinity of the verse in question. I will not translate my examples because the distinctions will only make sense in Persian, which I assume most readers of this volume on Persian studies will possess.

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time; and as for the telephone, we feel that Bell’s ingenious thought was somehow not fundamental. The groundwork was there, and if not Bell then someone else would have stumbled on the telephone almost as accidentally as on the West Indies. By contrast, we feel that Othello is genuinely a creation. This is not because Othello came out of a clear sky; it did not. There were Elizabethan dramatists before William Shakespeare, and without them he could not have written as well as he did. Yet within their tradition Othello remains profoundly personal; and though every element in the play has been a theme of other poets, we know that the amalgam of these elements is Shakespeare’s; we feel the presence of this single mind. The Elizabethan drama would have gone on without Shakespeare, but no one else would have written Othello.4 Consider for example, the motif of “Recognition of son by gushing up of milk in mother’s breasts.” This is a common motif in the folklore of many peoples around the world, and is listed as motif number H175.1 in Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature. However, it takes Ferdowsi to put such a common motif into verse in a manner that touches every Persian speaker quite deeply: j q "/K *  * jW > q * "# >  Y ! ! | x* /  > +  {143-140  ^} ! W/ > q *\ * Y  = ! Y#*

 *  b  * # / d/ 2 W   W! ^ +[ ; wx| ~" 2  * K # 2 W €  / Y: W[ # x*

There can be no doubt of Ferdowsi’s unique voice and manner of expression here. Similarly, the tales of Oedipus (tale type 931) and that of King Lear existed, independent of the genius of the authors who made them famous, long before Sophocles or Shakespeare were born. It was these two geniuses’ “telling” that transformed tale type 931 or the motif M21 into the tragic masterpieces that they are. Understanding this fact is especially important in these days of politically correct if mindless enthusiasm about the artistic activity of “bards” or “scribes,” whose bucolic ditties or slips of the pen are valued as much as the carefully crafted verse of literary masters. The reason the story of Lear that was told by Geoffrey of Monmouth—no mean storyteller himself—in the early twelfth century CE, had to await the ministrations of Shakespeare before achieving its present prominence has to do with Shakespeare’s special way of telling with his exact words, just as the reason for the triumph of 4

Jacob Bronowski, “The Creative Process,” in A Sense of the Future: Essays in Natural Philosophy, ed. Piero E. Ariotti and Rita Bronowski (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977), 7.

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Ferdowsi’s literary telling of Iranian epic tales is Ferdowsi’s unique way of putting them into verse. The exact words of Shakespeare and Ferdowsi, therefore, matter. That is why attempts at reconstructing or at least approximating the exact words of literary geniuses are important. As far as the Shhnma is concerned, unlike medieval European epic literature, which may be understood or analyzed in the context of the obscure troubadour culture that was instrumental in its creation and perpetuation, Ferdowsi’s verse may only be approached in terms of its poet’s individuality and exceptional creativity. In other words, we may not meaningfully speak of a faceless “epic tradition” behind the Shhnma as though we are discussing Beowulf, or El Cid. These poems may be products of impersonal “traditions,” but Ferdowsi’s voice and presence are too specific, too compelling to be classified as traditional in the same sense. It is with these points in mind that we should approach the problem of the interface between textual and literary criticism of the Shhnma. However, before getting to the meat of the matter, allow me a few words on the background of the problem. Literary analysts, most of whom are neither trained in textual criticism nor have a clear idea of its aims and limitations, regularly confuse their own literary preferences with what is attributable to Ferdowsi. They take it for granted that all textual evidence may be weighed in a literary scale, and be accepted or rejected according to whether or not it agrees with some idiosyncratic standard of literary taste. To them, the “essential value” of the work of art does not at all depend on the kind of minutiae on which textual critics spend life-times. But the details matter. The British texts of Ernest Hemingway that according to Bruccoli were often subjected to textual fumigations in order to make them more palatable for English consumption are full of dashes, deletions, asterisks and outright interferences. For instance, in Hemingway’s “A Very Short Story,” published in the Cape edition of In Our Time in 1926, “the word enema is purged to enemy, thereby ruining the point of the sentence: ‘When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table; and they had a joke about friend or enema’.”5 Those who have loftier concerns than the difference between enemy and enema might believe that such textual interference doesn’t matter; and that the “essential value” of literary monuments remain unaffected regardless of whether the text is Hemingway’s, Shakespeare’s, Ferdowsi’s, or some typesetter’s bowdlerized version. Fredson Bowers, using the text of Hamlet as an example, takes the “essential value” school of literary analysis to task with typical panache and penetration. He asks:

5

Matthew J. Bruccoli, “Some Transatlantic Texts: West to East,” in Bibliography and Textual Criticism, ed. O. M. Brack, Jr. and Warner Barnes (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 247.

