SOURCE: “Firdausî's Concept of History,” in Islam: Essays in the Nature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1955, pp. 168-84.

[In the following essay, Von Grunebaum studies Ferdowsi's portrayal of Persian history, arguing that the poet's aim was to generate a feeling of national unity by portraying the “oneness” of Iran's past.]

It is only when it is drawing to its close or even after it has passed away that a creative age will receive that literary representation that will be felt thenceforth to constitute the valid embodiment of its spirit, its aspirations, and its self-interpretation. Iliad and Odyssey follow rather than accompany the efflorescence of the civilization that has come to be known, for them, as Homeric. Virgil sings the mission of Rome at the very moment when, to him, this mission has been accomplished and when, to us, stagnation and decline are about to set in. Camões finishes the Lusiad only a few years before the Portuguese fight and lose their last battle to extend their possessions overseas. The glory of the Samanids was paling when Firdausî undertook his work; it had been a memory for almost a generation when he completed it. Yet it is the Samanid period in which the Shâh-Nâmah belongs, whose dreams it lent body and whose spirit it immortalized without ever devoting a single verse to honoring its deeds.

The Samanid century had created the language which Firdausî perfected and canonized; it had cultivated a sober and balanced taste in literary expression—jejune but graceful, fond of movement but careful of the bizarre, artful without artificiality. And it had fostered the spreading through all of north and east Persia of an interest in the national past. Or rather it had, through the encouragement of the court, made this interest that had always been there respectable in the Islamized circles of educated Iranian society, and had, by seeking to draw political strength from historical memories of pre-Arab achievement, Sassanian and older, actualized the latent national sentiment and, as it were, created the need for a national past to dignify the present through the demonstration of its direct descent from the Golden Age of Iran. And this national continuity was to be personified in the unbroken chain of legitimate rulers from the first man to the uncertain sovereigns of the day.

The period wanted for a compendium of the past, not necessarily complete in the pedantic sense of the word, but complete inasmuch as the nation cared or needed to remember. Firdausî's success is primarily due to his tact in collecting and selecting. Clearly his sense of relevance was in tune with contemporary judgment. The very uncertainties of his attitude toward history must have helped to make his presentation universally acceptable—especially since he was at one with his generation in his valuations and took pride in what they prized. Firdausî was a man of considerable information, but he was not a learned poet. In the light of later epics his style is simple and his vocabulary limited, his imagery pellucid and his narrative direct. Just as Homer could never be matched, in the eyes of the Greeks, by the Homeridae be it only for the comparative insignificance of their themes that were developed to fill in gaps of the Homeric narrative proper, nor by the sometimes powerful and sometimes painful but always clever efforts of the Hellenistic epigoni, even so did Firdausî's standing remain untouched by an Asadî the Younger who dealt with a saga cycle neglected by the Shâh-Nâmah, or by a Nizâmî, whose presentation of Alexander is perhaps more interesting than Firdausî's but who no longer cared for storytelling as such and who deliberately dimmed the understandability of his verse.

It has been pointed out¹ that only since the beginning of the nineteenth century has historiography claimed the right to treat of any historical theme which it feels able to inform. The earlier historian of the West—and we may add, of the East as well—found his theme solely in his own period or rather in that segment of the past that was still felt to be alive. It does not matter that this past may extend backward to the very creation of the world; the fact remains that it is studied and presented not for its own sake but as an integral part of the consciousness of the historian's contemporaries.

Thus the Shâh-Nâmah articulates the memories and associations of a past that was at the back of the period's consciousness of itself.² It is true that in all likelihood Firdausî amplified and modified what he knew to be the collective memories of his time; it is also true that he organized and rigidified those memories. Nonetheless it is unmistakable that he never ceases to speak but of what is near and emotionally effective because of its nearness. Countless years have passed since the treachery of time removed first one and then the next royal line from sight. Yet those ancient kings and heroes continue to live in the minds of their subjects' descendants as examples or simply as people whose problems and responses are their own. And Firdausî's casual anachronisms tend to weld tighter the circle that holds together the living and the dead.

Firdausî supplemented the more or less official construction of history as it was transmitted by the Sassanian Book of Rulers, or Xvaδ[âγ-Nâmaγ, from other presentations going back to Sassanian times. Apart from the Book of the Chiefs of Sakistân, mentioned by Mas‘ûdî (d. 956)³ and used in its (lost) translation by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (d. 757) for ‘Tabarî's (d. 923) report of Persian dynastic history,⁴ Firdausî could rely on not a few Pahlavî monographs, as we would call them now, on personages and episodes of the Iranian past. He completed his material by delving deep into the “oceans” of saga and legend, into popular romances that had not found their way into authoritative compilations. For his purpose the nature of his sources was perhaps less important than their range. He achieved that integration of Sîstânî (Sakistânî) and Zâbulî traditions in the main current of Iranian tradition that the Sassanian historians and romancers had failed to accomplish—provided, of course, they ever intended a synthesis of this kind.⁵ By allowing his narrative to roam over the vast expanse from Kâbul and Zâbul and Sijistân through the Persian heart lands to the Caspian Sea at Mâzandarân and again northward across the Oxus into the Turanian plains, Firdausî united in a fairly consistent whole the essential memories of that area which his contemporaries were prepared to think of as the lands of Iran. It is true that the lines along which the several traditions are riveted together remain for the most part easily discernible. But this may have been less so for the contemporaries. And in any event, Firdausî succeeded in laying down the frontiers of a Greater Iran (as compared with the political entities that had existed on its soil during the more than three centuries preceding his time) and in consolidating them on the foundation of a common past. The Shâh-Nâmah allowed every Iranian to share in the memories of every section of his country as in a personal possession. It helped the national consciousness to revert to a patriotism with which provincial loyalties could readily merge.

