The Rise of the Persian Renaissance

Abstracts of papers and biographies of speakers sorted alphabetically by last name of speaker

Pre-Islamic in Islamic: the Feast of Sada in early Persian poetry
Firuza Abdullaeva, University of Oxford

Traditions of celebrating calendar feasts are the most ancient in all nations. I have chosen the feast of Sada as one of the most ancient and important in the Iranian tradition. Fire, its main ritual component, naturally links the tradition to the Zoroastrian pre-Islamic past of the Iranian world.

Compared with two other main Iranian feasts of Nouruz and Mehrgan, inherited from the pre-Islamic past, the celebration of Sada is reflected in a rather limited number of surviving literary examples, belonging mostly to early court poetry in the New Persian language. This material shows the change of attitude towards the tradition and makes the feast of Sada one of the best examples of the survival of probably the most ancient feast of humankind through several transitional periods.

Firuza Abdullaeva is a graduate of the Iranian Philology Department, Faculty of Oriental Studies, St Petersburg University, she received her PhD in Iranian philology and Islamic Studies with her thesis on the earliest Persian Commentary on the Qur'an (Tafsir-i Qur'an Pak)" in 1989. She was an Associate Professor at the University of St Petersburg when she joined the Cambridge Shahnama Project in 2002. From 2005 she has been Lecturer in Persian Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Keeper of the Firdousi Library of Wadham College.

Her publications include: Early Persian Exegesis (2000); The Courtly Life of a Poet: Farrukhi from Sistan (SPb, 2000); The Lahore Commentary on the Qur'an (Moscow, 2001); Persian Classical Poetry (10-11th centuries C.E.) (SPb, 2002); The Unknown Shahnama from Ann Arbor". Manuscripta Orientalia 2005; "Divine, Human, and Demonic: Iconographic Flexibility in the Depiction of Rustam and Ashkabus", in Shahnama Studies I (Cambridge, 2006); Tales of a Parrot (SPb, 2006); "What's in a Safina?" in A Treasury from Tabriz: the Great Il-Khanid Compendium (Amsterdam, 2007); Islamic Calligraphy from the Wellcome Library (Chicago, 2007); "Persian Female Poetry", Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, vol. v, (Leiden, 2007); The Persian Book of Kings: Ibrahim Sultan's Shahnama (Oxford, 2008).

Middle Persian Literature and New Persian Literature: Continuity of Discontinuity?
François de Blois, SOAS, London

The conquest of the Sasanian empire by the Arabs in the first half of the 7th century CE marked a decisive turning point in the political, religious and cultural history of Persia. To be sure, we do not have any statistics that would enable us to establish the speed with which the Persian population converted to the religion of the conquerors, but there is good reason to think that within about a century of the conquest a large portion of the urban elite in the formerly Sasanian territories had accepted Islam, and the Arab religion must have made rapid progress in the countryside as well in the centuries after that. The Islamization of the Iranian world had a profound impact on the cultural life in Persia. The Persians did manage to keep their own language. In this way, the situation in Persia was different from that, for example, in Egypt, where not only the Muslim converts, but even the still very significant Christian minority eventually lost their native Coptic language and adopted Arabic. In Persia the Muslim elite certainly spoke Arabic. For several centuries they wrote only in Arabic and the Persian language adopted a very large number of Arabic words, but it remained, in its basic grammatical structure, undeniably Persian. However, for two centuries after the conquest, Muslim Persians wrote nothing in Persian and even in the 3rd century of the Hijra they wrote virtually nothing and only from the 4th century (10th century CE) was there any significant use of Persian writing by Muslims. During all this time Persian texts were still being written by Zoroastrians and, probably to a lesser extent, also by Christians, Jews and Manichaeans, but these texts were not read by Muslims, not least because they were put down in scripts that Muslims could not read (Pahlavi, Syriac, Hebrew and Manichaean scripts). This means that although the Persian language survived as a spoken idiom among Muslims it was an idiom that was cut off from the Persian literary tradition. The Islamicized Persian population certainly retained a number of customs and folk traditions from pre-Islamic times, particularly in the countryside. Along with the language, these were a link with the past, but their importance should not be exaggerated. The adoption of Islamic religion and culture did cut the Persians off from the religious (Zoroastrian) roots of the old national culture and the extinction of Zoroastrian book learning among Muslim converts and their abandonment of the Middle Persian written language meant that Sasanian literature, indeed the whole of Sasanian "high" culture, was unknown to Persian Muslims. The link with pre-Islamic Iranian literature and with the "high" culture of the Sasanian period was eventually reestablished through translations of Middle Persian books, translations made by Zoroastrians or recent converts from Zoroastrianism. These translations were an important vehicle of cultural influences also from India. We can distinguish two principal waves of transmission: for one, in translations from Middle Persian to Arabic made during the early Abbasid period, first and most famously by Ibn al-Muqaffa' (d. ca. 755 CE). Then, beginning about two centuries later, we find translations of Sasanid books, either from Arabic or (less commonly) directly from Middle Persian, into New Persian, notably under the patronage of the Samanids. These translations become the direct or indirect source of New Persian versifications, notably Rudaki's versification of Kalilah wa Dimnah, and the versification of the Shahnama by Daqiqi and Firdowsi. In modern scholarly literature, attempts have been made to establish a direct link between the poetic literatures of Sasanian and Islamic Persia, but these are misguided. In my presentation I will illustrate the discontinuity of Middle Persian and New Persian poetry with two examples: the metrical systems in the two languages, and the alleged pre-Islamic origin of Persian panegyric poetry celebrating Nowroz and Mihrgan.

