From Persian to Arabic (Concluded)

Abstract

Shdhpuhr in his brief but vicious thrust westward gained surprising but fleeting victories in Roman territory in Asia. Persian influence in those territories, aside from the introduction of Manicheism, was perhaps not greatly enhanced thereby. Shahpuhr took Greco-Roman treasures, including arts and crafts to Persia with him. He did not have to go to Antioch to secure those Western elements of wisdom which, with other things, he is said to have incorporated in his Avesta. Much wisdom of this sort he might have obtained from Mdni, who to all appearances was in high favor at his court and frequently in close contact with his person, even on these Western campaigns. No one to the writer's knowledge has yet looked for any sign of Manichaean influence in anything that might be identifiable as Shahpuhrian Avesta.5 One thing is universally identified-the writing of Persian in a Western alphabet, which Mani taught his people. This had little permanent success, except perhaps in whatever impetus it gave to the development of the Avestan alphabet, in Persia proper. Khurasqn became its major habitat, and thence it spread eastward, not westward. Western Iranistdn clung for all but its Avesta to "good old-fashioned" Pahlavi. The result was that with the coming of the Arabs and Islam, however much or little else the Arabs may be found to have given the Persians, they presently did introduce to them their alphabetic writing. With the Koran, official correspondence, and the transfer of the tax bureaus from Persian to Arabic, this traveled eastward apace. When with the Saff rids in the latter half of the third Moslem (= the ninth Christian) century and more fully with the Samanids throughout the fourth Moslem (= the tenth Christian) century Persian literature became once more really articulate in Khurasan and adjacent regions, the orthography of the Persian language in Arabic alphabetic writing was soon thoroughly developed. With the rise in Persian letters came the unfolding of a more than semi-independent unfolding of general culture in the Moslem Far East, in many ways comparable to that in Spain, the Moslem Far West. Together with Persian poetic, epistolary, and other literature much of the same nature was written in Arabic, a section of Arabic literature made much of in the fourth volume of al-Thacdlibi's Yatimat al-Dahr, which still continues to receive cavalierly treatment beneath its due merits in the latest revision of Brockelmann's Geschichte der arabischen Literatur. A number of their poets and writers of letters were bilingual.