A literary history of Persia

DOWN TO A.D. 1000 477This large and interesting question as to the characteristicsof the Arabic verse producedin Persia cannot be further discussedhere, but it well merits a systematic examination bysome scholar who has a thoroughly competent knowledge, notonly of both languages, but of both literatures. Unfortunatelyit is but very rarely that a scholar arises whose chief interest isin Persian literature, and who yethas a complete mastery ofthe Arabic language. The Arabist, as a rule, slightsthisbranch of Arabic literature as exotic, even when he does notcondemn it as post-classical ;while the student of Persianseldom realises till too late that for literary and historicalpurposes the point of view of the comparative philologist isentirely misleading, and that he need not so much to concernhimself with Sanskrit and other Aryan languages as withArabic.Of the Persian prose literature of this period, which musthave been of some extent, few specimens, unfortunately,remain to us ;while even of what has been pre-^iteraturT* served the greater part is translated from theArabic. Four works of importance, one historical,one medical, and two exegetical,allcomposed probably duringthe reign of the Sdmdnid King Mansiir I b. Nuh (A.D. 961-976), have come down to Two us. of them are abridgedtranslations of the great history and the great commentary ofTabaH ;the third is the Pharmacology of Abu MansiirMuwaffaq of HerAt the last is the now celebrated old Persian;commentary on the Qur'dn,of which the second volume ispreserved in a unique and ancient MS. in the CambridgeUniversity Library. All these are written in a simple, straightforwardand archaic language, of which I have discussed thepeculiarities at some length in the article in the Journal of theRoyal Asiatic Society for 1894 (pp. 417-524) where I first madeknown the existence of the Cambridge Codex of the oldPersian Commentary, which bears a date equivalent to Feb-