A literary history of Persia

BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERSIAN 11character as he heard it read, what he wrote would have beensimply " Modern Persian " in its most archaic form withoutadmixture of Arabic words. Indeed, so comparatively slight(so far as we can judge) are the changes which the Persianspoken language has undergone since the Sasanian period, thatif it were possiblefor an educated Persian of the present day tobe suddenly thrust back over a period of fourteen or fifteenhundred years, he would probably be able to understand atleast a good deal of what his countrymen of that period weresaying.The gulf which separates that speech from OldPersian is far wider, and the first Sasanian king, notwithstandingthe accomplishments which made him " famousthroughout all Pdrs," if he could similarly have travelledbackwards in time for some six centuries, would havecomprehended hardlyAchaemenian court.It isimpossiblea word of what was said at theto fix a definite date at which ModernPersian literaturemay be said to have begun. ProbablyPersian converts to Isldm began to write their. .. . ..Beginning of ,Modern Persian language in the Arabic character very soon afterLiterature. . ./-,the Arab L/onquest that is to say,some timein the eighth century of our era. The first attemptsof this sort were probably mere memoranda and notes,followed, perhaps, by small manuals of instructionProse..r T ii T>in the doctrines or Islam, fragmentary utterancesin Persian, and even brief narratives, are recorded hereand there in the pages of early Arabic writers, and these atleast serve to show us that the Persian of late Sasanian andthe same as thatearly Muhammadan times was essentiallywith which we meet in the earliest monuments of ModernPersian literature. Of actual books of any extent, the Persiantranslation ot Tabari's history made for Mansur I, theSdmdnid prince, in A.D. 963 by his minister Bal'ami ;theMateria Medico of Abu Mansur MuwafFaqb. * All of Herdt(preserved to us in the unique MS. of Vienna dated A.D. 1055,