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How many conventional readings in the text of Hamlet—one, two five, ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, two hundred?—must be proven unsound before the “total values” of the play are affected and the literary critic should begin to grow uneasy about the evidence on which he is formulating his hypothesis for the whole?6 One can pose the same question with respect to the Shhnma with the same relevance. The first 296 verses of the story of Rostam and Sohrb in Khaleghi-Motlagh’s new critical edition records 735 textual variants and 193 interpolated verses. At what point can a reasonable person surmise that the “essential value” of Ferdowsi’s art has been compromised by these errors and interpolations? How many errors should be dismissed as insignificant before we reach a text that cannot be said to be Ferdowsi’s? Small change in wording, at least in Persian literature, not only separates great verse from ordinary verse, but also implies great change in meaning. Consider verse 356 in the story of Rostam and Sohrb: W ‚ Y *   W  2 W   " ! /K _Q@ 2 The first hemistich of this verse has been recorded in all other editions of the epic as follows ( ...7/K _Q@ 2 ), recording 2 (“when”) instead of 2 (“why”), and 7/K (1st person sing.) instead of /K (3rd person sing.). These apparently small changes transform the meaning of the verse, and what’s more, turn the relationship between the crown and the hero on its head. Critics who are not careful of the purity of their texts, are apt to muse meaninglessly on misprints or scribal errors. F. O. Matthiessen’s pointless pondering of a phrase in Melville’s White-Jacket, as reported by Bowers, is instructive:

6

Fredson Bowers, “Textual Criticism and the Literary Critic,” in Textual and Literary Criticism, ed. F. Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2. The error begins from the very title page. Greg, the father of the “copy text” theory in modern textual criticism asks: “How many readers of Dickens, for instance, know that The Adventures of Oliver Twist: or The Parish Boy’s Progress is the title which the author gave his novel”? W. W. Greg, “The Rationale of Copy Text,” in Art and Error: Modern Textual Editing, ed. R. Gottesman and S. Bennett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 39. In addition to correcting many textual errors that have led a host of literary critics astray, the authorized edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby restores some 1,100 punctuation marks and four space breaks, by which Fitzgerald signaled shifts in time or narrative. The Fitzgerald scholar, Matthew J. Bruccoli writes: “Punctuation is not decoration: A few commas more or less do not matter much in a novel, but more than a thousand punctuation interferences alter the overall rhythm of the prose—a serious matter in reading a stylist whose sense for the sound and movement of the American language has been compared to perfect pitch.” See M. J. Bruccoli, “The Text of the Great Gatsby,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, The Authorized Text, ed. M. J. Bruccoli (New York: Scribner, 1992), 194.

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Melville is describing his fall into the sea from the yard-arm of the U.S. frigate Neversink. In the Constable Standard Edition of Melville’s Works we read the following description of his feelings as he floats under water in an almost trance-like state:

I wondere whether I was yet dead or still dying. But of a sudden some fashionless form brushed my side—some inert, soiled fish of the sea; the thrill of being alive again tingled in my nerves, and the strong shunning of death shocked me through. Commenting on these lines Matthiessen writes: But then this second trance is shattered by a twist of imagery of the sort that was to become peculiarly Melville’s. He is startled back into the sense of being alive by grazing an inert form; hardly anyone but Melville could have created the shudder that results from calling this frightening vagueness some ‘soiled fish of the sea.’ The discordia concors, the unexpected linking of the medium of cleanliness with filth, could only have sprung from an imagination that had apprehended the terrors of the deep, of the immaterial deep as well as the physical.7 Bowers, who can be ruthless in his criticism of the gullible critic’s total trust in the printed page, comments: The only difficulty with this critical frisson about Melville’s imagination, and undemonstrable generalizations such as ‘nobody but Melville could have created the shudder,’ and so on, is the cruel fact that an unimaginative typesetter inadvertently created it, not Melville; for what Melville wrote, as is demonstrated in both the English and American first editions, was coiled fish of the sea.8 It is true that avoiding errors of impure texts helps one avoid making meaningless forays into critical analysis, and thereby making himself look foolish. However, I believe there is a more compelling reason to insist on working with authentic texts: namely, it is immoral to do otherwise. The artist who labored to craft a work of art deserves to have his work presented as accurately as possible. This is no more than saying that one should 7 8

Bowers, Textual and Literary Criticism, 29-30. Ibid., 30.

