A literary history of Persia

PAHLA Wt LITERA TURE 107Bridge of $irat, " finerthan a hair and sharper than a sword,"to which Byron alludes in the well-known lines" By Allah, I would answer ' Nay ! 'Though on al-Sirat's bridge I stood,Which totters o'er the burning flood,With Paradise within my view,And all its houris beckoning through."And these houris also seem to find their more spiritual prototypein the fair maiden who meets the departed soul of therighteous man, and who, on being questioned, declares herselfto be the embodiment of the good deeds, the good words, andthe good thoughts which have proceeded fromHupstak him during his life. The " Book of Jthe accursedAbalish..Abalish" already mentioned more than once, waspublished by Barthelemy in 1887, with the Pazend and Parsf-Persian versions and a French translation. The yamfap-n&mak,known in its entirety only in Pazend and Persian versions,contains some interesting mythological and legendary matterabout the ancient mythical kings of the PersianKhusraw-i-Epos. The Andaraz-i-Khusraw-i-Kawtithn* orKavatan. . . .dying injunctions or King INushirwan (Anoshakruban,A.D. 531-578) to his people, though of very smallextent, deserves mention because it has been taken bySalemann in his Mittelpersische Stttdlen (Melanges Asiatiques,ix, pp. 242-253, St. Petersburg, 1887) as the basis of a veryinteresting and luminous study of the exact fashion in whicha Pahlawitext would probably have sounded when read aloud ;an ingenious attempt at a criticalPazend transcription.Pahlawl 3. texts on non-religious subjects, represented by onlyeleven works, comprising in all about 41,000 words. Thisclass of Pahlawi literature is at once the mostpahUwTwOTks! interesting and the least extensive. A large nontheologicalliterature no doubt existed in Sasaniantimes, and many works of this class no longer extant (notablythe Khudhtiy-n&mak) or " Book of Kings," which will be dis-