François de Blois has written extensively on Iranian and Semitic languages and literatures and on the history of the Near East and Central Asia. From 1989 to 2000 he was employed as a Research Fellow at the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, with sole responsibility for the research project Biobibliography of Persian Literature (the Storey project). From 2001 to 2002 and again from 2003 to 2005 he was employed by the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, as a researcher for the Dictionary of Manichaean texts project. From 2002 to 2003 he was acting professor of Iranian studies at Hamburg University. From 2005 to 2008 he worked, again at SOAS, on the Bactrian documents project. Currently he is working for the Institute of Ismaili Studies (London) preparing a descriptive catalogue of the Hamdani collection of Ismaili manuscripts.

"Wine is a Great Healer": a New Persian topos in retrospection
Natalia Chalisova, Russian University of Humanities, Moscow

One of the striking features of the Iranian Renaissance (9-10th century CE) is the exceptionally fast development of New Persian poetry. In the Middle Persian period, court poetry was a purely oral tradition, and our knowledge of it is all but limited to the names of the greatest poets and musicians at the court of Khusraw Parwiz (591 - 628 CE). The poetical output of Barbad and Nagisa "must have been brilliant" (Lazard), but only the titles of Barbad's songs have remained in attested sources. Following Barbad, "two centuries of silence" follow, after which poetry written in New Persian is established in its completeness over less than a century, from the first attempts of writing in new forms (Hanzala Badgisi) up to the classic poems (Rudaki). This begs the question - what reasons underlie such a rapid rise of poetry and the phenomenon of "instant classics"? Was the early New Persian poetry merely a successful experiment in borrowing from the Arabs, or was it in some way derived from the Sasanian court poetry, if not in metrics and rhyme, then in its imagery at least? In other words, can we at least theoretically try to bridge the gap between Rudaki and Barbad? The verses of the Samanid period are replete with descriptions of wine. Most of the New Persian wine topoi can be traced back to the Arabic genre of khamriyyat, especially to the poems of Abu Nuwas (d. 810 CE), and look like pure borrowings. In my presentation I am going to observe the topos of "wine as a great healer of body and soul" in retrospection. This poetic idea is central to the early New Persian poetic descriptions of wine (Rudaki and other Samanid poets, such as Firdawsi), it also occurs frequently in Arabic khamriyyat poems. But if we turn to Middle Persian texts, we find a lot of contexts praising the healing power of wine in different genres of literature (Handarz-i Oshnar-i danag, Khosrow-i Kawadan ud redag-e, Arda Viraz namag). Passages dealing with the power of wine, as well as the hallucinogen which Viraz drinks before his soul travels to the next world, link this topos to the descriptions of Haoma in the texts of the Avesta (Yasna 9; 10): it is health-bringing and physically strengthening, it stimulates alertness and is nutritious for the soul.

The final part of my presentation is conjectural. Wine played an important role in the Sasanian court rituals, and some of the songs of Barbad (ramish-i jan,nushin bada, rah-i ruh) explicitly dealt with the praise of that sweet drink (that is, if we can trust the names preserved in tradition). The circulation of the topos of "wine as a great healer" in the Middle Persian texts provides strong, though obviously circumstantial, evidence for the fact that it could have also been embedded in the imagery of those wine songs. If that is the case, the Abbasid authors of the khamriyyat poems could have borrowed that particular convention for the description of wine directly from the Persian songs (the musical culture of the Persians was well in use at the Abbasid court of the 8th century CE). And when Iranian poets of the Rudaki age turned to their own khamriyyat, they did not borrow the conventional imagery from the Arabs, but, more likely, "restituted" it to its rightful owners.

Natalia Chalisova, is Professor of Persian Literature and Head of the Centre for Comparative Studies at the Institute of Oriental and Classical Studies, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow.

Continuity and cultural identity in ancient Persia
Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, British Museum, London

The art and coinage of pre-Islamic Iran uses an iconography which is based on traditions and continuity. In the Persian Empire, the Achaemenid kings developed an artistic style which was based on traditional Near Eastern motifs, but modified and adapted to the Persian taste. Soon after Alexander's conquest of the ancient Near East a local dynasty in Parsa, modern Fars, rose to power and struck coins, which show a striking resemblance to the iconography of Persepolitan reliefs and Achaemenid Persian coins.When the Arsacid Parthians came to power in the third century BCE, they also copied an earlier iconography, known to us from 4th century BCE coins of Persian satraps. Under Mitradates II the Parthians reintroduced the ancient Near Eastern title "King of Kings" and abandoned the Hellenistic costume in favour of the traditional Iranian costume of tunics and trousers. The Sasanians defeated the Parthians at the beginning of the third century CE. Early kings, such as Aradshir I and Shapur I, chose the ancient site of Naqsh-i Rustam, where Darius and Xerxes were buried, to carve their magnificent rock-reliefs. The Achaemenid platform throne with its lion paws, known from the palace reliefs at Persepolis and the royal tombs at Naqsh-i Rustam, became an important icongraphic feature on coins of the Sasanian kings.

Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis is Curator of Iranian and Islamic Coins in the British Museum and President of the British Institute of Persian Studies. She obtained her MA in Near Eastern Archaeology and Ancient Iranian Languages from the University of G�ttingen, Germany, and received a PhD in Parthian Art from University College London. From 1983-2004 she was the joint Editor of IRAN (Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies). Her publications include Persian Myths (British Museum Publications, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2005), Persian Love Poetry (British Museum Press, 2005, 2006) and From Persepolis to the Punjab (British Museum Press, 2007). She also edited The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Persia (I B Tauris, 1997) and the series The Idea of Iran, volumes I-III. Her publications include articles on Parthian and Sasanian coins, religion and iconography in IRAN, Iranica Antiqua, Encyclopaedia Iranica, Proceedings of the British Academy, Reallexikon der Assyriologie. She has also contributed to the Catalogue of the British Museum Exhibtion, Forgotten Empire. The World of Ancient Persia (2005, 2006). She has been involved in a major collaborative project on Sasanian Coins with the National Museum of Iran and the first volume has gone to press in Tehran. She has just started a major international project on Parthian Coins with Vienna, Tehran, Paris, Berlin and New York.

Publishing Scholarly Classics on Persian literary Classics: pros and contras of the new project
Ali Dehbashi, Bukhara Magazine

The new project on publishing a selection of the best scholarly achievements in the field of the Classical Persian Literature was started several years ago. It was launched by the book called Yad-i Yar-i Mihraban Ayad Hami ("I remember my Beloved"). This contains a collection of articles and studies on Rudaki, his life and works by the most prominent Iranian scholars who have contributed to this subject, such as: Foruzanfar, Zarrinkub, Minovi, Mo'in, Nafisi, Shafi'i Kadkani and many others. The obvious success of this publication as a unique reference book for mature scholars and students of Persian Classical literature and culture encouraged the idea of continuing the project, which took its shape in the second book in the series, dedicated to another milestone figure in the Iranian literary history, Umar Khayyam, whose poetic heritage belongs equally to the Persian and English literary culture.

The reasons of the necessity of such project and the problems the publisher encounters are the focus of this presentation.

Ali Dehbashi is Editor-in-Chief of Bokhara magazine. He studied Persian literature and history under supervision of prominent scholars such as Seyed Abolghasem Enjavi Shirazi, Dr. Mehrdad Bahar, Dr. Gholam Hossein Yousefi and Dr. Abdol Hossein Zarinkoob. Ali Dehbashi has cooperated with many literary,cultural and art magazines including Arash, Borj, Cheragh, Donyaye Sokhan Adineh and Art Office. From 1990, he was Editor-in-Chief of the monthly magazine Kelk - a prominent literary, cultural and Iranological publication with a considerable number of readers, mostly Iranian university professors and Iranologists around the world. Ali Dehbashi has also been the Editor of Academy of Science Quarterly for the last 3 years and he is currently the editor (selected by the Board of Trustees) for publishing the works of Seyed Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh. About 75 titles have been published by Dehbashi over the years.

The 'Persian Revival' in Narratives of Iranian History
Edmund Herzig, University of Oxford

A native Iranian dynasty claiming descent from the great Sasanian general and rebel, Bahram Chubin, the Samanids have featured prominently in narratives of Iranian national history. The historical significance of the Samanid period has often been understood in terms of an era of independent Iranian dynasties, or as an Iranian "intermezzo" (Minorsky) in which they are loosely bracketed with Tahirids, Saffarids and Buyids. In Garthwaite's words, the Samanids laid "the definitive basis for Iranian identity over and against the Turks of Central Asia and the Arabs to the West". Historians have emphasized Samanid patronage of the first great poet of New Persian literature, Rudaki, and of the first major history written in New Persian (Bal'ami), as well as the formative place of Samanid government in shaping the mediaeval Perso-Islamic tradition of kingship and administration.

These qualities have made the Samanids attractive to historians interested in charting the history of the Iranian nation and its struggles to achieve independence and retain identity in the face of repeated foreign conquest and domination. Yet the Samanids pose some dilemmas for nationalist historians: it is debatable how far they were, or considered themselves, independent of Caliphal authority. Additionally, they relied extensively on Turkish troops and they were generous and interested patrons of works written in Arabic as well as Persian. Moreover their capital, Bukhara, and their heartland were in Transoxiana and Eastern Khorasan - territories outside the boundaries of the modern Iranian state. For historians writing in the Islamic Republic, interpreting the Samanids has presented a further set of dilemmas: how should they evaluate a dynasty that has been seen as contributing to the eclipse of Islamic government embodied in the Caliphate, to the reassertion of Iranian identity and independence at the expense of the Muslim Arab conquerors, and to the revival of the Iranian Kingship tradition?

The paper explores the place of the Samanid age in narratives of Iranian national history, discussing the interpretations of the period in the work of a number of Iranian historians writing in both the Pahlavi and Islamic Republic periods.

Edmund Herzig research interests in Iranian history focus on the Safavid period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), and the contemporary period (history and politics of the Islamic Republic). He is currently working on a Cambridge History of Modern Inner Asia, on a study of Iranian foreign policy at the turn of the 21st century, and on the place of history in the formation of modern Iranian nationalism.

