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146-503: The Hamzanama ( Persian / Urdu : حمزه‌نامه Hamzenâme , lit.   ' Epic of Hamza ' ) or Dastan-e-Amir Hamza (Persian/Urdu: داستان امیر حمزه , Dâstân-e Amir Hamze , lit.   ' Adventures of Amir Hamza ' ) narrates the legendary exploits of Hamza ibn Abdul-Muttalib , an uncle of Muhammad . Most of the stories are extremely fanciful, "a continuous series of romantic interludes, threatening events, narrow escapes, and violent acts". The Hamzanama chronicles

292-721: A Karenid as its governor. The reason behind the appointment was to avoid further family conflict in the province, and in order to gain more direct control of the province. During the Muslim conquest of Persia , the last Sasanian king Yazdegerd III fled to Sakastan in the mid-640s, where its governor Aparviz (who was more or less independent), helped him. However, Yazdegerd III quickly ended this support when he demanded tax money that he had failed to pay. In 650, Abd-Allah ibn Amir , after having secured his position in Kerman , sent an army under Mujashi ibn Mas'ud to Sakastan. After having crossed

438-638: A Dari dialect. In the 19th century, under the Qajar dynasty , the dialect that is spoken in Tehran rose to prominence. There was still substantial Arabic vocabulary, but many of these words have been integrated into Persian phonology and grammar. In addition, under the Qajar rule, numerous Russian , French , and English terms entered the Persian language, especially vocabulary related to technology. The first official attentions to

584-527: A Sasanian vassal during the reign of Shapur's father Ardashir I (r. 224–242), who also had the ancient city Zrang rebuilt, which became the capital of the province. Shapur's son Narseh was the first to appointed as the governor of province, which he would govern until 271, when the Sasanian prince Hormizd was appointed as the new governor. Later in ca. 281, Hormizd revolted against his cousin Bahram II . During

730-418: A dictionary called Words of Scientific Association ( لغت انجمن علمی ), which was completed in the future and renamed Katouzian Dictionary ( فرهنگ کاتوزیان ). The first academy for the Persian language was founded on 20 May 1935, under the name Academy of Iran . It was established by the initiative of Reza Shah Pahlavi , and mainly by Hekmat e Shirazi and Mohammad Ali Foroughi , all prominent names in

876-456: A fascinating early glimpse of the development of Hindi. The heirs of Nawal Kishore apparently published a 662-page Hindi version of the dastan as late as 1939. During this same period Nawal Kishore added a third version of the Hamza story: a verse rendering of the romance , a new masnavi by Tota Ram Shayan called Tilism-e Shayan Ma ruf Bah Dastan-e Amir Hamza published in 1862. At 30,000 lines, it

1022-560: A fifteenth-century Turkish version twenty-four volumes long. Moreover, even in Iran the story continued to develop over time: by the mid-nineteenth century the Hamza romance had grown to such an extent that it was printed in an edition comprising about twelve hundred very large pages. By this time the dastan was often called Rumuz-e Hamza (The Subtleties of Hamza), and had also made itself conspicuously at home in India . Annemarie Schimmel judges that

1168-500: A language name is first attested in English in the mid-16th century. Farsi , which is the Persian word for the Persian language, has also been used widely in English in recent decades, more often to refer to Iran's standard Persian. However, the name Persian is still more widely used. The Academy of Persian Language and Literature has maintained that the endonym Farsi is to be avoided in foreign languages, and that Persian

1314-417: A literary language considerably different from the spoken Persian of the time. This became the basis of what is now known as "Contemporary Standard Persian". There are three standard varieties of modern Persian: All these three varieties are based on the classic Persian literature and its literary tradition. There are also several local dialects from Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan which slightly differ from

1460-568: A member of a radical Islamic sect called the Kharijites , who was the leader of a rebel movement against the caliph Harun al-Rashid and his successors. This Persian Hamzah lived in the early 9th-century, and seems to have been a dashing rebel whose colorful exploits gave rise to many stories. He was known to have fought against the Abbasid caliph-monarch , and the local warriors from Sistan , Makran , Sindh and Khorasan are said to have joined him in

1606-564: A member of the Hindustani department of the famous Fort William College in Calcutta, composed the earliest printed version of the dastan in Urdu: the 500-page Dastan-e Amir Hamza , consisting of twenty-two dastans, or chapters, grouped into four "volumes." Ashk claims that the story he is telling goes back to the time of Mahmud of Ghazni , in the early eleventh century; he implies that his present text

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1752-584: A microfilm set at the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago is on the verge of completion. This immense cycle claims to be a translation of a (mythical) Persian original written by Faizi , one of the great literary figures of Akbar's court; this claim is made repeatedly on frontispieces, and here and there within the text. Like this purported Persian original, the Urdu version thus contains exactly eight daftars —even though, as

1898-529: A period of several centuries, Ottoman Turkish (which was highly Persianised itself) had developed toward a fully accepted language of literature, and which was even able to lexically satisfy the demands of a scientific presentation. However, the number of Persian and Arabic loanwords contained in those works increased at times up to 88%. In the Ottoman Empire, Persian was used at the royal court, for diplomacy, poetry, historiographical works, literary works, and

2044-520: A prolonged war against infidels . Although the ostensible goal of these conflicts is to eradicate idolatry and convert opponents to Islam , the latter is usually related with little fanfare at the end of the episode. Champions often proclaim their faith in Allah as they take to the battlefield, and sometimes reproach unbelievers for failing to grasp that the Muslims' past military success is prima facie evidence of