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strive toward accuracy even in the face of certain knowledge that absolute accuracy is impossible. That knowledge does not automatically obviate striving for the highest degree of accuracy possible. I realize that my use of words such as “impure” and “authentic”—to say nothing of “immoral”—raises more than a few postmodernist eyebrows. However, I am also unable to disabuse myself of the gnawing notion that all those who find insistence on accuracy and precision anachronistic, would not be willing to publish a book or a paper without proof-reading it first. In other words, qua authors, they insist on the integrity of their work and the accurate reporting of their words. All textual critics say is: let us extend the favor to all authors, dead or alive. It is not difficult to find evidence in favor of this proposed honesty of reportage in the work or correspondence of literary figures. One of the better examples of interference in spite of the author’s explicit wishes is Owen Wister’s duel with the proofreaders at the Harper’s Magazine, which he relates in the preface to a volume of his stories: Once in an early tale I sought to make our poor alphabet express the sound of cow-bells, and I wrote that they tankled on the hillside. In the margin I stated my spelling to be intentional. Back it came in the galleys, tinkled. A revised proof being necessary, I restored, the word with emphasis—and lo, tinkle was returned me again.9 Mark Twain’s objection to his typesetters’ tampering with his punctuation marks is a bit more vehement than Wister’s. On Sunday, July 25, 1897, Twain (1835-1910) wrote the following letter to his publishers, Chatto & Windus: Dear C & W: I give it up. These printers pay no attention to my punctuation. Nine-tenths of the labor & vexation put upon me by Messrs. Spottiswoode & Co consists in annihilating their ignorant & purposeless punctuation & restoring my own. This latest batch, beginning with page 145 & running to page 192 starts out like all that went before it—with my punctuation ignored & their insanities substituted for it. I have read two pages of it—I can’t stand any more. If they will restore my punctuation themselves & then send the purified pages to me I will read it for errors of grammar & construction— that is enough to require of an author who writes as legible a hand as I do,

9

Owen Wister, Members Of The Family (London: MacMillan, 1911), 20.

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& who knows more about punctuation in two minutes than any damned bastard of a proof-reader can learn in two centuries. Conceive of this tumble-bug interesting himself in my punctuation— which is none of his business & with which he has nothing to do—& then instead of correcting misspelling, which is in his degraded line, striking a mark under the word & silently confessing that he doesn’t know what the hell to do with it! The damned half-developed foetus! But this is the Sabbath Day, & I must not continue in this worldly vein.10 A similar concern with accuracy is expressed in a poetic message exchanged between two giants of classical Persian poetry. When San’i-ye Ghaznavi (d. 525/1131) inadvertently mingled verse of other poets with the poetry of Mas‘ud-e Sa‘d-e Salmn (d. 515/1121) in the course of his collection of the latter’s verse, Mas‘ud, who had seen a copy of the collection, privately criticized San’i’s poor editorial ability. San’i, embarrassed by this development, composed the following verse apology, addressed to Mas‘ud-e Sa‘d:   +* 2 W;/G  †  / Y`ƒ  *  #^„  …  Š ^‹„ "#` / 0Œ 2  ; > ‡! W/ Y   ˆ^‰  ŠŠ q‰ ˆ0‚ >   XŽ„ # ; > ‡! * ‰ > | 2      _  2 ŠŠ / ^€* /  ‡! …   0  *  > `€„   W@  /Œ  2    Œ*  W[ + H ‰@ W[* ‰@ > ] ? ‘ Y  ‚   b‚ > ““ ˆ^‰ 0Œ * X‰ >   ’  /K: W[   Q  K   ˆ^‰ +!/  / "  @  b/Œ   # * * ^ 2  ‰ H / +!  * /    + ”G  #! €@ W\/ jW[* Y 2  ‚ ‰@    ‘ †  ‡! > `€‡   HK  / /w‡ H| … W@   *   _ 2 Y j  b‘ > • / @ HK 11   ^ > #‡ > ‡ > — #K H  W[*  ‡! 2 – 10

“An Unpublished Letter: Mark Twain to Chatto & Windus, 25 July 1897,” CEAA Newsletter (An Occasional Publication of the Center for Edition of American Authors, Modern Language Association of America), no. 1 (March 1968), 1. 11 Divn-e Hakim Abu al-Majd Majdud b. dam San’i-ye Ghaznavi. Ed. Modarres-e Razavi, 3rd printing (Tehran, 1361), 1060-61. Note the word pas in the last line quoted may be a corruption for bas used adverbially in the sense of “often.” [For a discussion and translation of the relevant lines of this poem,