On Arabo-Muslim Clichés in Late Zoroastrian Scriptures
Ali Kolesnikov, Institute of Oriental Studies, St Petersburg

In an attempt to throw more light on this phenomenon, the author analyses four treatises included in a Zoroastrian manuscript (C 1869) from the collection of the Oriental Institute in St. Petersburg. By attributive process, the manuscript is dated to the 16th or 17th century. The four writings (from amongst the dozen ones comprising C 1869) are remarkable in their abundance of Arabo-Muslim clichés. These works are as follows: 1) Jamasp-name - a New Persian narration based on the original Pahlavi version, undated; 2) Arda-Wiraf-name - a re-telling of the Pahlavi version from the first half of the 16th century; 3) Sayast-nasayast - a New Persian narration of the Pahlavi version from the first half of the 16th century; 4) Dastan-e Anushirwan-e 'adel - the original New Persian treatise dating from the 11th century onwards. All arabisms that occur in the aforementioned compositions are divided into three classes: a) Arabic loan-words of the neutral type, that is without obvious Islamic allusions; b) Arabic words explained through Iranian ones, and vice versa - Iranian meanings explained through arabic ones; c) Pure Arabo-Muslim clichés represented by Islamic attributes to the Zoroastrian God, Islamic phrases and idioms occurring in the text. The number and character of Arabo-Muslim clichés in Persianized Zoroastrian scriptures differs from one work to another and depends on the genre of the composition. They are more numerous in fictions and stories like Jamasp-name or Dastan-e Anushirwan-e 'adel, which were devised for mass readership (Muslims included). They are limited in number and even reduced to a minimum in the canonical writings such as Sayast-nasayast or Arda-Wiraf-name, which were intended for Mazda worshippers.

Ali Kolesnikov is the Head the Department of Middle Eastern studies in St Petersburg Institute of Oriental studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, where he has been working since 1967. He graduated the Leningrad University, Faculty of Oriental Studies, Iranian Philology Department. His main research interests are in the history of Iran of Sasanian and Early Islamic periods (4th-10th cc.). His numerous publications are dedicated to political and economic history, the history of culture, based on narrative and epigraphic sources, Sasanian numismatics and Zoroastrian texts in Pahlavi and New Persian. His last study is on the 5th Book of Denkard, the annotated Russian translation of which has been recently submitted for publication.

Cult niches in Central Asia: before and under Islam
Victoria Kryukova, Kunstkamera Museum, St Petersburg

Until now it cannot be considered that the question both of the origin and introduction of the cult niche, mihrab, into ritual Muslim practice has been completely resolved. Also the meaning and etymology of the word are rather obscure, though it is used in the Qur'an - in particular regarding "a sanctuary" of Da'ud (38:20) and "altars" of Sulayman (34:12) and is known in pre-Muslim Arabian literature.

At the same time one of the Qur'anic passages, without mention of the word "mihrab", quite appropriately conveys a symbolic meaning of the cult niche (24:35):

God is the Light of Heaven and Earth!
His light may be compared to a niche
in which there is a lamp; the lamp
is in a glass; the glass is just as if it were a glittering star
kindled from a blessed olive tree,
[which is] neither Eastern nor Western,
whose oil will almost glow though fire
has never touched it.
(Tr. by T.B. Irving)

The very image of the mihrab, with a suspended lamp, became a symbol of the mosque and prayer.

Whatever way the introduction of the mihrab into the Arab countries occurred, in Iran and Central Asia the mihrab gradually replaced the cult niches of Zoroastrian temples and home sanctuaries. The shape of cult niches, in which the images of deities were put, is well known in Zoroastrian temple architecture and also in Central Asian coroplastic art. Besides the proper niche there were other sacred objects of similar purpose in Central Asia before Islam. These are the so-called "small hearths" (on which a fire was burnt) and "oven doors" or "screens" connected with local Zoroastrian domestic rites, which were widespread in Sogdiana. Their formalistic columns and arches depicted the most sacred part of the temple. The genesis and evolution of the Zoroastrian cult niche in Central Asia came under the influence of the Hellenic canons, but a very important role played there is also the development of local tradition. The first appearance of a wall-niche in Central Asia dates back to the late Stone Age. The niche was a common sight, a place for sacred objects, in the Near and Middle East, and also in Central Asia. It was used in different religious traditions and then found its place in the Muslim mosques, as well as continued its life as cult wall-niche in Central Asian dwellings.

Victoria Kryukova is a Senior Research Fellow at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences, St,-Petersburg, and also a Lecturer on Zoroastrianism at the Russian Christian Academy of Humanities. She is the author of two books on Zoroastrianism (in Russian) and numerous articles on Zoroastrian rituals and traditional culture of Iranian peoples.

Greater Khurasan - The Land of Wine Poetry: Aesthetics of the Early Persian Wine Odes
Ali Mir-Ansari, Great Islamic Encyclopaedia, Teheran

In Persian Literature, the term khamriyya often refers to the odes describing wine, its vessels, accessories and effects; such odes usually contain detailed accounts of the banquet of wine: the symposium (Persian: bazm-i may-gusari). Examination of the few scattered verses from the wine odes of the 4th/10th century reveals that from the opening period of Persian classical literature, "Wine Poetry" - originally established in Khurasan - was regarded as an independent poetic genre, usually composed in the form of a qasida. Apart from the few scattered verses, two complete odes are extant - the first one, having been composed by Rudaki, is known as Mother of Wine (Madar-i May) and the second, by Bashshar, is entitled Raz, meaning "vine". Thus Rudaki and Bashshar can be considered as the forefathers of Persian wine poetry. The last decades of the 4th /10th century marked the beginning of a thousand years of attempts to keep this genre alive. In the 5th/11th century the genre was under the influence of Arabic Wine Poetry, of which the work of Munuchihr-i Damghani is a salient example. By the development of the mystical Sufi poetry during the 6th/12th century, Muslim mystics added further to the poetic allegories of wine and, through additional emphasis on the spiritual qualities of wine, actually transformed Wine Poetry into the poetic expression of the inner states of an archetypal mystic continually intoxicated by the wine of eternal wisdom and love. During the following century the spiritual attitudes in Wine Poetry continued to exist, although its form of expression changed from the qasida to the ghazal. In the11th/17th century some unsuccessful attempts were made to revive the powerful style of early Wine Poetry. But the sun rose for Persian Wine Poetry with the appearance of the work of Malik al-Shu'ara and his well-known wine ode entitled Night and Wine ( Shab wa Sharab); in fact his work was reminiscent of the style of the initial period of the Persian Wine Poetry. In this concise study some aesthetic aspects of the classical Persian wine odes of the 4th/10th century, composed by Rudaki , Bashshar and another 13 poets from Greater Khurasan, as well as the well-known wine ode of Malik al-Shu'ara Bahar - who can be considered as the last great Persian qasida composer - will be examined comparatively.

