. Persia past and present; a book of travel and research, with more than two hundred illustrations and a map . radise, which has come to usfrom Persian through the Greek, while gul and bulbul, thePersian nightingale and rose, are familiar to all readers ofEastern poetry. The title of Persian literature to a place among the greatliteratures of the world is a recognized one, and it is in thisdomain perhaps that Persia makes the greatest claim upon ourinterest. In age the Avesta and the Old Persian Inscriptionscarry us back at least to the sixth century before Christ andpossibly earlier; the Pahl
. Persia past and present; a book of travel and research, with more than two hundred illustrations and a map . radise, which has come to usfrom Persian through the Greek, while gul and bulbul, thePersian nightingale and rose, are familiar to all readers ofEastern poetry. The title of Persian literature to a place among the greatliteratures of the world is a recognized one, and it is in thisdomain perhaps that Persia makes the greatest claim upon ourinterest. In age the Avesta and the Old Persian Inscriptionscarry us back at least to the sixth century before Christ andpossibly earlier; the Pahlavi literature belongs to the Sasanianperiod from the third to the sixth century after Christ; andthe Modern Persian began within the last thousand years. Itsprang up a century or two after the Arab conquest as a re-naissance movement with the revival of the old national feeling;and this period is certainly the most interesting of all. Someknowledge of Firdausi, Saadi, and Hafiz belongs to true cul-ture, and Omar Khayyam has become an English classicthrough FitzGeralds version. The less-known names of the. His Royal Highness Muzaffak ad-Din, Shah of Persia PERSIAN LITERATURE 31 romantic poetic Nizami, the dervish Jalal ad-Din Rumi, andthe mystic Jami (d. 1492), the last classic poet of Persia,should be mentioned as deserving to be known to lovers ofliterature. Little space remains for writing about the influence of Persiaupon our own poetry. Persia was hardly known to Englandbefore the sixteenth century, yet Chaucer alludes to Persianblue, pers, in the Prologue. Among the Elizabethans, Pres-ton dramatized the story of Cambises, Marlowe has Persiannames and Persian scenes in his Tamburlaine^ and Shaksperealludes to Persian attire in King Lea7\ to a Persian prince in Merchant of Venice^ and to a voyage to Persia in hisComedy of Errors. Milton summarizes the early history ofPersia in the third book of his Paradise Regained, besidesreferring to Ecbatan, Hispahan, Tauris, and Casbee
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