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Textual critics’ persistent pursuit of unblemished and correct texts is thus neither mere moping about minutiae, nor as one particularly tasteless critic alleges, connected to the Nazis’ notions of racial hygiene or patriarchal anxiety about legitimacy of descent or notions of property and inheritance. 12 Textual scholarship is not out to celebrate patriarchy, promote racism, or perpetuate some objectionable set of political or economic relationships. Its project, I’m afraid, is far less ambitious. It seeks only to eradicate as much error from literary monuments as humanly or realistically possible. This, it seems to me, is a rather modest mission compared to the demolition derby that has of late been deconstructing everything in sight. Bowers explained the mission of the textual scholars in the following words: The most important concern of the textual bibliographer is to guard the purity of the important basic documents of our literature and culture. This is a matter of principle on which there can be no compromise. One can no more permit ‘just a little corruption’ to pass unheeded in the transmission of our literary heritage than ‘just a little sin’ was possible in Eden.13 Aside from the fact that literary analysts care more about the quality of the wine served at departmental parties than about the quality or accuracy of texts that they consult, while textual critics are hell-bent on making sure that their texts are as “clean” as possible, the most important difference between textual and literary criticism is that literary analysis is more subjective and intuitive,14 while textual criticism, although by no means devoid of subjectivity, is relatively more objective and bound by method. It is relatively more objective because it functions within limits that are imposed on it by the nature and authority of the textual variants, and by the established canon of a discipline that traces its lineage to Alexandrian scholarship of the 3rd century BCE. There is wisdom in Alfred E. see Franklin D. Lewis, “Reading, Writing and Recitation: San’i and the Origins of the Persian Ghazal,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1995, 130-36. – Ed.] 12 In a discussion that best represents the excesses of the kind of modernist free association that passes for scholarship these days, Bowers’ pleas for pure texts and Hitler’s demands for racial purity are connected to the cleansing powers of Clorox in an attempt, not to “discredit Bowers as a person” (26), but to “show how the textual-critical strategies of eclectic editing were strongly influenced by the residue of eugenic ideology surviving in the discourse of mid-century idealism.” See Joseph Grigley, Textualterity (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 20-27. 13 Bowers, Textual and Literary Criticism, 8. 14 W. W. Greg, "The Function of Bibliography in Literary Criticism Illustrated in a Study of the Text of King Lear," in W. W. Gregg; Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 26798.

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Housman’s definition of it: “Textual criticism is a science, and, since it comprises recension and emendation, it is also an art. It is the science of discovering error in texts and the art of removing it.”15 Aside from being less subjective, textual criticism is also a relatively more scientific area of literary scholarship. I do not mean to imply that it is “scientific” in the same sense as the physical sciences; but only that it is systematic, methodical, and scholarly as distinct from whimsical or arbitrary. In other words, it is scientific in that it shares with the natural and physical sciences a rigor of systematic investigation, or as D. F. McKenzie observes: “an honesty of method.”16 Thus, when available textual variants point to a certain reading, and when no compelling external factors militate against this reading, the textual critic is not free to disregard it in favor of one that he prefers in a literary sense. He can not just go with his whim, and disregard the sensible dictum that “what is best is not what seems best to the critic, but what is attributable to the author.”17 In spite of all this, I do not believe that texts are sacrosanct. Nor do I favor total surrender to the tyranny of textual witnesses. In the final analysis it is the critic who should evaluate, sift, sort, adopt, or reject the testimony of these witnesses. 18 Good textual critics, like good judges, don’t believe every witness. They must be temperamentally distrustful; indeed the whole enterprise of textual scholarship is informed by what David Greetham calls a “hermeneutics of suspicion.”19 Sometimes an educated guess is the only way out of a textual labyrinth. These educated guesses, called conjectural emendations, though an important tool in editing, should not be attempted haphazardly, but according to rules that govern their exercise. One of the most important of these is that the emendation should be able to account for the form of all received readings. That is, it must be a reasonable explanation of the received MS variants in terms of their orthography.20 Let me provide an example from 15

A. E. Housman, “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” in Art and Error, op. cit., 2. Tanselle, Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing, 326-28. 17 G. Kane, “Conjectural Emendation,” in Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Criticism, ed. Ch. Kleinhenz (Chapel Hill: UNC Dept. of Romance Languages, 1976), 211ff. See also E. Vinaver, “Principles of Textual Emendation (with an appendix: Lancelot’s Two Steps),” also in Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Criticism, 139-167; and E. Vinaver, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 1: xcii-xciii. 18 Naturally, this process involves the exercise of considerable personal (some might say subjective) judgment. However, all subjective judgments are not the same. Many are justified and supported by years of experience. It is this fact that seems to have escaped the notice of those who rail against the very possibility of “objectivity” in textual editing. 19 See D. Greetham, “Interweave 5: A Suspicion of Texts,” in Textual Transgressions: Essays Toward the Construction of a Bibliography, ed. David Greetham (New York and London: Garland, 1998), 198-219. 20 Kane, “Conjectural Emendation,” op. cit., 215; A.J. Wyatt, Beowulf With the Finnsburg Fragment, revised ed. by R. W. Chambers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), xxvi. 16