Ali Miransari was born in Tehran in 1958 and received his BA and MA in Persian Literature from Tehran University, and has been working at the Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia since 1996, and at the National Archives Organization and the Encyclopaedia of Iran since 2000. His research interests include contemporary and early classic Persian literature as well as dramatic Persian literature. He has published more than 150 articles in the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia, the Encyclopaedia of Iran and in numerous Persian periodicals in the fields of Persian literature and the history of Iran. His book publications include Dramatic works of Mir-Zadeh Eshghi (2007); Arj-Nameh Bahar (2006); Aiine-ye Mashrooteh (2006); Mikadoo-Nameh (2006); Records of Iran's contemporary literary notables (5 volumes) (1997-2004); Selected records of drama in Iran (2003); Letters of Malak-o Shoara Bahar(2001); Shahnameh, Bahar's commentary on the Shahnameh, edited introduced and indexed by Ali Miransari (2001); Two travel accounts by Nima Youshij (2001); Bibliography of Nima Youshij (1996); Bibliography of Attar (1995); Bibliography of Nasir Khosrow (1994); Bibliography of Khajou Kirmani (1991).

Gardizi, the Seljuks and the Persian Renaissance
Andrew Peacock, BIPS, Ankara

In this paper I investigate one of the earliest Persian historical works, the Zayn al-Akhbar by Gardizi, written in the mid-eleventh century CE for the Ghaznavid sultan 'Abd al-Rashid. Although the Zayn al-Akhbar is a major source for Samanid and Ghaznavid history, its place in the rise of Persian historiography has rarely been discussed. It is particularly important as it is the sole extant historical work written for a Ghaznavid sultan. I examine why, during the brief and troubled reign of 'Abd al-Rashid (1049-51 CE), this work should have been composed. As has already been noted by Julie Scott Meisami, the Zayn al-Akhbar seems to express a certain nostalgia for the lands of Khurasan, recently lost to the Seljuks. However, I argue that the work is not merely an attempt to assert the Ghaznavids' position as the rightful rulers of Khurasan. It legitimises the Ghaznavids by stressing their claims to Persian descent, and also links rulership of Iran with that of Sistan. Gardizi's work must be considered in the light of the struggle between the Ghaznavids and Seljuks over Sistan. I suggest that from the mid-eleventh century, precisely as the Ghaznavids lost control of their last Iranian lands, they attempted to stress their Iranian links as part of a propaganda offensive designed to reassert their right to rule in Iran (broadly defined) and Sistan in particular, the last province they had a hope of holding. The Zayn al-Akhbar was one element in this offensive, in contrast to local works like the Tarikh-i Sistan which rejects the Ghaznavids as Turks and as a disaster for Sistan, and the Seljuk sympathies evident in much of the Ghaznavids' former territories. Finally, I suggest that the sudden upsurge in the eastern Iranian world in the second half of the eleventh century of epic poetry, especially related to Sistan, with works like the Garshasp-nama and numerous others, may be associated with these debates over the Ghaznavids' legitimacy of Iranian rulers in the wake of their loss of Khurasan and Sistan.

Andrew Peacock is Assistant Director of the British Institute at Ankara. After studies at St John's College, Oxford he proceeded to Pembroke College, Cambridge where he completed his PhD on Bal'ami's translation of Tabari. He took up his current position after holding research fellowships at the British Institute at Ankara and the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the medieval history of Anatolia, Caucasia and Central Asia, Islamic manuscripts and historiography. Among his publications is a monograph, Medieval Islamic Historiography and Political Legitimacy: Bal'ami's Tarikhnama (London: Routledge 2007) and an edited volume, The Frontiers of the Ottoman World (Proceedings of the British Academy: in press), and articles in numerous journals such as Arabica and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. He is writing a general history of the Great Seljuk Empire for Edinburgh University Press

Syriac Poetry with a Persian Approach? : Warda Hymn Collection (12th -13th century CE)
Anton Pritula, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

The 12th-14th centuries CE were not only a time of hardship for the Church of the East (so called Nestorian Church), but was also an age of poetic heyday. The most famous East Syrian hymn-writers of the period are Givargis Warda (13th century) and Khamis bar Qardahe (late 13th- 14th century). The hymns by both poets were included in holiday services, and the manuscripts were used for liturgical purposes.