In the light of Firdausî's determination to create or revive a feeling for the oneness of Greater Iran through the realization of the oneness of its past, his omissions of available materials assume especial significance. It is almost immediately obvious that, of the three strands of tradition that were alive in Firdausî's century or that had been at work in the written evidence at his disposal, he follows almost exclusively the national, not to say nationalistic, which had been given final form under the Sassanians. The popular traditions, from which Firdausî borrowed a great deal, also seem to have fitted in with the national view of history, at least in spirit. The third strand, the priestly tradition that had been elaborated as early as the Arsacid period, Firdausî left largely aside. Where it can be traced, as in the story of Darius, it appears somewhat incongruously side by side with the national, and it may be assumed that the juxtaposition is due not to Firdausî himself but to his sources.

Firdausî devotes considerable space to the mythical kings; as a matter of fact he begins his tale with the world's creation. But he makes no mention of Zoroastrian and pre-Zoroastrian lore on the origin of earth and man, being satisfied with a concise aperçu of the conventional Muslim view. The national tradition did, of course, operate with the philosophical concepts animating the priestly tradition. The Sassanians, especially in their later days, affected a strictly religious outlook. The two traditions differ in emphasis and in the valuation of individual events and rulers—they represent different phases of theological thought; and the national tradition bears the marks of that romantic love of the past that had grown stronger during the last two hundred years of Persian independence.⁶

Firdausî does not eliminate the basic dualism that pervades the narrative of his sources. Without entering into theological disquisitions regarding the fundamental conflict between dualistic Zoroastrianism and monistic Islam, or regarding the individual tenets of the old religion, he allows mythical events to retain their significance in terms of the dualistic conflict between good and evil, Ormizd and Ahriman.⁷ In general, Firdausî is content to play down such features of the old faith as would directly offend the Muslim reader. He is anxious to avoid giving the impression that the Zoroastrians worshiped the fire, and he relegates to the background the “incestuous” marriage between brother and sister.

Zoroastrianism as represented in the Bundahishn assigns to the world a duration of twelve thousand years. The first three thousand, it existed unnoticed by the evil principle. After the initial conflict Ahriman agrees to a period of nine thousand years for the combat with Ormizd. The first third of this period, Ahriman has the upper hand; in the second the wills of Ahriman and Ormizd are intermingled; in the third Ahriman is reduced to impotence.⁸ This concept of cosmic history as the frame of human history which is made meaningful within the larger sphere by man's participation on the side of one or the other of the eternal antagonists remained active well into the period of Arab domination. The thirty-third chapter of the Bundahishn tells of the misfortunes that befell Êrânshahr in the several millennia. The first three (of the six millennia here accounted for) carry the history of man from the first attack of the Evil Spirit on the first man to the appearance of Zoroaster. The fourth millennium witnesses the rise of the pure religion, the reign of Alexander, the period of the provincial lords (kaδaγ xvaδ[âγ, mulûk at-tawâ’if), the rule of the Sassanians, and the Arab conquest. At some future date after a short year of Byzantine occupation of Iran, Mazdasnian Persia will rise once more. Then the fifth millennium will begin, and after it the sixth will bring the end of the world with the appearance of the Sôshyans, the Savior.⁹

Firdausî tacitly dropped this construction; or it may be more accurate to say that he secularized it. The fight of Good and Evil is real to him, but as a Muslim he identifies the Good Principle, or Ormizd, with Allâh, the One, the Creator, and reduces the stature of Ahriman to that of a dêv or of the koranic Iblîs. Firdausî at various points speaks of the youth or the rejuvenation of the world, but this renewal no longer is tied to the sequence of cosmological events; rather it is connected with a change of dynasties or merely with the advent of a new ruler. Any chronological link with cosmic process has disappeared. Firdausî's world grows young, not because as time wears on the victory of the Good Principle approaches, but because a model king has put an end to a bad reign—he will bring about a new era of social and administrative progress, and he will mature into a sage and become a spiritual guide for his people.¹⁰

Zoroastrianism had dominated the last great age of Iranian history. Pride in the ancestral religion was inseparable from pride in the Persian past. But as a Muslim, Firdausî had to dissociate himself from the national faith and to avoid the psychological and the practical conflict of divided religious loyalties as best he could. As his contemporaries did not accuse him of being a crypto-Magian, it is likely that the coexistence of two conflicting prides was too common in his day to be accounted scandalous.

