one month and seventeen days.
All these kings were portrayed in the manuscript. Another medieval historian, Hamza Isfahani, saw just such a manuscript (or perhaps the very same one). He left a description of the portraits of “kings and courtiers, famous guardians of the fire, all priests and others noted among the Persians”. These illustrations were typical official portraits. The crown was precisely depicted, the kings stood or sat on their throne. The manuscript was translated from the original into Arabic for the Caliph Hisham. It was completed in 731 CE and this is probably the earliest record of the translation of Middle Persian works.
Portal and minarets, Masjid-e-Jāmeh Yazd. Yazd, Iran.
The Gate of All Nations, c. 470 BCE. Persepolis, Iran.
A few compendiums of the 10th-12th centuries preserve fragments of similar translations and they confirm that in terms of their content such books were records of state affairs, arranged not by year but by separate reigns. Around the 4th century comes the first reliable report of literary works being among such records, and of their being collected into specific anthologies, their abundant subject-matter relating as a rule to distant antiquity. We know in particular of one such story, Rast-sukhan (The Truthful Word).
The story has not survived, but apparently it contained the legendary history of the founder of the Sassanian state – Ardashir, the son of Papak – and was similar to the Book of the Deeds of Ardashir, known in a late Sassanian version (4th century). It is possible that both these works were combined into one text in the 6th century. Despite the fact that it recounts various stories in terms of feats of chivalry – the struggle with a fabulous “serpent”, the freeing of beautiful women, tournaments, miraculous portents, military stratagems and so on – this story was indisputably semi-official insofar as it defends the legitimacy of the Sassanid rulers’ power, asserting that they are descended from the ancient Iranian kings. It is curious that at the same time an “anti-romance” also existed and was widely known in certain circles opposed to the dynasty. In it, Ardashir turns out to be the son of a soldier called Sasan and of the wife of a cobbler called Papak (Papak, it is true, was a sorcerer).
Fragments of eastern-Iranian myths about the hero-kings, the Kayanids and Peshdadians, survive in isolated Yashts of the Avesta, written in the alphabet specially created for it in the 5th century, and subsequently glossed and partly translated into Middle Persian (the language of the Avesta is very archaic). Names of heroes and various of their feats are mentioned (for example, their battles or their victory over the forces of evil), but not a single more-or-less complete myth has reached us.
These legends became especially popular in the 5th century, perhaps as a result of the Sassanids’ capture of the city of Balkh in eastern Iran – according to legend the very city once ruled by the Kayanids. This was the period when the Sassanids began tracing their lineage back to these epic hero-kings. At the same time, epic poems dating from the Parthian era were being recorded.
Only one of them has survived, The Chronicle of Zarer, relating the Iranians’ struggle for the Zoroastrian faith against their famous enemies, the “Turanians” (in the Sassanian version they are called Chionites, but that is a prose retelling). Even later, in the 6th and early 7th centuries, there were cycles written about individual Sassanid shahanshahs, such as the conqueror of the Turks and the usurper of the throne, Varahran Chobin. Apparently there were also books in existence at that time concerning the “wonders of the world”, similar to the stories of Sinbad the Sailor, and there was a geographical literature and stories of the exploits of holy men. It is well known that in the 6th century a collection of edifying novella-type tales, Kalila and Dimna (or Pañchatantra), was translated from Sanskrit into Middle Persian. This book was by no means mere light reading – it was valued as “a book full of wise thoughts”.
Thus, towards the end of the Sassanian period several literary genres already existed as well as official history and religious works. Tradition relates that the last of Iran’s shahanshahs, Yazdegerd III, commissioned a scholar called Daneshvar to compile a dynastic history.
This book, the Khwataw-namak (Book of Rulers), grouped together myths, historical romance and royal records in a single cycle. This marked the beginning of a written tradition, although one must bear in mind that such works would hardly have found a wide readership. Written Middle Persian was extremely complicated and hard to understand. It involved a vast quantity of heterograms and in addition the lack of vowel points and the enormous polysemy of individual signs made the writing so difficult that contemporaries had good reason to name it “the devil’s script”. When reading these books, dabirs (scribes) and priests often had to “translate” them into spoken Persian.
To make this clearer (for the problems of literature and language will play an important role later on in this account), we will cite the literal translation of one section from the Sassanian romance, Book of the Deeds of Ardashir:
“(1) In the book of the deeds of Ardashir, son of Papak, it is thus written that after the death of Alexander Rumi in the kingdom of Iran there were 240 rulers of principalities. (2) Isfahan, Parsa and the adjacent provinces were under the hand of the governor Ardawan. (3) Papak was marzban and governor of Parsa and was among those designated by Ardawan. (4) Ardawan sat at Istakhr (5) and Papak did not have any son to bear [his] name. (6) And Sasan was shepherd to Papak and always to be found among the sheep, but [he] was of the line of Darius.”
Everything underlined in this text was written in heterograms. And this is one of the easiest texts! Consequently, as previously under the Parthians, the basic literary works – epics, folk tales and true histories – were recited by poets and gosans, versifiers of epics, at courts and the castles of “knights”. Their names have survived and in later works there are a number of stories about their talent and their outstanding role in court life, for example the story of Barbad, the gosan of the shahanshah Khusrau II. We know only four lines from one of his poems, but these are the oldest verses at present known in the Dari language – the spoken language of late Sassanian Iran, which was to become the Iranian literary language two centuries later. They were preserved by the Arabic-speaking historian, Ibn Khurdadhbih: “Caesar [here the Byzantine emperor] is like the moon, but Khakan [king of the Turks] is like the sun. But my lord [Khusrau II] is a mighty cloud [Khusrau II was called Parwiz, “cloud”]. When he wishes he will cover the moon; when he wishes, the sun”.
These unsophisticated verses are one of the first examples of the ruba’i, the quatrain, a literary form that was to become extremely widespread in the Iran of the age of Islam.
It is beyond the scope of this study even to draw up a brief list of the problems connected with the new Islamic religion, which has been the dominant ideology in Iran from the 7th century to the present day.
However, one of its aspects is of great importance. From the very beginning, Islam rejected figurative representation, or more exactly the depiction of living creatures, as a means of propagating its ideas. In this respect Islam differed from Buddhism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, which made widespread use of figurative representation and had for a long time anthropomorphised their deities. This hostile attitude towards the depiction of living creatures – though in essence only towards anthropomorphic representation as an object of worship – had a number of consequences that were decisive for the development of art in Iran.
Firstly, it caused a gradual decline of monumental art forms such as rock reliefs, stucco panels and wall-painting (although we know that the latter existed in eastern Iran up to the 13th century, and in central and western Iran up to the 17th century).
Secondly, it diminished the status of the artist, at any rate during the first centuries of Islam when it expelled him from the ranks of those creating works pleasing to God, and transformed his occupation