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the kingship of Ardashir-e Bbakn in volume 6 of Khaleghi-Motlagh’s critical edition of the Shhnma. Verse 371 of Ardashir’s rule reads: ( `  @ YŒ*     2 ). The form ( YŒ*  ) appears in three corrupt forms: ( Y#* – YR;  – –  ). The orthography of all three of these received forms may be explained by the correct reading ( YŒ*  ), which has been maintained in the older Istanbul manuscript, and adopted in this edition. This brings us to the topic of “scribal errors,” which is used as a scapegoat more often than it should be. Attributing an annoying variant to “scribal error” as a means of explaining away thorny problems of the text, or bringing it into harmony with personally held views, is unfortunately too common. It is often better to have the patience of allowing the text to communicate its message, even when it appears corrupt at first glance. Housman wrote of Bently’s hasty and tyrannical emendations in his edition of Manilius (1793): He corrupts sound verses which he will not wait to understand, alters what offends his taste without staying to ask about the taste of Manilius, plies his desperate hook upon corruptions which do not yield at once to gentler measures, and treats the MSS much as if they were fellows of Trinity. 21 Responsible adherence to the canon of textual criticism however, neither means that the critic should be a slave to his sources, nor that he should take leave of his senses. It only means that he should be mindful of making hasty emendations, and keep within limits that are dictated by the nature of his material and the collective experience of the generations before his. In addition to being able to explain the orthographic variation of the received readings, all emendation must be philologically feasible. Emendation against philology invariably leads to absurdity. For instance, a recent suggestion that the Iranian name Hojir in the Shhnma may be a corruption of the Greek name Helen is preposterous from a philological point of view, and hence untenable. 22 It would be equally fruitless to emend against rules that govern the path of textual corruption. Thus the suggestion that in one Shhnma verse, the more archaic form ( Œ* ), “tall,” be emended to the simpler word (  Œ* ), “tower,”23 may not be realistically entertained not only because it flies in the face of the age-old and generally valid dictum difficilior lectio probior “the harder reading is the most sincere,”24 but also because there is no textual or 21

A.E. Housman (ed.), M. Manilii Astronomicon, 5 vol. (London,1937), 1: xvii-xviii. Dick Davis, “In the Enemy’s Camp: Homer’s Helen and Ferdowsi’s Hojir,” Iranian Studies 25, 3-4 (1992), 24. 23 Davis, loc. cit., 23-4. 24 M.L. West, Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1973), 51; S. Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann (Firenze: F.L. Monnier, 1963), 21 n.1 22

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art historical support for it. In this case, (  Œ* ) is not only a more difficult word than (  Œ* ), but in addition the proposed (  Œ* ) is not recorded in any manuscript. That is, not a single witness among all existing witnesses has preserved the suggested emendation of (  Œ* ) in this place. The editorial choice is not between (  Œ* ) and (  * ) but rather between ( Œ* ) and ( #Œ; ), “steep”; and what’s more, the correct reading is in fact the more archaic ( #; ), as the text of Khaleghi-Motlagh’s edition has clearly established (Rostam and Sohrb, 493). This is especially important because textual critics who work on the Shhnma soon find out two lessons by experience: that conjectural emendation is rarely called for; and that when such interference is required, the form of the corruption in one or more codices provides very good orthographic support for it. For instance, verse 1822 of the story of Alexander in all of the commonly used editions of the Shhnma is as follows: 25 W@/ /q +   K #! W #  †* ; ; >  I have restored the second hemistich as: W@/   +   K #! The available manuscript variants for this word are:  :(d jK j2Y| j j  j2Ÿ ` ) 2 j2? jž jŸ j j?  :Y|

    :3?  :|

As it can be seen in this example, the orthography of the Leiden MS, namely ( / 0* ) is almost identical—with the exception of diacritical marks—with the restored form. Here the editor is on solid ground because 1. The restored form (   ), “dear, beloved,” when compared to the mutilated reading of ( / 0* ), “fruit bearing,” in the Leiden MS is both more difficult and more meaningful in the context. It is obvious to most people that a dead person— Alexander in this case—can hardly be described as “a fruit-bearing tree.” Therefore, ( / 0* ) may be ruled out without any troubling pangs of conscience. 2. The form (   ) is more complex than ( / 0* ), and thus in accordance with the rule of “the more difficult reading is more trustworthy,” it is more likely to be the true reading. 3. Ferdowsi has used the word in a literary formula in verse 518 of the story of Fereydun. That is, we have analogical evidence in favor of (   ) in the text of the Shhnma: W@/   +   K #! W; "@  " ]‰ ; "@ 

25

The verse numbers refer to Khaleghi-Motlagh’s new critical edition except where specifically stated otherwise.