The concept underlying the national tradition was, from a Muslim's point of view, more readily defensible. In it the glory of the past stood firm, no matter what the religious allegiance of the ruler. The emotional conflict arose when the Arabs, the soldiers of the Prophet's successor, vanquished the legitimate sovereigns of Iran in the name of the new faith. As a Persian, Firdausî was irremediably humiliated by the Sassanian defeat; as a Muslim he should have felt elated at a development that had brought the true faith to his people and to himself. So the national tradition ended in a melancholy key. All through the Samanid century and its national revival the foreign faith was pushing back the indigenous religion. What to the contemporaries may have appeared as portents of a quickening of Mazdaean life soon proved of mere local or denominational significance. The sectarian movement of Ibn abî Zakariyyâ at-Tammâmî¹¹ broke down shortly after its start in a.d. 931, and the great effort of the Zoroastrian orthodoxy to codify its heritage that led to the compilation of the Dênkart in tenth-century Baghdâd resulted in nothing but a precarious consolidation of the faith, unable to prevent the further decline of the “Magian” community.¹² And religious conditions had not become sufficiently stabilized to compel Firdausî to adjust himself to that double self-identification which an unqualified assent to the national past would have required. To this division within himself we owe such beautiful passages as Bârbad's elegy for Husrav Parvêz¹³ or the prophetic letter written by Rustam to his brother on the eve of his decisive defeat by the Arabs with its prediction of the downfall of Persia and all she stands for.¹⁴ After he has told of the murder of the last king and the punishment of his assassin, Firdausî concludes his narrative perhaps somewhat too dryly:

… Since then
Hath been the epoch of ‘Umar, made known
The Faith, and to a pulpit changed the throne.(15)

Four hundred years have passed; now, in Firdausî's time, the period of oppression is coming to its end. But was it really ending when a Turkish ruler actually controlled most of Iran?

The Muslim idea of history was at one with the Zoroastrian in viewing the life of mankind as a process of limited duration. The coming of Islam was the climax of the sequence of happenings, and the world was now to be confronted in the relatively near future with the Last Judgment. The total number of years allotted to man in history was not fixed by doctrine and, since it was established without reference to cosmic events known to take place at definite points of time, variations would not matter. But Islam did, of course, reject unquestioningly any suggestion of an apokatastasis to introduce another, though identical, sequence of human history. The conception of religion and empire as “sisters,” as it is developed by Firdausî in the Sassanian tradition,¹⁶ had become an integral part of Muslim political theory, where we find it often expounded directly on the basis of Persian sources¹⁷ and where it was destined to survive throughout the Middle Ages. Despite affinities of this kind, the Muslim concept of history with its devaluation of all pre-Islamic phases, its implied Arabism and open contempt for superseded truth was essentially incompatible with both the concepts that had been shaped by Persian tradition. Firdausî might have had hopes for a Muslim-Persian empire, but as long as this had not become a reality the painful conflict of the values inherent in the two traditions could not be reconciled. The bleak pragmatism of an older contemporary of his, whose name, Abû Bakr al-Qûmisî, bespeaks his Iranian descent and who proposed to rate any historical period solely for its material prosperity,¹⁸ may possibly be ascribed to a feeling of hopeless inability to resolve the clash of traditions except by discarding them both.

The unresolved conflict of the concepts of history, in fact, their almost clumsy juxtaposition is characteristic of the realities of Firdausî's age. Persian national sentiment had to appropriate both the Zoroastrian past and the Muslim present as effective motivations. If it had been a political factor under the Samanids, which is not too certain, it had ceased to count when the Ghaznavids took over. The “brokenness” of the Persian intellectual's response to his historical situation was tolerable at a time when conditions excluded his nation from effective power.¹⁹

Firdausî's somewhat passive attitude toward the conflicting traditions was not necessarily typical of his Persian contemporaries. The Samanid vizier, Bal‘amî, writing in 963, succeeds much better than does the poet in co-ordinating Muslim and Persian lore. His method consists in synchronizing the Persian king-list and the list of koranic or biblical prophets. He quotes contradictory traditions with respect to the total duration of this world without committing himself. In a passage added by Bal‘amî to the ‘Tabarî text which he is translating and condensing, the beginning of the world is given in astronomical terms and metaphysical time thus definitely transformed into historical time.²⁰ Thus the evolution of what was to become the Arab and the Persian wings of the Muslim Empire could be shown at any given stage. The Ihwân as-Safâ²¹ record a line of thought according to which the world was to come to its end on November 19, 1047,²² and which is based on a parallelism of cosmic change and changes of political power on earth.²³ Ismâ‘îlî ideology of the period, too, insists on the double role, cosmic and historical, of the imâm, without, however, setting a definite term to the life of this world. History is, in part at least, articulated by prefiguration—the Ismâ‘îl of the Old Testament prefigured the imâm of this name, the imâm Ja‘far acts out what was prefigured by the patriarch Jacob.²⁴

Firdausî is alone among the major contemporary students of history in that he seems to be utterly unable to extract any general ideas from the developments which he presents in such masterly fashion. The outlook characteristic of the period is that of the Hellenistic age, which looked upon history, the magistra vitae as Cicero was to say, largely as a collection of exempla. Miskawaih (d. 1030) at least pretends to deal with history for its didactic value. He entitles his work The Experiences of the Nations and assumes that the present generation may learn from the lessons of the past. Tauhîdî (d. 1023) displays the same didactic motivation with regard to his own interest in history,²⁵ and the tradition of this attitude continues to the close of the Middle Ages, to Tâj ad-Dîn Subkî (d. 1370)²⁶ and Ibn Haldûn (d. 1406). Firdausî does not seem to have professed this view. His comments on the events which he narrates are confined to melancholy observations on the inevitability of change, which must not be dignified out of proportion by ascribing them to a tragic feeling of life. For nothing is farther from Firdausî than that conflict between the concatenation of events and the individual's compulsion to realize the values governing his own existence, or that clash of law and conscience, of freedom and necessity, which are the essence of tragedy.²⁷ When Firdausî mentions change it is with the implied sentiment that change is for the worse; the transitoriness of greatness makes its value questionable; human ambition and human achievement kindle pride and may yield fame, but the treachery of time, the raib az-zamân of the Koran, stultifies human success, and fate ever tends to underline the essential futility of man's works—those very works that make up the glory which the poet sings.

