File:The Open court (1887) (14753187796).jpg

Identifier: opencourt47920caru (find matches)
Title: The Open court
Year: 1887 (1880s)
Authors: Carus, Paul, 1852-1919 Open Court Publishing company, Chicago
Subjects: Religion Religion and science
Publisher: Chicago : The Open Court Pub. Co.
Contributing Library: Morris Library, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Digitizing Sponsor: CARLI: Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois

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se in this style was Daqiqi(tenth century), a professed Zoroastrian, who had begun to writean Epic of the Kings of Persia, when his life was brought to an un-timely end by the hand of an assassin. This Epic was next takenup by the greatest poet of the court of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna(eleventh century), Firdawsi, who lived to complete in sixty thou-sand verses his famous Shahnanm or Book of Kings, which is oneof the most valuable documents in the modern Persian language.It was possibly due to the fame of this work, which was so essen-tially nationalistic in character, that the Kalila and Dimna of Rudaki,which was non-Persian in origin, sank into comparative oblivion.Since Firdawsi, as it were, exhausted the materials of the heroicage, only a few writers after him attempted to treat of the earlykings. He himself turned to the romantic epic in mathnavi form inhis Ynsuf and Zalaykha, and set a model which was to be copiedand surpassed by later poets like Nizami and Jami. It was this style
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Ife&pfoJfi \^J^jS^\ l-T(&&M: THE ASCENT OF MUHAMMAD TO HEA\ EN Sixteenth Century(British Museum, London) 24 THE OPEN COURT of composition which proved most attractive to the great paintersof the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The range of topics dealt with by the mathnavi writers is strictlylimited. It was no part of a poets ambition to discover new sub-jects. His business was to give a perfect setting to a familiar story,very much as the religious artists of Europe seldom went outsidea limited number of stereotyped subjects, to which they gave theimpress of their style without any attempt to treat their subjectin an original way. The favorite themes were the story of Josephas told in the Qnran, the story of the Loves of Layla and Majnun,and of Khusrau and Shirin as told in the Shahnama, and the fabu-lous adventures of Alexander the Great. It is not, however, in the mathnavi that we must look for thechief beauties of Persian poetry, but in the ghazal or love-lyric, inw

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