The 'onita genre, of which Warda's poetry is an example, gained its popularity in the 12-14th centuries, when it became one of the group of widely-used types of liturgical hymns. Their content is very diverse: Biblical and theological subjects as well as the description of different calamities, such as hunger or plague. The structure is, generally speaking, a strophic one with each stanza consisting of 4 semi-lines. Each semi-line contains 7 syllables. In the preface and the final of most of hymns, alternation of 6 and 7 syllable semi-lines is met. This was first briefly pointed out by H.Hilgenfeld, and no detailed study of the genre has been done since that time. For this study I will use the 4 earliest existing dated copies. A priori a striking influence of medieval Arabic and Persian literature can be noticed in this genre both structurally and poetically. Rhyming borrowed by the Syriac poetry from the Persian and Arabic traditions is seen in most of these hymns. This impact is noticeable in the poetic figures as well. One may note also a complete change in the poetry's character. Earlier the Syriac poetry was a "poetry of content", starting with Ephrem the Syrian, who tried to use it as an instrument for transmission of ethical and dogmatic information, in a very free form. The hymns ('onita) of the new type have no ambition of any philosophical or subjective novelty. Neither can Givargis Warda and his companions be treated as original thinkers. In fact their aim was the opposite: they arranged in new poetic form all the existing traditions, including the poetic one. This can be concluded after comparing Warda's hymns to the production of his predecessors, for example Mar Narsai (5th - 6th centuries CE) - a theologizing poet who may be treated as the founder of East Syrian (so -called Nestorian) poetic tradition. In hymns ascribed to Warda, not only the subjects but also the content of his hymns and even close paraphrases are used in great number. So, the motivation of the creators of the new genre is absolutely formalistic - arranging an old subject into a new shape. That is something unknown to Syriac literature, but typical for the Persian one. This, in turn, means that within a genre, creativity gains an imitative character. The most admired authors are taken as a model for the genre. We cannot speak with any certainty of the attribution of the hymns to one personality, but rather to one style or circle. This is what we do with many Persian poems imitating for instance the style of Hafiz. The certainty of attribution is the lesser, the bigger the distance that separates the existing manuscripts from the author's life time. In the case of Warda it is about three centuries. So, further study of these poems demands not only careful textual study, but also the understanding of with what kind of poetry we are dealing.

Anton Pritula graduated from the department of Iranian Philology, Faculty of Oriental Studies of St. Petersburg University in 1995. In 2001 at the same department he defended his doctoral thesis, published later as a monograph: Christianstvo i persidskaja knizhnost' XIII-XVIII vv. [Christianity and the Persian Manuscript Tradition in the 13-17th centuries] Orthodox Palestine Collection, vol. 101 (St Petersburg, 2004). This was the first complex study of this group of texts based on the whole bulk of the material. While working on his doctoral thesis he started learning Syriac, which was the main liturgical and literary language of the Christian communities in Iran. Later he concentrated on studying Syriac hymns composed in the12th-14th centuries AD in the region, where Islam was a dominant religion. One of the goals of his research is finding connections between Christian and Islamic literary traditions in the mediaeval Near East. Anton studied and published several important Syriac texts, of which most important are: An Autobiographic Hymn by Givargis Warda. in Studien zur Orientalischen Kirchengeschichte. Herausgegeben von Martin Tamcke. Syriaca II (M�nster, 2004): 229-243. Also published in English: A Hymn by Givargis Warda on the Childhood of Christ in Syriaca III (M�nster, 2005): 145-176. At the same time he has been working as a researcher and curator in the Oriental Department of the Hermitage Museum, where his position is head of the Byzantine and Near-Eastern Section. He studies Islamic Art and also acts as a curator of different exhibitions and editor of the catalogues: Beyond the Palace Walls. Islamic Art from the State Hermitage Museum. Islamic Art in a World (Edinburgh, 2006). He is also the author of 3 essays and more than 30 catalogue entries in Vo Drortsakh I v Shatrakh: Islamskij mi rot Kitaja do Evropy [In Palaces and tents. Islamic World from China to Europe] (St. Petersburg, 2008).

Riddles as Political Emblems
Ali Asghar Seyed-Ghorab, University of Leiden

One of the genres of Persian poetry that has received little attention is the literary riddle. In this paper, I will investigate the political significance of literary riddles composed during the early phase of Persian poetry between the 10th and 12th centuries. The questions to be addressed are: what were the possible reasons for the inclusion of this genre in the Persian panegyrics (qasidas)? What is the function of a riddling qasida in a courtly environment? And why did poets choose the genre of riddle for this specific purpose? Many qasidas are symbols of the ruler's power, freezing an important moment in the life of the patron in which some aspects of his rule are depicted. In Ghaznavid poetry, many insignia of the court such as a horse, pen, sword, etc. are individually depicted in detail. In this paper, I will argue that the Islamic dynasties including the Ghaznavids, not only modelled their entire administrative systems on the Sasanian bureaucracy, but also the way the monarchs were celebrated by artists continued in the Islamic era in an adjusted form. The riddling qasida gave them the possibility to replace visual artefacts connected to the pre-Islamic Persian kings by riddles.