Even as a collection of facts has a useful life longer than an interpretative synthesis of the same facts that will be significant in terms of the synthesizer's age, so has Firdausî's unintegrated presentation of his nation's memories retained the stimulating usefulness of factual materials where a thoroughly integrated presentation would long have become solely an object of study and perhaps of edification and aesthetic enjoyment. The facts still carry, even where the formative power of the poet falters. The most cursory comparison of the Shâh-Nâmah with the kindred efforts of Virgil and particularly of Camões demonstrates immediately Firdausî's lack of a unified view of his nation's past except, of course, for such as is inherent in mere chronological or dynastic sequence.²⁸ This failing, which is both philosophical and artistic, did, however, manifestly further Firdausî's ultimate purpose, viz., the strengthening and consolidating of an Iranian national consciousness through the common possession by all of Iran of a body of history that would justify collective pride even when the present would not seem to justify it. And this pride would be the double pride of political leadership once held and cultural superiority still retained and ennobled by the adoption of the revealed faith of Islam. By leaving to his people the sum total of their relevant collective experience, he allows each subsequent generation to find its own meaning in the past. No final interpretation of the heritage is presumed; no one tradition is preferred to the exclusion of any other vital mode of self-perception. The glittering beauty in which Firdausî presented the heroes of the past has kept them alive in the minds of the Persians to this very day. Persia did not have the sense of a specific mission in Firdausî's time, so she did not demand a definite and exclusive interpretation of herself in her past. When she regained this sense of mission under the early Safavids, her Muslim present had grown out of a centuries-old Muslim past which, in turn, had come to be felt to blend with the more remote and not-yet-Muslim past. And today a revised Iranian nationalism avails itself in its historical self-interpretation (although with the more systematic claims of scientific aspirations) of the same past that Firdausî portrayed with such superb artistry and such philosophical casualness.

The historical object reveals itself only through the contexts in which we place it and capture it. Firdausî gives his object a peculiar richness of perspective by carelessly multiplying the contexts, that is, the traditions. Camões and Virgil are greater than Firdausî in their comprehensive and unifying Sinngebung of their nations' histories, which makes the present the consummation of the past; but Firdausî preserved better than they the multiple interpretability of the historical process, which allows every age to keep alive the past by finding itself in it.

EXCURSUS

A NOTE ON KIND AND FORM OF THE SHâH-NâMAH

The kinship of the Shâh-Nâmah with the Aeneid or the Lusiad is more limited in its form than in its intent. In fact, in terms of the Western contemporary of Firdausî, whose literary categories would be more or less patterned on a tradition transmitted or formulated by Isidore of Seville (d. 636), the Shâh-Nâmah might not have passed as poetry at all. For Isidore states: Officium autem poetae in eo est ut ea, quae vere gesta sunt, in alias species obliquis figurationibus cum decore aliquo conversa transducat. Unde et Lucanus [the author of the Pharsalia, a.d. 39-65] ideo in numero poetarum non ponitur, quia videtur historias composuisse.²⁹

From the viewpoint of composition we might be inclined to classify the Shâh-Nâmah as a chanson de geste rather than as an epic, which term, to the Occidental student, inevitably suggests a work in the line of the “great” tradition from Homer to Milton. The interest in poeticized history, part chronicle and part romance, was almost equally strong in medieval Europe and in medieval Iran. Firdausî's approach to his subject reminds one to some extent of that displayed by the authors of the chansons de geste that belong to the Crusade cycle. This cycle has been described as consisting of (1) une section entièrement fabuleuse; (2) une section rigoureusement historique; and (3) une section semi-historique³⁰—a classification which could mutatis mutandis be meaningfully applied to the matter of the Shâh-Nâmah.

The similarity of taste extends to the form as well. The medieval epic in the “vulgar” tongues of Europe shows the same preference as the Persian for narrative in rhyming pairs of comparatively short lines. It may be noted that the rise and rule of the rhyme are among the most striking common characteristics of medieval literature East and West, as contrasted with its “premedieval” models and antecedents.

In this connection the observation is called for that a chanson de geste is little else but a kâr-Nâmak, or book of deeds or gesta, in poetical form. Praxis, as the individual “deed” of the hero in the spätantike life-tale of a philosopher, saint, or martyr; and kâr, as the individual “deed” of the heroized prince on his road to kingship in the Pahlavî narrative of Artaχshêr-ê Pâβaγân, are, the first very likely an antecedent, but both, curious parallels to the etymological origin and function of the French term. E. R. Curtius³¹ points out that the Spanish priest, Juvencus, in the preface of his Evangeliorum libri IV, defines his program by saying (vs. 19): “mihi carmen erunt Christi vitalia gesta.” Curtius continues: “In diesem Vers war ein Anhaltspunkt für die mittelalterliche Auffassung des Epos gegeben: die Taten (gesta) eines Helden zu versifizieren.”