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4. Other early poets, such as the author of Vis o Rmin (5th century AH) and Mokhtri (6th century AH), have used this archaic form in their verse: (48/214 

) #  "Œ#  ¡/   2 !  : W[ #*/  0! (3/507 / +)   "# 2 / !  

 W| 2 / W^ 

5. The emendation is further supported by the rule utrum in alterum abiturum erat?, “which would have [been more likely] to change into the other?”26 In other words, one should always ask: Of the variant readings available—assuming that one is correct and the rest are incorrect—which is more likely to have been tampered with in order to produce the others? In this instance for example, we should ask: are scribes likely to change the straightforward words (/q ) or (  Œ@ ) into the archaic word (   ) as the reading of the Leiden codex (minus its dots) indicates, or are they more likely to have changed the archaic form (   ) of their exemplar to the simpler forms (/q ) or (  Œ@ ) by the process known as trivialization? It has been my experience that more often than not the correct reading is preserved in at least one of the Shhnma manuscripts. For instance, verse 12 of the rule of Shpur-e Zolaktf in Khaleghi-Motlagh’s new critical edition reads:  > _@ 2 #! @ * Y2 | > _*  –  Y2 # +* The word ( | ) in the first hemistich of this verse has been recorded as (  ) in the Moscow and Tehran editions. The Mohl edition has totally trivialized the verse as: d +!   2 #! @ * ^ dK > _*  –  Y2 # +* Manuscript variants for this verse are:27  :(d jK j2Y| j3? j| j2Ÿ jY| `) 2? jž j j?  : (Initial undotted ductus)  :  :Ÿ I have followed the reading of the first Cairo MS (Ÿ), namely ( | ), meaning “inflicting blows, striking,” a variant spelling of which (in the form of –ŒŠ| ) has been maintained in

26

For a short but excellent and to the point discussion of the general rules of editorial decision-making see P. Kyle McCarter, Jr. Textual Criticism: Recovering the Text of the Hebrew Bible (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 62-76. 27 Fifteen manuscripts, 6 primary and 9 secondary, have been collated for Khaleghi-Motlagh’s new critical edition of the Shhnma. The manuscript sigla and the grouping of the codices into the primary and secondary groups has been discussed in the introduction to the 5th volume. The readings of secondary codices are given in parenthesis according to this editions rules of presentation.

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(Mowlavi) Rumi’s Fihe m Fih.28 In this example, only one of the primary codices has kept the true reading; and that is quite adequate. One should not count one’s witnesses, but weigh them. Since I have repeatedly referred to the rule of the more difficult reading, which is traditionally expressed in western textual criticism by the formulas, lectio difficilior praeferenda est, or alternatively, Difficilior lectio potior, I will take this opportunity to further clarify the application of this rule to the editing of classical Persian texts. The rule of the more difficult reading, although generally sensible and quite useful, may not be applied mechanistically. The main objections against it are as follows:29 1. The more difficult reading may be more difficult not because it is an archaic word, but because it is a slip of the pen. In other words, scribal errors may take on the appearance of the lectio difficilior. For instance, in verse 45 of the kingship of Ardashir-e Bbakn, reads (W "  * 2 ), “What punishment is suitable,” in all manuscripts except the optimus codex and the second Leningrad manuscript. These have recorded the meaningless form ( W  * 2 ). The Vatican codex’s reading, ( W+!  2 ), is, in my opinion, a trivialization. 2. The rule may be applied subjectively. That is, what is a difficult reading to Tom may not be one to Dick or Harry. For instance, I consider the reading of the Vatican manuscript in this verse to be a simple reading. Another critic may look at the form and argue that compared to the standard Persian (   ), the form ( W!  ) is archaic. I may respond that it is true that ( W!  ) is attested in some early classical Persian texts, but since it also exists in vernacular Persian, and since some illiterate folks in Iran may end the word by a final “t” in order to achieve a “fancier” speaking effect, I don’t think the form ( W!  ) really qualifies as lectio difficilior, and round and round we go. Here, those who might agree with me or with my imaginary opponent, do so either based on their personal experience of having heard ( W!  ) used by an illiterate Persian speaker, or because they decide to favor me by giving me the benefit of their doubt. In either case, the grounds on which they agree or disagree with this reading is not firm enough to constitute a canon of textual criticism. 28

For references see M. Omidsalar, “Some notes on the [sic] Khaleghi Motlagh’s Edition of the Shhnma,” in Nme-ye Irn-e Bstn: The International Journal of Ancient Iranian Studies, 1, 2 (2002), 10-11. 29 For a discussion of the objections against this rule in Old Testament textual studies see Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2nd rev. ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 303-304. B. Alberektson has also discussed the problems of this rule in an article called “Difficilior Lectio Probabilior—A Rule of Textual Criticism and its Use in OT Studies,” in Oudtestamentische Studiën 21 (1981): 5-18.