Ali Asghar Seyed-Ghorab was born in Tehran and has lived in the Netherlands since 1986. He studied English language and literature (M.A.) at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and Persian language and culture (M.A.) at Leiden University. He completed his Ph.D. at Leiden University, specializing in Persian literature and mysticism. He is currently chairman of the Persian Department at Leiden University. He has published several books and articles on various aspects of Iranian culture, including Courtly Riddles: Enigmatic Embellishments in Early Persian Poetry, 2008; The Essence of Modernity: A Study of Mirza Yusof Khan Mostashar ad-Dowla Tabrizi's Treatise on Law (Yak Kalima), 2007, (revised second edition 2008, together with S. McGlinn); The Treasury of Tabriz: the Great Il-Khanid Compendium, 2007 (together with S. McGlinn); Gog and Magog: The Clans of Chaos in World Literature, 2007 (together with F. Doufikar-Aerts & S. McGlinn) all with Rozenberg (Amsterdam) and Purdue University Press (West Lafayette, Indiana); and Layli and Majnun: Love, Madness and Mystic Longing in Nizami's Epic Romance, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003; The Mirror of Meanings (Mir'at al-Ma'ani), translated with an introduction and glossary, Mazda, Costa Mesa, California 2002, (critical Persian text prepared by N. Pourjavady); "Majnun's Image as a Serpent" in The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric, eds. J.W. Clinton & K. Talattof, New York: Palgrave, 2000, pp. 83-95. He has also published several volumes of Dutch translations on modern Persian poetry and prose (two volumes on Sohrab Sepehri, Forugh Farrokhzad, Ahmad Shamlu, Nader Naderpur, Shahrnush Parsipur and Hushang Golshiri). In 2007 he was elected a member of the 'Young Academy' of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW).

Retrieving Women's Voices in Early Persian Poetry
Sunil Sharma, University of Boston

This paper takes up the problem of understanding the contribution of women poets such as Mahsati, Rabiah, and others, in the early years of New Persian literature. The textual evidence for poetry by women is found in a number of sources, mainly anthologies and biographical dictionaries, for there are no independent divans composed by any female poet from this time. Women's poetry is found mainly non-courtly genres and forms, such as ruba'i and ghazal, not in qasida and masnavi, which helps us better understand the social and literary milieux in which literature outside the proscribed space of courtly circles was produced and practiced. While writing about the achievements of women poets, later writers of biographical dictionaries viewed them in the dichotomy of pious sufi versus woman of the bazaar, or as the daughter of a notable, thus not allowing them to have complex roles in society. The description of women's lives in such sources suggests how the biographical accounts of them were crafted in order to give their readers specific views of the literary past.

Sunil Sharma is Senior Lecturer at Boston University and Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University. He is the author of Persian Poetry at the Indian Frontier: Mas'ud Sa'd Salman of Lahore (2000), Amir Khusraw: Poet of Sultans and Sufis (2005), and co-editor of a volume of essays, The Necklace of the Pleiades (2007).

The Man with the Panther's skin: Rustam before Firdousi?
Nicholas Sims-Williams, SOAS, London

The story of Rustam is best known from the Shahnama. By bringing together literary and iconographic sources for the name Rustam and elements of his story from pre-Islamic Sogdiana, Bactria and Gandhara, this paper will show that the Rustam saga was already known in parts of the pre-Islamic Iranian world.

Nicholas Sims-Williams' main field of research is Middle Iranian philology. He studied Old Iranian, Middle Iranian and Sanskrit at the University of Cambridge. He has been employed at SOAS, University of London, since 1976, becoming Professor of Iranian and Central Asian Studies in 1994. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a foreign member of the national academies of France and Austria. At present he is working on the publication and analysis of documents and inscriptions in the Bactrian language of ancient Afghanistan and on a catalogue of Christian manuscripts in the Sogdian language.

Mithraic Societies: A Lasting Structure for Iranian Brotherhoods
Aboulala Soudavar, independent scholar, New York

Several recent studies of the Sufi and dervish orders, as well as the rites of the Zurkhaneh wrestlers, have hinted at a possible connection to an ancient Mithraic cult. Yet, as noted by Marcel Simon in regards to Roman Mithraic societies, the latter did not offer a new cult but rather the possibility of adhesion to a brotherhood. The purpose of this paper is to suggest the existence of similar Mithraic societies in pre-Islamic Iran, with a hierarchical structure, a code of conduct, initiation rites and symbols that was subsequently inherited by a vast segment of Iranian society at the sub-elite level, organized as brotherhoods. They of course had to adjust the tenets of their teachings to the prevailing religious atmosphere and underwent several metamorphoses; but because of their hierarchical structure, these brotherhoods had always the potential to grow militant and become a political force. Thus at times, they were feared and persecuted by the elite in power, and at others, they actually took the reins of power.

Abolala Soudavar completed his university education at the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris (1967), Stanford University (1968) and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Pratiques, Paris (1981). He was Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Tehran University from 1970 to 1977. He is a member of the Board of Trustees/Visiting Committee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Chicago (1995-7), the Arthur M Sackler Gallery (Smithsonian Institution) in Washington, and the Harvard University Museums. His recent publications include "The Han-Lin Academy and the Persian Royal Library" in the Festschrift Volume for Prof. John Woods (2006), "Achaemenid Bureaucratic Practices and Safavid Falsification of History" in SIE 2003 Proceedings (2006), "The Significance of Av. cithra, OPers. ciça, MPers cihr, and NPers cehr, for the Iranian Cosmogony of Light" in Iranica Antiqua (2006), '"The Mongol Legacy of Persian Farmans", in The Legacy of Genghis Khan (2006).