Although for the sake of classification the Shâh-Nâmah should be placed with the chansons de geste rather than with the Great Tradition, certain affinities of its presentation with the style and the clichés of that very Tradition must not be overlooked. Even as it has been possible to demonstrate, for example, the survival into Arabic times of the ancient rhetorical pattern for the city panegyric³² as well as that of the Ubi sunt qui ante nos motif³³—the same could be shown, e.g., for the topos of the “praise of poetry”³⁴ and for that of the Lustort³⁵—so the survival of other stylistic habits of late antiquity could be documented in Firdausî. The spätantike stylistic clichés traced by Curtius in the Chanson de Roland³⁶ could as easily be traced in the Shâh-Nâmah.

Persian theory has not found the epic its proper place. Shams-i Qais (who completed his work in 1232/3) is representative when he confines himself to consideration of the prosodical appearance of the mathnawî (literally: couplet[-poem]), as epic narrative is called in Persian where the term is chosen solely for its metrical characteristics. These characteristics Shams-i Qais illustrates by an example from the Shâh-Nâmah, concluding his exposition with the remark: “This kind, nau‘, is used for extensive tales and long stories which it would be impossible to compose on one and the same rhyme throughout.”³⁷ His contemporary, Diyâ’ ad-Dîn Ibn al-Athîr (d. 1234), is the only Arab theorist to refer to the Persian epic. He sees poetry as separated from prose composition, kitâba, by three peculiarities: meter, a different choice of words, and limitation in length. But with regard to this last point he feels constrained to make one qualification: “I found that the Persians, al-‘ajam, excel the Arabs in this point; for their poet [!] records a [kind of] book(s) composed in poetry from beginning to end. It is a detailed presentation, sharh, of stories and events, ahwâl. Nenetheless it is exceedingly eloquent [the text has both fasâha and balâgha] in the language of the people.” Firdausî's Shâh-Nâmah is an unsurpassed specimen of this kind, which deals in 60,000 verses with the history of the Persians. “It is the Koran of those people.” Despite the general inferiority of Persian to Arabic letters, in this one respect the Arabs have nothing to match Persian achievement.³⁸

The origin of the meter of the Shâh-Nâmah—a hendecasyllabic line with four ictus—has been followed back to the Arsacid period. Rhymed pairs of such lines occur in the Turfan Fragments and in the Great Bundahishn. The meter was taken over by the Arabs in pre-Islamic times and developed in accordance with their quantitative prosody. Persian prosodical theory of the Islamic period repatriated the meter under its Arabic name, mutaqârib—there is no evidence of a native name.

It is to be noted, however, that the Pahlavî specimens of the hendecasyllabic verse are not to be found in historical narrative but in a sample of Rangstreitliteratur and in religious poetry. As we do not know whether the Xvaδ[âγ-Nâmaγ was written in verse or in prose, we cannot decide who first selected the mutaqârib as the vehicle of an extensive “historical” narrative. Nöldeke has pointed out, with reference to a mutaqârib couplet by Abû Shukûr of Balh (fl. 941/42), that already some time before Daqîqî and Firdausî the mutaqârib had been employed for epic presentation and that, besides, the style of this epic had developed certain fixed forms that had had their roots in Pahlavî narrative.³⁹ If the use of the mutaqârib originated with a poet of the post-Pahlavî period, his choice is all the more remarkable since the octosyllabic variety of the other principal meter of the Persian epic, the hazaj, actually had been used in Pahlavî for historical narrative. In fact, the so-called Great Bundahishn⁴⁰ contains five lines (two of which rhyme) that deal with the exposure of a newborn prince, Kavât, in a chest on a river and his discovery by one Urav who brought him up in his home—the very motif that was spun out to considerable length by Firdausî⁴¹ when he recorded the youth of the future king Dârâb. The octosyllabic verse (with occasional rhyme) had also been used in the apocalyptic prophecies of the Zhâmâsp-Nâmaαγ.⁴² Equally remarkable is the disregard shown by Daqîqî of the hexasyllabics used with such great skill and effect by the poet of the Ayâδγâr-ê Zarêrân,⁴³ although (1) its contents were incorporated in the Shâh-Nâmah; (2) it anticipates such peculiarities of the Shâh-Nâmah as the hyperbolic imagery; and (3) not a few individual lines of Daqîqî's are nothing but recastings of specific passages of the Zarêr Book.⁴⁴ The joining of two octosyllabic (and hendecasyllabic) lines to a rhymed pair or, in the language of Arabo-Persian prosody, the joining of two such lines into one verse with rhyming hemistichs, must have been widely practiced by the end of the Sassanian period, since the Arabs took over this form, later called muzdawij, as early as ca. a.d. 700.⁴⁵