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3. Two variant readings may be equally difficult or easy. In that case making a choice between them often depends on subjective criteria. 4. What may be a lectio difficilior in one period may end up as a lectio facilior in another period of the text’s history.30 Of these objections, the first three are certainly applicable to Classical Persian. However, I am not aware of a single instance of the transformation of the lectio difficilior to lectio facilior in the textual tradition of classical Persian.31 This rule, developed by classicists on the basis of dead European languages or Biblical Hebrew, may not be applied to a living language such as Persian that continues to produce poets who compose in the meter and style of the classical tradition in which Ferdowsi composed. In other words, whereas scholars of Homer, Virgil, or the Old Testament can only draw on purely scholarly tools to resolve difficult textual problems, Iranian text critics can add their own native-speaker intuition and their living literary poetic tradition to their arsenal of purely scholastic tools. Therefore, until an adequate number of changes of lectio difficilior to lectio facilior are catalogued, I remain skeptical of its applicability to the Persian textual tradition. A more interesting problem in the Shhnma textual tradition is the following: A number of our Shhnma MSS tend toward a certain degree of archaizing. However, this archaizing tendency always involves simple forms. The oldest complete manuscript of the epic, namely the London manuscript of 675/1276 almost always changes the reading asp ( £ ) to the reading bra ( "/ * ) when it is metrically possible to do so. In other words, often where all of our primary and secondary codices have recorded asp, the London manuscript alone reads bra. For instance, in verse 380 in the rule of the Ashknin, all manuscripts that have kept the verse read: #` 2 2 #K /# £  #/ #0x / * ]^Q2 2 Both the Moscow and the Tehran editions have blindly followed the reading of their optimus codex, and have printed the second hemistich as: #` 2 2 #K / "/ * 

30

This dictum is most closely associated with Giorgio Pasquali. See his Storia della tradizione e critica del testo, 2nd ed. (Firenze: Felice Le Monnier, 1952), 121-122. 31 This objection is usually sounded by people with no first-hand experience of editing in any language, and chiefly by followers of what I’ve dubbed Harvard’s Tribal Religion. See my “Narrating Epics in Iran,” (with Teresa P. Omidsalar) in Traditional Storytelling Today: An International Sourcebook, ed. Margaret Read MacDonald (Chicago/London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1999), 326, and also my paper, “Orality, Mouvance, and Editorial Theory in Shhnma Studies,” in Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 27 (2002): 245-283..

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They have thus further simplified the more archaic verb ( #K /# ) to ( #K / ). Now, the reading bra may appear more archaic than asp to hasty and inexperienced eyes; but in fact it is not. There is no doubt that the forms bra and asp existed side by side almost from the beginning of classical Persian literature; and at least etymologically the word asp in the sense of “horse” is more ancient than the form bra (“mount”), which is a derivative of compounds that had the sense of “rider, one who is borne by mounts,” and the like (cf. Old Iranian assa-bara-). Dismissing the variant bra thus falls under the rule eliminatio lectionum singularium, and is completely justified. Changes such as these are instances of pseudo-archaism, found in a number of Persian manuscripts; and have nothing to do with the claim that lectio difficilior and lectio facilior may go back and forth through the ages. The problem of the more difficult reading in Persian and Arabic is, I think, more interesting than the choice between two different and distinct readings. It often involves either inaccurate dotting or complete lack of dotting. Many Persian words that may have opposite meanings are spelled exactly the same without their dots. Many scribes tend to leave dots out altogether, or place only some of the dots of the word. Words such as (# 0* / # 0), “one must / one must not”, or (## / ##*) “he saw; he did not see,” are written without dots: ( and  ) in many classical Persian manuscripts. What’s more, many of these words are metrically equal. Therefore, whether the editor chooses to read one or the other, his choice of reading fundamentally changes the sense of the verse or sentence in which the un-dotted word occurs. An example: Verse 79 of Ardashir-e Bbakn’s rule in both the Moscow and Tehran editions reads: !/ ~" 2 / dK ##*  # * /  #Œ* 2 None of these editions bother to tell us in their criticus apparatus that the form ( ##* ) is in fact spelled without some of its dots in their manuscripts. The editors have simply read the imperfectly written word as ( ##* ) rather than ( ## ), and that’s that. The sense of the verse has thus been changed to: “One day the vizier came and found tears [rolling down] Ardashir’s face.” But if we consider the actual spelling of this word in our manuscripts, this is what we find: (Only the fourth letter is pointed)  :? (The third letter is unpointed)  :(Y| `) ž j   :( d jK j  j3? j| ` )2 ({Unpointed}  : 2Ÿ) (2 Y| j `) 2? jŸ = Y+