Sparkling and Ravishing: Wine in Rudaki's Poetry
Kamran Talattof, University of Arizona, Tucson

Rudaki (859-940/941 CE), like many other classical Persian poets, uses the word wine in its many forms and all associated vocabulary in many of his poems. However, he surpasses all other descriptions when he presents the process of wine making in a highly allegorical poem entitled "Mother of Wine." Through contextual, historical, and discursive analyses of this poem the paper argues that this poem - written in the form of qasida - is, despite general assumptions about this old form, very well-structured, organized, and with a unified meaning. Moreover, the poem, which seems to have been written to be performed for a live audience reflects the discourse of the Samanids (819-999 CE - the first native dynasty after the Muslim Arab conquest of Persia) as they saw themselves to be the continuation of the pre-Islamic Sasanians (224-651 CE). It does so through synchronic and diachronic portrayals and references. Paying attention to these particularities is perhaps an exegesis of post-revolutionary (since 1979) readings of classical literature. In this period, new challenges have emerged. Critics have to resist the temptation offered and the restriction imposed by the state ideology on their modes of reading as they have to resist a return to the limited pre-Revolutionary reading of such works in terms of Persian identity. As regards Rudaki, for example, he has either been the subject of the constrained religious reading the same way many other classical poets such as Nizami (12th century CE) or Hafiz (14th century CE) have been in the last few decades or he has been totally ignored. Both the religious reading and the oblivious attitude are constructed against, say, Nafisi's reading of these works. In his monumental book on Rudaki, Nafisi, is very concerned with purity of the Persian culture and sees Rudaki as a protector of such purity.

Kamran Talattof (Ph. D., University of Michigan 1996) is the professor of Persian language and literature and Iranian culture at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He has taught Persian for over fifteen years. He has had extensive training in teaching Persian as a second language and he has given many presentations in different workshops nationwide. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature (Syracuse University Press, 2000); Modern Persian: Spoken and Written with D. Stilo and J. Clinton (Yale University Press, 2005); Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry with A. Karimi-Hakkak (Brill, 2004); The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric with J. Clinton (Palgrave, 2000); and Contemporary Debates in Islam: An Anthology of Modernist and Fundamentalist Thought with M. Moaddel (St. Martin Press, 2000). He is the co-translator of Women Without Men by Shahrnoosh Parsipur, with J. Sharlet (Syracuse University Press, 1998) and Touba: The Meaning of the Night by Shahrnoosh Parsipur, with H. Houshmand (Feminist Press, 2006). Many of his articles also focus on issues of gender, ideology, culture, and language pedagogy. His forthcoming projects include a monograph on Sexuality, Modernity, and Popular Arts in 1970s Iran and the production of two intermediate level Persian books: Modern Persian: Written Spoken, Volume 3&4. Kamran Talattof has received a few awards for his teaching and services to the field of Persian and Iranian Studies. He has served on a number of ISIS and MESA committees, as the editor of SIS Newsletter, and as the book review editor of the Journal of Iranian Studies.

On the early Persian version of the Arday Viraf nama
Olga Yastrebova, National Library of Russia, St Petersburg

All the versions of Zoroastrian books written in the Persian language in Arabic script are usually considered by scholars as secondary and consequently deserving much less attention than their Pahlavi versions. These Pahlavi versions are normally regarded as "original". The text of the Persian Arday Viraf nama (in prose) is no exception, and probably this is the reason why it has never been fully published or thoroughly studied. In the European collections there are five copies of this work, all of them relatively late (17th-19th centuries) and originating from India. All of them descend from a copy made in 894/1525 in Isfahan by Iranian Zoroastrians for their Indian brothers in faith. The text is anonymous and undated, but some archaic peculiarities of its language point to a rather early time for its production. It is very close to the poetic version of the subject written in the 13th century by the Zoroastrian author Zartusht Bahram, and obviously it is the same text on which Zartusht's version is based. There is much difference between the early prose version and the famous Pahlavi Arta Viraz Namak (The Book of the Righteous Viraz). Detailed comparison of the two texts shows that although both have a similar compositional outline and there are some extracts that coincide almost word by word, at the same time there are significant discrepancies. For example, they have completely different historical introductions; there are numerous dissimilarities in the opening part in the description of Paradise. The Persian version even contains a didactic passage ("The Admonition of Srosh") which is very close to one of the passages from the famous "The Tale of Barlaam and Joasaph". And a closer look at the Pahlavi version shows that it actually contains two descriptions of the journey to Hell - one literally coinciding with the description of the Persian version, and another one different from it. Scholars agree that the text of the Pahlavi Arta Viraz Namak has undergone numerous revisions and its final editing probably took place as late as 9th-10th or even the 11th century. Comparing it with the Persian version we may propose that the process of editing at some stage also included the combination of two or more versions of the subject, and one of the versions used for the purpose was either the Persian one in question or some text very closely related to it.

Olga Yastrebova works as the Keeper of Oriental Collections at the Manuscript Department, National Library of Russia and is also a part-time lecturer of Persian language at the Oriental Faculty of St. Petersburg State University. Her field of scholarly interests involves research of the manuscript collections of the National Library of Russia (she has published a catalogue of Persian and Tajik documents in the Library's collections in 1999 and is involved in the description of the new acquisitions of Islamic manuscripts), and studies in Zorastrian literature written in the Persian language ("The manuscripts of Changranghache-name and Arday-Viraf-name by Zartosht-e Bahram-e Pazhdu", Studia Orientalia (Finnish Oriental Society), No. 95 (2003); "The Zoroastrian author in the contemporary literary context: Turkic-Mongol loan words in Ardây Vîrâf nâma by Zartush Bahram" Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo Universiteta. Ser. 9, Vyp. 4, pt.2 (2007).