A literary history of Persia

356 DECLINE OF THE CALIPHATERawdhaki), who flourished in the first half of the tenthcentury. Indeed his fame so far outshone that of his predecessorsthat he is often reckoned the first Persian poet:thus in an Arabic " Book of Origins" written earlyin thethirteenth century x occurs the following passage:"The first to compose good poetry in Persian was Abu 'Abdi'llahJa'farb. Muhammad b. Hakim b. 'Abdu'r-Rahman b. Adamar-Rawdhakt, 2 that poet so piquant in expression, so fluent in verse,whose Diwdn is famous amongst the Persians, and who was theleader in Persian poetry in his time beyond all his contemporaries.'The minister Abu'1-Fadl al-Bal'ami used to say, Rawdhaki has no"equal amongst the Arabs or the Persians.'The minister above cited was wazlr to Isma'il b.Ahmad,and died in 940 ;he is not to be confounded with his sonAbu 'Ali al-Bal'ami, who was wazlr to theBaraks. Amir Mansur b. Nuh, translated Tabarfs greatchronicle into Persian, and died in A.D. 996.Turning once more to Baghdad, and to the metropolitan,as opposed to the provincial, writers of al-Mu'tamid's CaliphateC^AD^STJ^Q;}(A.D. 870-893), we need notice only, amongstevents f general importance, the suppression of- the Zanj insurrection in A.D. 883, and theincreasing activity of the Carmathians, whose history anddoctrines will be more fullydiscussed in the next chapter.The chief writers and thinkers who died between A.D. 874and 900 were the following The " :Philosopher of the Arabs,"Abu Yusuf Ya'qub b. Ishaq al-Kindi, whose literary activitychiefly belongs to an earlier and more liberal period, is supposedto have died about A.D. 874. He is notable as one of thefew pure Arabs who were really distinguished in the domainof thought and letters.Hunayn b. Ishaq, the physician andtranslator, who died about the same time, has been already1See my Hand-list of the Muhammadan MSS. in the CambridgeUniversity Library, pp. 125-6.3See Carra de Vaux, Avicenne, pp. 80-88.