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manuscript, as well as one of their Leningrad codices, have recorded ( ## ) instead of ( ##* ). Therefore, there is no textual justification for their choice of ( ##* ) over ( ## ). Both ( ##* ) and ( ## ) are quite simple. The problem is that by choosing ( ##* ), the Moscow and Tehran editors have missed the opportunity to restore the more archaic sense of the verse that is restorable only if we take the next word, b, in its more archaic meaning of “luster, brightness.” Here we are dealing with a more difficult reading that has been masked by the fact that our witnesses have not preserved the original dotting of the word, and have thus confused the meaning of the entire hemistich. Lest it be said that my suggestion that the better reading is ( ## ) rather than ( ##* ) is purely conjectural, let me point out that many classical Persian and Arabic sources that have kept versions of this tale report that the vizier found the king “sad” (which would be in agreement with !/  " 2 / dK ## ), rather than “crying” (which would support the reading …" 2 / dK ##* ).32 We can now pose this question: which is the lectio difficilior, ( ## dK ) or ( ##* dK ), in Ardashir’s face? The important point is that the word b in this verse does not mean “water,” and by extension “tears,” but rather “luster, brightness.” Compounds (such as bru), and names (such as Rudbeh, Mehrb, Sohrb), maintain the old sense of the word. Thus, the sense of the verse is that the vizier finds the king depressed and looking pale. For this reason, the reading ( ## dK ) is the more difficult, and therefore the better reading. Whereas in this instance deciding between what is an archaic reading and what is not is rather simple, one is occasionally faced with situations in which the lack of dots, or their inaccurate placement, makes it difficult to decide between what is right and what is not. For instance, verse 99 of the story of Ashknin in both the Moscow and Tehran editions reads: d@ * ]/ Y!/ # 2 d  > H* * #Œ* +[@ 0! Although ( d  ) might be understood as “quick witted, clever” and the like, because some manuscripts record ( d / ) rather than ( d  ) in this verse, I took ( d / ) to mean “one who wants to beget a child,” and restored the text as: d / > H* * #Œ* +[@ 0! In so doing I was following the archaic meaning of ( / ) in the sense of “child, son.” The translation of the History of Qom, the Arabic text of which was composed in 378 AH, during the era of Ferdowsi’s literary activity, glosses the word as follows: rd ba zabân-e ajam kudak bshad (Dehkhod, s.v., Rud). According to Dehkhod, the word has been used in the verse of Sa‘di, Hfez, and other poets. Here, although ( d / ) is 32

For instance, Tabari, Bal‘ami, Ebn Athir, Dinawari, all relate the story, writing that the vizier found Ardashir depressed; or as Bal‘ami puts it:  r ghamgin yft. For quotations from these sources see Krnmeh-ye Ardashir-e Bbakn, ed. Bahrm Farrah-vashi (Tehran: Dneshgh-e Tehrn), 257, 265, 270 and 273.

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the lectio difficilior as far as its first part (rud) is concerned, (d  ) might be viewed as lectio difficilior as a compound. In other words, ( d  ) as a compound meaning “clever, quick of mind” is both archaic and more difficult than it would appear in the first glance. This confusion is exclusively created by the dotting of letters. There can be no doubt that Ferdowsi wrote either one or the other. There is only one rule that absolutely and always applies to textual criticism across the board, and that is the old dictum that “every case is a special case.” I have already quoted Housman’s observation that textual criticism is both an art and a science. Here, I would like to end by observing that it is more of an art than it is science, and conclude with another quotation from Housman: A textual critic engaged upon his business is not at all like Newton investigating the motions of the planets: he is much more like a dog hunting for fleas. If a dog hunted for fleas on mathematical principles, basing his researches on statistics of area and population, he would never catch a flea except by accident. They require to be treated as individuals; and every problem which presents itself to the textual critic must be regarded as possibly unique.33

33

A. E. Housman, Collected Poems and Selected Prose. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Christopher Ricks (London: The Penguin Press, 1988), 326.

94

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K ] ^Q2  wEK  — ^ ;  Y;Y/ / #[ 2   ¦/ / ^! * ‡* 

# / 

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+ ?¤‰

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96

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