A literary history of Persia

6 INTRODUCTORYdynasty, embraces a periodof about five centuries and a half(B.C. 33O-A.D. 226). The second, beginning with the Arabinvasion and Muhammadan Conquest, which destroyed theSasanian dynasty and overthrew the Zoroastrian religion,though much shorter, had far deeper and more permanenteffects on the people, thought, and language of Persia." Hellenism," as Noldeke"says, never touched more thanthe surface of Persian life,but Iran was penetrated to thecore by Arabian religion and Arab ways." The Arab conquest,though presaged by earlier events, 1 maybe said to havebegun with the battles of Buwayb and Qadisiyya (A.D. 635-637), and to have been completed and confirmed by the deathof the last Sasanian king, Yazdigird III, A.D. 651 or 652.The end of the Arabian period cannot be so definitely fixed.In a certain sense it endured till the sack of Baghdad andmurder of al-Musta t sim bi'llah, the last 'Abbasid Caliph, inA.D. 1258 by the Mongols under Hulagu Khan, the grandsonof Changiz Khan. Long before this, however, the Arabpower had passed into the hands of Persian and Turkishvassals, and the Caliph, whom they sometimes cajoled andconciliated, but more often coerced or ignored, had ceased toexercise aught beyond a spiritual authority save in the immediateneighbourhood of Baghdad. Broadly speaking, however,the revival of the Persian language proceeded part passu withthe detachment of the Persian provinces from the directcontrol of the Caliph's administration, and the uprising otlocal dynasties which yieldedat most a merely nominalobedience to the 'Abbasid court. Or these dynasties theTahirids (A.D. 820) are sometimes accounted the first ;butthey may more truly be considered to beginwith the Saffarids(A.D. 867), Samanids (A.D. 874), and Buwayhids (A.D. 932),and to reach their fulldevelopment in the Ghaznawids andSeljuqs.1Notably by the Battle of Dhu Qar in the reign(A,D. 604-610).of Khusraw Parwiz