The Lost Treasures Persian Art. Vladimir Lukonin

high positions in the state to the Iranian nobility that had helped them to seize the Caliphate. The state system of their Caliphate followed the Sassanian pattern.

      There was yet another important consequence of the change of power. Before the Abbasid age the Islamic community of Iran had consisted primarily of Arabs and only afterwards of Persians converted to Islam, who were considered as clients (mawali) of the Arab families and tribes and did not possess equal rights with true Arabs. The Abbasids ended this division and in the same period many dihqans, who had preserved or even raised their social status, adopted Islam. This Iranian elite did a great deal for Islam.

      The supporters of the Iranophile cultural movement, the so-called Shuubiyya, wrote their works in Arabic. This movement flourished especially in Khurasan under the Abbasids, and despite the fact that it inculcated into an Islamic culture the pre-Islamic ideas, traditions and customs of Sassanian Iran, in objective terms it led to the enrichment and widening of Islam itself and to a rejection of the provincial narrowness of Muslim culture. In the court of the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun (813–833 CE) translation in particular blossomed: works of many types were translated into Arabic – ethical and didactic (andarz), historical (numerous “Histories of the Kings of Fars” linked to the Khwataw-namak cycle), literary (such as Kalila and Dimna) and many others. At the same time scientific tracts and parts of religious and philosophical books were translated. It is interesting to note that at approximately the same period a Zoroastrian orthodoxy, that was not in any way prohibited by Islam, held power in Fars; basic Zoroastrian works such as the Denkart were written here. In honour of the arrival of al-Mamun in Marv (809 CE), a certain Abbas-i Marwazi delivered the first verses in the Modern Persian language.

      These were all the first steps of the “Persian Renaissance” leading to a flowering of Modern Persian literature by the 10th century and, in the final analysis, to that of the Iranian cultures of Firdawsi, Nizami, Sa’di and Hafiz.

      The creation of Modern Persian literature was also a factor of the utmost importance for medieval Persian art, for it was this which was to serve as the basis of figurative art. The essential preconditions already existed.

      The illustrative quality and the variety of forms within late Sassanian art, the rich artistic traditions of wall-painting in eastern Iran and Central Asia and the no less rich traditions of Christian art in the eastern provinces of Byzantium, etc. But before discussing what happened to Persian art in the early Middle Ages, it is necessary to know something of the “Persian Renaissance” which flourished in eastern Iran, mainly during the rule of its Samanid dynasty – a line of Iranian nobles who claimed descent from the Sassanian general and usurper Varahran Chobin.

      Modern Persian literature began as courtly literature. At that period the demotic language in the whole of Iran, Khurasan and Central Asia had for a long time been Dari, or what was to be Modern Persian. The Arabs themselves promoted the spread of Dari over a vast territory and its transformation into a language of communication between different ethnic groups; they used it to communicate with the local population in Iran, Khurasan and Central Asia.[19] The adoption of Arabic script (more convenient than Middle Persian or Sogdian) for the Dari language was a natural process. In 982 CE a geographical treatise, Hudud al-’alam (The Limits of the World), was published, and in 100 °CE, the medical treatise Kitab al-Tasrif was completed by al-Zarhawi. But the first prose work in Modern Persian was a compilation of “universal history” (from various Arabic translations of the Sassanian Khwataw-namak), produced in 959 on the order of the ruler of the city of Tus, Abu Mansur Muhammad ibn Abd al-Razzaq, by four Zoroastrians (to judge by their names), “scholars of the past of the Persian kings”.

      In lyrical poetry, the famous poets of the “Persian Renaissance”, Rudaki, Daqiqi and others, comprehensively exploited all the achievements of Arabic literature, but also utilised non-Arabic verse forms which were evidently still Sassanian or were re-created on the basis of Sassanian verse.

      Their work was founded on oral tradition, the poetry of those same gosans who, in the courts of local rulers during the early Islamic era, continued to be “…entertainers of king and commoner, privileged at court and popular with the people; present at the council and at the feast; eulogists, satirists, story-tellers, musicians; recorders of past achievements, and commentators in their own times”.[20]

      The greatest literary achievement of this period was the Iranian national epic, the Shahnama of Firdawsi, who wrote this long poem on the glorious past of his country. Although he undoubtedly considered his subject matter as history, he wrote it in the form of a narrative poem, creating characters and combining various events from different periods or episodes from various legends around them so that the acts of his heroes and their ethical and moral, or even political consequences should stand out in sharp relief. Firdawsi’s poem, like Iranian poetry of that period in general, could be said to “discover” the individual as an independent, creative being, as a personality and as the creator of his own fate and history. Man as an individual, and not as a typical representative of an estate, caste or class – it could be said that this is the leitmotif of Persian literature and social life at the time of the “Persian Renaissance”.

      It is clearly unnecessary to discuss the social and economic basis of this process at any length – it is completely comprehensible and has frequently been described. This, incidentally, was the golden age in the development of cities, but they differed from those of Western Europe, above all, in that their citizens had no special class privileges. The city was simply a conglomerate of manufacturing, territorial, religious and other self-governing corporations under the aegis of a civil service. Like the poets at court, the cities’ craftsmen were bound together by close ties. All of these highly important circumstances bear witness to the enormous changes taking place in society, its social structure and its psychology.