32(a) - ZOROASTRIAN PAHLAVĪ WRITINGS

Summary

Of the imaginative literature of Persia in Sasanian times almost nothing survives in Middle Persian, and this has tended to obscure its width, variety and richness. Some survives, however, through Arabic and Persian translations, and a good deal more in Persian recensions and adaptations. The originals were destroyed partly during the Arab conquest and some subsequent foreign invasions, notably the Mongol onslaught, and partly through religious fanaticism in Iran itself, down to recent times. But the most important factor for the disappearance of Middle Persian works was the neglect and disuse that they suffered as a result of the change of the script and the adoption of Islam. After a lull, a new literature – that of New Persian – emerged, which embodied and continued many of the norms and traditions of Sasanian literature and met the literary needs of the people. It is to this literature above all that we must turn for an appreciation of Sasanian literary genres and conventions.

Apart from religious literature, the most important genres were poetry, fiction, wisdom literature, history, and informative writing. Poetry is perhaps the most elusive of these genres, not because it was neglected or weak, but because Sasanian poetry was largely united with music in the art of the minstrels, who had a tradition of oral transmission and usually did not commit their songs to writing.

With the fall of the empire, court minstrelsy, which was highly cultivated by Sasanian monarchs and the nobility, suffered a grievous blow; but the tradition continued, and when local dynasties emerged on Persian soil, court patronage was renewed and the Sasanian tradition was revived in a new garb.