The occurrence in the Shâh-Nâmah of classical or postclassical stylistic devices and clichés is readily ascertained. It is, of course, much more difficult to reconstruct the road on which these clichés found their way into tenth-century Persia than to retrace that which connects their Hellenistic-Roman sources with the pertinent clichés of the Chanson de Roland. It may, however, be tentatively suggested that the Alexander Romance, which was translated into Pahlavî directly from the Greek toward the end of the Sassanian period,⁴⁶ played a significant part in the history of this transmission. Nöldeke has pointed out⁴⁷ that the main contents of the Romance may have already been incorporated in the Xvaδâγ-Nâmaγ. In any case, passages such as Shâh-Nâmah, VI, 1787-89 (Alexander goes to Darius as his own ambassador), VI, 1805-7 (Alexander's letter to his new subjects), and VII, 1810-12/C 1286-87 (Alexander's letter to Roxane's mother) are but “amplifications” of Pseudo-Callisthenes II, 14; II, 21; and II, 22, respectively.⁴⁸Shâh-Nâmah, VI, 1801-3, the meeting of Alexander with the dying Darius, is closely modeled on Pseudo-Callisthenes II, 20, where the Greek narrative is almost completely in so-called “epic choliambs” of twelve syllables with four (or five) principal ictus,⁴⁹ a verse that rather provokes comparison with Firdausî's couplets of hendecasyllabic lines with four ictus. While it would be rash to base on a passage of this kind any conclusions as to the reasons for Daqîqî's selection of the mutaqârib for historical narrative, the similarity of the two meters (which may well have been reflected in the Pahlavî translation of the Alexander Romance) should at least be noted pending further investigations. Such investigations would also have to take into account the development of the (Greek and Latin) hendecasyllabic verse (“Elfsilbler”) that was to be employed so widely in Byzantine literature, even as it should not be forgotten that the Chanson de Roland, for example, is composed in decasyllabic couplets of alliterative verse.

Notes

1. By E. Schwartz, “Geschichtschreibung und Geschichte bei den Hellenen,” Die Antike, XII (1928), 14; reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, I (Berlin, 1938), 67.

2. Precedent goes back as far as the Zam Yasht (Yasht 19) of the Avesta where, §§21-87, a long list of mythical rulers and heroes is presented in whom the Xvarenah, the divine Machiglanz, manifested itself; cf. H. S. Nyberg, Die Religionen des alten Iran (Leipzig, 1938), p. 72.

3. Murûj ad-dahab, ed. Barbier de Meynard and Pavet de Courteille (Paris, 1861-77), II, 118.

4. Cf. A. Christensen, Les Kayanides, Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, Hist.-fil. Meddelelser, XIX/2 (1931), p. 143.

5. Two Sogdian fragments of episodes of the (Sijistânî) Rustam story are extant. They were published with translation by E. Benveniste, Textes sogdiens (Paris, 1940), pp. 134-36 (No. 13 I, II). On p. 134, Benveniste connects the fragments with Rustam's battle against the dêvs of Mâzandarân; but the Shâh-Nâmah has a completely different version of the events. The origin of the Sogdian narrative remains obscure. So does the relation of its form to that of the Shâh-Nâmah. In 1913, W. Barthold suggested rather vaguely that the introduction of the Rustam cycle in the epic dates back to the times of the Arsacids or the Sassanians; cf. Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft, XCVIII (1944), 134.¹

6. The priestly tradition found itself embarrassed by the failure of the Achaemenids to embrace Zoroastrianism. On the question of their Zoroastrian affiliations, I agree with the negative verdict of E. Benveniste, The Persian Religion According to the Chief Greek Texts (Paris, 1929), pp. 34-49, and more particularly of Nyberg, op. cit., pp. 355-74. Firdausî's detachment from the priestly tradition may be reflected in his designation of the two ministers, dastûr, of Darius who become his murderers, as môbads, or priests (VI, 1800, vss. 315-16/C [=ed. Turner Macan, Calcutta, 1829] 1280). Whether or not Firdausî's source here mirrors an actual antagonistic attitude of the Zoroastrian clergy to the Achaemenid dynasty we do not seem to have any means of investigating, although the assumption does not appear too probable. Mary Boyce, Serta Cantabrigiensia (Wiesbaden, 1954), pp. 45-52, makes a judicious attempt to follow the “secular” (oral) tradition from its inception in Achaemenid times to its condification under the Sassanians.

7. Cf., e.g., Shâhnâmah (Teheran, 1313-15/1934-36), I, 33, vss. 186-87 (trans. A. G. and E. W. Warner [London, 1905-25], I, 139), where Firdausî comments on the dêv's action in causing snakes to grow out of Zohâk's shoulders:

   The purpose of the foul Dív shrewdly scan:
   Had he conceived perchance a secret plan
   To rid the world of all the race of man?

8. A. Christensen, Les Types du premier homme et du premier roi dans l'histoire légendaire des Iraniens, I (Stockholm, 1917), p. 15; cf. also Christensen, Les Gestes des rois dans les traditions de l'Iran antique (Paris, 1936), pp. 24-27.

   The first three thousand years that really mark a period before the actual creation of the world constitute a Zoroastrian addition to an originally Zervanistic scheme; cf. Benveniste, Persian Religion, pp. 109-10. In Nyberg's interpretation (op. cit., p. 21), the universe was first created as mênôk, transcendent reality, in a state of perfection in which it remained for three thousand years until it was transferred by the creator into the state that is called gêtîk, or earthly reality.

9. Cf. Kayanides, pp. 61-64.

10. For the model king, cf. Gestes, p. 75.

11. Cf. Bêrûnî, Chronology, ed. trans. E. Sachau, text (Leipzig, 1878), p. 213, translation (London, 1879), p. 196. For anti-Islamic prophecies in connection with this revolt, cf. A. Z. Validi Togan, Ibn Fadlân's Reisebericht (Leipzig, 1939), pp. xxi, xxvi-xxvii.

