A literary history of Persia

450 THE LITERATURE OF PERSIAwriting poetsflourished before the middle of the eleventhcentury of our era, is the Lughat-i-Furs, or Persian Lexicon,of Asadi of TUS, composed about A.D. 1060, and edited fromthe old Vatican MS. (Pers. XXII), transcribed in A.D. 1332,by Dr. Paul Horn (Strassburg, 1897). * In this most valuablework verses of some seventy-eight poets, many of them otherwiseunknown or scarcelyknown even by name, are cited.Having now considered the sources available to us for aPersia at thisstudy of the literary phenomena presented byperiod, we shall consider first the Persian- and then the Arabicwritingpoets who flourished under the Tdhirid, Saffdrid,Sdmdnid, and other contemporary dynasties, deriving ourinformation concerning the former chiefly from 'Awff'sLubdb^ and for the latter from Tha'alibl's Tatlma. Thelatter work has been already sufficiently described, but,pending the publication of my edition of the latter, someaccount of its contents is here given.Of the author of this work, Muhammad 'Awfl, nearlyallthat is known will be found on pp. 749-750 of Rieu'sCatalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the BritishDescription ofJAwff's LvMbu- Museum. He claimed descent from 'Abdu'r Rah-'l-Albdb.man b. 'Awf, one of the six Companions of theProphet who were appointed by the dying Caliph c Umar tochoose his successor from their midst. His repeated referencesto poets whom he had met at different dates and in differenttowns in Persia show that he had travelled widely inKhurasanand the neighbouring lands about the beginning of the seventhcentury of the hijra (circ. A.D. 1200). He subsequentlyresided in India, first at the Court of Nasiru'd Din Qubacha,and then at that of Shamsu'd-Dm Iltatmish, after the over-1Another MS. was discovered by Dr. Ethe amongstthe India OfficePersian MSS. (No. 2516 = No. 2455 of the forthcoming Catalogue, cols.1321-1335). This Asadi was the transcriber of the oldest extant PersianMS., the Vienna Codex of Abu Mansur al-Muwaffaq's Pharmacology,edited by Seligmann (Vienna, 1859). This Codex is dated A.H. 447( = A.D. 1055-6).