Although the printing press is invading the domain of the Persian scribe, the art of calligraphy is still cultivated, and artistic penmen are held in great repute.
EARLY LITERATURE.
It is evident that the early kings of Persia possessed royal libraries, containing historical records and official decrees, for in the book of Ezra[[15]] it is said that “search was made in the house of rolls,” in Babylon, for the imperial decree of Cyrus concerning the rebuilding of the temple. It was afterwards found at Ecbatana “in the palace that is in the province of the Medes,” the decree having been made in the first year of King Cyrus. But aside from some of the inscriptions, the earliest literature we now have belonging to this people is the Zend-Avesta, our present version of which was possibly derived from texts which already existed in the time of the Achæmenian kings. Although there are no facts to prove that the text of the Avesta as we now possess it was committed to writing previous to the Sassanian dynasty[[16]] Prof. Darmesteter thinks it possible that “Herodotus may have heard the Magi sing, in the fifth century before Christ, the very same Gāthas which are sung now a days by the Mobeds of Bombay.”[[17]]
As some of these early texts must have existed before the fifth century B.C. we place them chronologically before the inscriptions of Darius the Great.[[18]]
Historians claim that ancient Persian manuscripts were destroyed, when Alexander, in a condition of drunkenness, ordered the beautiful city of Persepolis to be set on fire, in order to please the courtesan Thais.
The modern worshippers of Alexander, however, have placed around his name all the possible glory of military achievement with a vast amount of rhetoric, concerning “the young hero” and “the thunder of his tread.” They claim, indeed, that he had very few faults, except cruelty, drunkenness, and some worse forms of dissipation. Their defense of this barbarous act is that “only the palace and its environs were burned” at this particular time, and that this was an act of requital for the pillage of Athens, and also to impress the Persians with a due sense of his own importance. Whatever may have been the motive, or physical condition, of the incendiary, it is highly probable that when the palace, and its environs were burned, the royal libraries went down in the flames, and certain it is, that from the time of the Macedonian conquest to the foundation of the Sassanian dynasty, the history of the Persian language and literature is almost a blank page. The legends of the Sassanian coins, the inscriptions of their emperors, and the translation of the Avesta, by Sassanian scholars, represent another phase of the language and literature of Īrān.
The men who, at the rising of the new national dynasty, became the reformers, teachers, and prophets of Persia, formed their language and the whole train of their ideas upon a Semitic model. The grammar of the Sassanian dialect, however, was Persian, and “this was a period of religious and metaphysical delirium, when everything became everything, when Māyā and Sophia, Mitra and Christ, Virāf and Isaiah, Belus and Kronos were mixed up in one jumbled system of inane speculation, from which at last the East was delivered by the doctrines of Mohammed, and the West by the pure Christianity of the Teutonic nations.”[[19]]
It was five hundred years after Alexander before Persian literature and religion were revived, and the books of the Zend-Avesta collected, either from scattered manuscripts or from oral tradition. The first collection of traditions, which finally resulted in the Shāh-Nāmah, was made also during the Sassanian dynasty. Firdusī tells us that there was a Pahlevan, of the family of the Dihkans,[[20]] who loved to study the traditions of antiquity. He therefore summoned from the provinces, all the old men who could remember portions of the ancient legends, and questioned them concerning the stories of the country. The Dihkan then wrote down the traditions of the kings and the changes in the empire as they had been recited to him. But this work, which was commenced under Nushirvan and finished under Yezdejird, the last of the Sassanians, was destroyed by the command of Omar, the Arabian chieftain.
The scanty literature of the Sassanian age was somewhat augmented by a notable collection of Sanskṛit fables which was brought to the court of the Persian king, Koshrou,[[21]] and translated into the Persian, or Pahlavī tongue. This collection comprised the fables of the Panćatantra and the Hitopadeśa, and from it the later European fables of La Fontaine probably originated.