12. For both events, cf. Nyberg, op. cit., pp. 3, 14, 35.

13. Shâh-Nâmah, IX, 2930-33/C 2041-42 (Warners' translation, IX, 29-32).

14. Shâh-Nâmah, IX, 2965-71/C 2062-65 (Warners' translation, IX, 74-78).

15. Shâh-Nâmah, IX, 3016, vs. 833/C 2095 (Warners' translation, IX, 121).

16. Cf. the passage just quoted in the text.

17. Cf. Ibn Qutaiba (d. 889), ‘Uyûn al-ahbâr (Cairo, 1343-49/1925-30), I, 13; trans. J. Horovitz, Islamic Culture, IV (1930), 197; Murûj, II, 162; Abû Manşûr Tha‘âlibî, Histoire des rois des Perses, ed. trans. H. Zotenberg (Paris, 1900), p. 483. F. Rosenthal, Journal of the American Oriental Society, LXX (1950), 181-82, shows conclusively that the author is identical with the well-known philologist (d. 1038); C. Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, I (Weimar, 1898-1902), 342, and GAL, Suppl. (Leiden, 1937-42), I, 581-82, should be corrected accordingly. The Histoire was written before 1021.

18. Tauhîdî, Muqâbasât (Cairo, 1347/1929), pp. 143-44.

19. Cf. Nöldeke's judgment of the strength of Iranian national feeling under Mahmûd in: W. Geiger and E. Kuhn, Grundriss der iranischen Philologie (Strassburg, 1896-1904), II, 154. ‘Utbî considers it a barbarism when Mahmûd's vizier, Fadl b. Ahmad (deposed in 1010/11), makes Persian the language of the royal chancellery; his successor, Hasan Maimandî, restores Arabic as the official language (loc. cit., n. 3).

20. Chronique de Tabarî, traduite sur la version persane de Bal‘amî par H. Zotenberg (Paris, 1867-74), I, 2-3; for the integration of Persian in Muslim tradition, cf., e.g., I, 100 ff.

21. Rasâ’il (Bombay, 1305-6), IV, 194.

22. Cf. P. Casanova, Journal asiatique, 1915, 5-17, esp. pp. 6-7.

23. Tauhîdî, Risâla fî 'l-‘ulûm (in: Risâlatâni [Constantinople, 1301/1884], p. 207), speaks of the expectation of an early end of the world that is cherished in Sûfî circles, but it cannot be made out whether the Sûfîs in question are Persians.

24. Cf. W. Ivanow, Ismaili Tradition concerning the Rise of the Fatimids (London, 1942), pp. 232, 244, 248, 250, 255, 259-60, 266, 296-97. The Ismâ‘îlî concept of history, dubbed “historiosophie” by H. Corbin (Eranos Jahrbuch, XIX [1951], 251), is designed to account for the permanence of history in terms of a (practically) unending sequence of cycles that receive their rhythm from the alternation of periods of unveiling, kashf, and periods of concealment, or veiling, satr. Meta-physical time is connected with mundane history in the particular cycle in which we find ourselves, through the Adam of our cycle who is identical with the “historical” Adam of Bible and Koran. His fall necessitated the instituting of a new Era of Concealment (in which we are still living). This fall was induced by the eternal Satan, whose functional perpetuity ties together our cycle with the one preceding it. Also, the fall itself is meaningful only when seen as a descensus from the happy state of the end-time of the last cycle; it is essentially an error of judgment on Adam's part with regard to the structure of the time in which he finds himself placed. There is no evidence in the Shâh-Nâmah that Firdausî was moved by what from the Sunnite as well as the modern occidental viewpoint must be called the antihistorical outlook of the Ismâ‘îliyya. For this outlook, cf. especially the studies of H. Corbin, ibid., XIX (1951), 181-246; XX (1952), 149-217; and his “Étude préliminaire” to his and M. Mo‘în's edition of Nâsir-i Khusraw's Jâmi‘ al-hikmatain (Teheran and Paris, 1953), passim and particularly pp. 123-26.

25. Kitâb al-imtâ‘ wa'l-mu’ânasa (Cairo, 1939-44), III, 150. Actually it is Ibn Sa‘dân, vizier 983/4-985/6, who is expounding to Tauhîdî the idea of the instructiveness of the past with relation to the future.

26. Tabaqât ash-Shâfi‘iyya (Cairo, 1323-24/1905-6), I, 184. In a characteristic passage Yâqût (d. 1229), Mu‘jam al-buldân, ed. F. Wüstenfeld (Leipzig, 1866-73), I, 2, quotes Koran 22:45, “Have they not traveled about in the land so as to have hearts to understand with and ears to hear with? For it is not the eyes which are blind, but blind are the hearts which are in the breasts,” and adds, “This [pericope] is an upbraiding of him who travels through the lands without taking an example [from what he sees] and who looks upon the past generations without feeling restrained.” (The somewhat similar âya, Koran 47:11, could also be taken as an indication of God's self-revelation in history.)

