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.
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