A literary history of Persia

4 INTRODUCTORYlanguage almost to the exclusion of their own in writing oncertain subjects, notably theology and philosophy ;while duringthe two centuries immediately succeeding the Arab invasionthe language of the conquerors was, save amongst those whostill adhered to the ancient national faith of Zoroaster, almostthe sole literarymedium employed in Persia. To ignorethisliterature would be to ignore many of the most important andcharacteristic manifestations of the Persian genius, and to forman altogether inadequate judgment of the intellectual activityof that ingenious and talentedpeople.The term " Persian " as used by us, and by the Greeks,Jews, Syrians, Arabs, and other foreigners, has a wider significationthan that which itoriginally bore.The Pers ians call themselves Irani and their'uTm'plrsia*' land Ir&nJ and of this land Pdrsa, the Persis ofthe Greeks, themodern Fdrsf is one province out of several.But because that province gave birth to the two great dynasties(the Achaemenian in the sixth century before, and the Sasanian1Iran, Erdn, Air an, the Airiyana of the isAyesta,the land of theAryans (Ariya, Airiya of the Avesta, Sanskrit Arya), and had thereforea wider signification than the term Persia, which is equivalent to Iranin the modern sense, has now. Bactria (Balkh), Sogdiana (Sughd), andKhwarazm were Iranian lands, and the Afghans and Kurds are Iranianpeoples.2The ^>-sound does not exist in Arabic, and is replaced by /. Pars,Isfahan, &c., are simply the arabicised forms of Pars, Ispahan. Theadjective Fdrsi (or Pdrsi) denotes the official language of Persia (which isat the same time the mother-tongue of the great majority of its inhabitants,and the national language in as full a sense as English is the nationallanguage of Great Britain and Ireland), and in this application is equivalentto Irani. As applied to a man, however, Fdrsi means a native of theprovince of Pars. In India Pdrsi (Parsee) means of the Persian (i.e., theancient Persian, or Zoroastrian) religion, and the term has been re-importedin this sense into Persia. To call the province of Pars " Farsistan," as issometimes done by European writers, is quite incorrect, for the termination-istdn (" place of,"" land of ")is added to the name of a people todenote the country which they inhabit (e.g., Afghanistan, Baluchistan), butnot to the name of a country or province.