27. For a discussion of different views of the nature of the tragic, cf. A. Weber, Das Tragische und die Geschichte (Hamburg, 1942), esp. pp. 40-44. Max Scheler's (d. 1928) approach seems particularly fruitful. He sees in the tragic a Daseinstatbestand, owing to which Kausalitätsverlauf and Wertverwirklichung will find themselves in a conflict that cannot be resolved. E. R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Berne, 1948), p. 175, expresses this view: “Altes Heldenepos und tragische Daseinssicht gibt es nur bei den Griechen; in später Gestaltung bei den Persern, den Germanen, den Kelten und den in der Kreuzzugsära zum nationalen Sendungsbewusstsein erwachten Franzosen.”¹

28. See Excursus.

29. Etymologiae viii. 7, 10. E. R. Curtius, op. cit., pp. 451-52 (=Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, LVIII [1938], 470), has pointed out that the first sentence recurs verbatim in Lactantius (d. after 313) Divinae Institutiones i. 11, 24. Servius (fl. ca. 400) ad Aeneidem i. 382, who voices the same opinion, adds the verdict on Lucan. Petronius, Satyricon, chap. 118, contains a passage which is generally believed to have been directed against Lucan: “It is not a question of recording real events in verse; historians can do that far better. The free spirit of genius must plunge headlong into allusions and divine interpositions, and rack itself for epigrams coloured by mythology, so that what results seems rather the prophecies of an inspired seer than the exactitude of a statement made on oath before witnesses” (trans. Michael Heseltine [London and New York, 1913]). It is easy to see which parts of the Shâh-Nâmah Petronius would have accepted as poetry and which he would have considered “versified” history somewhat after the manner in which Aristotle, Poetics IX, 2 (1451b), declined to accept a “versified Herodotus” as poetry.

30. A. Hatem, Les Poèmes épiques des Croisades (Paris, 1932), p. ix.

31. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, LXIV (1944), 251.

32. Cf. G. E. von Grunebaum, Journal of the American Oriental Society, LXIV (1944), 61-65.

33. Cf. C. H. Becker, Islamstudien (Leipzig, 1924-32), I, 501-19, for the Eastern, E. Gilson, Les Idées et les lettres (Paris, 1932), pp. 9-38, for the Western, development of the topos that goes back to the diatribe of the Cynics, and beyond it to Isa. 33:18 (cf. also Apoc. Bar. 3:16-19; I Cor. 1:19-20), as pointed out by Gilson, pp. 12-13 and 31. Further examples of transitions of Greek themes and genres into Arabic literature have been listed by this author, Journal of the American Oriental Society, LXII (1942), 291-92.

34. For its history in medieval Europe, cf. Curtius, Europ. Mittelalter, pp. 533 ff.

35. As indicated by this writer, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, IV (1945), 145, n. 67; for the Western development, cf. again Curtius, op. cit., pp. 200-3. The cliché has also entered Byzantine literature, where it occurs, e.g., in the epic of Digenes Akritas.

36. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, LXIV (1944), 273-78. Curtius' observations, ibid., LVIII (1938), 215-32, should also be considered in this connection. Cf., e.g., on p. 229 the short list of elements which were taken over by the Chanson de Roland from ancient epic tradition: “(1) Hervorhebung der Wohlgestalt des Helden; (2) abstrakt typisierende Landschaftschilderung; (3) Tötung von Ross und Reiter mit einem Streich; (4) Vorbereitung der Tragik durch Vordeutungen des Dichters, Omina und Träume.”

37. Al-Mu‘jam fî ma‘âyîr ash‘âr al-‘Ajam, ed. Muhammad Qazvînî (Leiden and London, 1909), p. 290.

38. Al-Mathal as-sâ’ir (Cairo, 1312), p. 324. On the other hand, Ibn al-Athîr's contemporary, Yâqût (d. 1226), op. cit., IV, 733-34, apologizes for telling the story of Bahrâm Gôr's master-shot, as it is a qissa min hurâfât al-Furs, “one of the silly stories of the Persians.”

39. “Persische Studien” II, in Sitzungsberichte der Wiener Akademie, phil.-hist. Cl., CXXVI (1892), Abh. 12, p. 13; cf. also Grundriss, II, 149.

40. Ed. B. T. Anklesaria (Bombay, 1918), pp. 231¹³-32², as read and interpreted by H. W. Bailey, Bulletin of the London School of Oriental and African Studies, VII (1933-35), 760.

41. Shâh-Nâmah, VI, 1759-61/C 1249-50.

42. In the case of this book, it is likely that the author deliberately patterned his verse on the verse of the (lost) Avestan Vahman Yasht; cf. Benveniste, Revue de l'histoire des religions, CVI (1932), 366 ff.

43. Sassanian Bearbeitung of an Arsacid work; cf. Benveniste, Journal asiatique, CCXX (1932), 291.

44. These have been pointed out by Benveniste, op. cit., pp. 262, n. 2, 271, 275-81, 282; for further literature on the Zarêr Book and its connections with the Shâh-Nâmah, cf. Nöldeke, Nationalepos, pp. 134-35, and p. 135, n. 5.

45. A good survey of Pahlavî poetry is found in A. Christensen, Heltedigtning og Fortaellingslitteratur hos Iranerne i Oldtiden (Copenhagen, 1935), pp. 32-37; for the muzdawij, cf. this author, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, III (1944), 9-13.¹

46. Cf. Th. Nöldeke, “Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alexanderromans,” Denkschriften der Wiener Akademie, phil.-hist. Cl., XXXVIII/5 (1890), pp. 14-16, 34.

47. Ibid., p. 34.

48. Ed. W. Kroll (Berlin, 1926).

49. The lines were composed ca. A.D. 200; cf. Pauly-Wissowa, Realenzyklopädie, IX, 679. H. Kuhlmann, “De Pseudo-Callisthenis carminibus choliambicis” (Diss., Münster i. W., 1912), does not contribute to the solution of our problem. The “Matrical Discourse upon Alexander” which C. Hunnius, Das syrische Alexanderlied (Diss., Göttingen, 1904), dates between 628 and 637, uses the dodecasyllabic verse (three units of four syllables each) customary with the Syriac homilies.