A literary history of Persia

128 THE SASANIAN PERIODwho brought unto them taxes and tribute. And they heldsway, withal, over the fourth Clime, which is the Clime ofBabel, the middle part of the earth, and the noblest of the[seven] Climes." In the same spirit sings a poet cited in thesame work (p. 37), who, though he wrote in Arabic, boasteddescent from the Royal House of Persia :"And we portioned out our empire in our timeAs you portion out the meat upon a plate.Greece and Syria we gave to knightly Salm,To the lands wherein the sunset lingers late.And to Tuj the Turkish marches were assigned,Where our cousin still doth rule in royal state.And to Iran we subdued the land of Pars,'Whence we still inherit blessings rare and great."We have seen that the Sasanian kings called themselves"gods" or "divine beings " (Pahlawf bagh, Chaldaean alaha yGreek 0eoe), regarded themselves as the dekingsregarded scendants and legitimate successors of the ancientas divine beings. , , v ' ' i J^L-L-^ rand the inheritors orlegendary Kayani dynasty the Farri-Kaydnl or " Royal Splendour " a kind of Shekinaor symbolised Divine Right by virtue of which they alonecould rightly wear the Persian crown and did everythingintheir power to impress their subjects with a sense of theirsupreme majesty. Of the accession of " the Royal Splendour"to the House of Sasan we shall shortly cite a curious legend,and of the majesty maintained by them the following extractfrom Ibn Hisham's Biography of the Prophet (ed. Wiistenfeld,p. 42)furnishes an instance :"Now Kisra [Chosroes, here Khusraw Anushirwan] used to sit inhis audience-hall where was his crown, like unto a mighty cask,according to what they J say, J set with rubies, emeralds,The splendour, '.. , , ,which they and pearls, with gold and silver, suspended by a chainmaintained.o g oj^ from the top of an arch in this his audiencehall;and his neck could not support the crown, but he was veiledby draperies till he had taken his seat in this his audience-hall, andhad introduced his head within his crown, and had settled himself