2190-528: A proofreader at Nawal Kishore Press, revised and embellished this edition. In the twentieth century, Abdul Bari Aasi adapted this version by removing all the couplets from it and toning down the melodramatic scenes. Owing to the popularity of the Ashk and Bilgrami versions in Urdu, Nawal Kishore also brought out in 1879 a counterpart work in Hindi called Amir Hamza Ki Dastan , by Pandits Kalicharan and Maheshdatt. This work

2336-500: A series of wives. His sons and grandsons by various wives appear one by one, perform heroic feats, and frequently die young. He and Amar have a brief but traumatic quarrel. Toward the very end of his life he must enter the Dark Regions, pursuing a series of frightful cannibal kings ; while their incursions are directly incited by Naushervan, Amar's own act of vicarious cannibalism seems somehow implicated as well. Almost all Hamza's army

2482-479: A short section describing events that set the stage for the appearance of the central hero. In this case, the place is Ctesiphon ( Madain ) in Iraq, and the initial protagonist is Buzurjmehr , a child of humble parentage who displays both a remarkable ability to decipher ancient scripts and great acumen in political affairs. By luck and calculated design, Buzurjmehr displaces the current vizier, and attaches himself first to

2628-580: A speaker of Persian. Persian is a member of the Western Iranian group of the Iranian languages , which make up a branch of the Indo-European languages in their Indo-Iranian subdivision . The Western Iranian languages themselves are divided into two subgroups: Southwestern Iranian languages, of which Persian is the most widely spoken, and Northwestern Iranian languages, of which Kurdish and Balochi are

2774-413: A threat from Landhaur, and thence onto Greece , where Bakhtak Bakhtyar has insidiously poisoned the kings against him. Hamza, of course, proves his mettle in these and other tests, but his marriage to Mihr Nigar is forestalled by the treacherous Gostaham , who arranges her nuptials with another. Hamza is seriously wounded in battle with Zubin, Mihr Nigar's prospective groom, and is rescued by the vazir of

2920-615: A vassal Kushanshah state before being overrun by the Hephthalites in the mid 5th century. Sassanid armies reconquered Sakastan in by 565, but lost the area to the Rashidun Caliphate after the mid 640s. The province was formed in ca. 240, during the reign of Shapur I , in his effort to centralise the empire; before that, the province was under the rule of the Parthian Suren Kingdom , whose ruler Ardashir Sakanshah became

3066-644: Is a continuation of Middle Persian , an official language of the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE), itself a continuation of Old Persian , which was used in the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE). It originated in the region of Fars ( Persia ) in southwestern Iran. Its grammar is similar to that of many European languages. Throughout history, Persian was considered prestigious by various empires centered in West Asia , Central Asia , and South Asia . Old Persian

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3212-610: Is a direct descendant of Middle and Old Persian. Gernot Windfuhr considers new Persian as an evolution of the Old Persian language and the Middle Persian language but also states that none of the known Middle Persian dialects is the direct predecessor of Modern Persian. Ludwig Paul states: "The language of the Shahnameh should be seen as one instance of continuous historical development from Middle to New Persian." The known history of

3358-436: Is a translation, or at least a rendering, of the written, presumably Persian text that the distinguished dastan-narrators of Mahmud's court first set down. Ashk also claims that his sources, the narrators of Mahmud's court, compiled fourteen volumes of Hamza's adventures. However, we have no evidence that Mahmud of Ghazni ever sponsored the production of such a work. Gyan Chand Jain thinks that in fact Ashk based his version on

3504-765: Is also spoken natively in the Tajik variety by a significant population within Uzbekistan , as well as within other regions with a Persianate history in the cultural sphere of Greater Iran . It is written officially within Iran and Afghanistan in the Persian alphabet , a derivative of the Arabic script , and within Tajikistan in the Tajik alphabet , a derivative of the Cyrillic script . Modern Persian

3650-606: Is attested in Old Persian cuneiform on inscriptions from between the 6th and 4th century BC. Middle Persian is attested in Aramaic -derived scripts ( Pahlavi and Manichaean ) on inscriptions and in Zoroastrian and Manichaean scriptures from between the third to the tenth centuries (see Middle Persian literature ). New Persian literature was first recorded in the ninth century, after the Muslim conquest of Persia , since then adopting

3796-425: Is conventionally divided into three stages: Early New Persian remains largely intelligible to speakers of Contemporary Persian, as the morphology and, to a lesser extent, the lexicon of the language have remained relatively stable. New Persian texts written in the Arabic script first appear in the 9th-century. The language is a direct descendant of Middle Persian, the official, religious, and literary language of

3942-492: Is destined to be Hamza's faithful companion. Unlike most Persian heroes, Hamza is not born to royalty, but is nonetheless of high birth, the son of the chief of Mecca . An auspicious horoscope prophesies an illustrious future for him. Hamza shows an early aversion to idol-worship , and with the aid of a supernatural instructor, develops a precocious mastery of various martial arts . He soon puts these skills to good use, defeating upstart warriors in individual combat, preventing

4088-464: Is in flight after suffering a fresh defeat at Amir Hamza's hands. He and his supporters arrive near Hoshruba and solicit the aid of the Emperor of Sorcerers. Before long, Amir Hamza's armies pursuing Laqa find themselves at war with Afrasiyab and his army of sorcerers. When hostilities break out Amir Hamza's grandson, Prince Asad, is the designated conqueror of the tilism of Hoshruba. Prince Asad sets out at

4234-520: Is lost in the Dark Regions, and he returns in a state of grief and desolation. Finally, he is summoned by the Prophet , his nephew, back to Mecca to beat off an attack by the massed infidel armies of the world. He succeeds, losing all his companions except Amar in the process, but dies at the hands of the woman Hindah , whose son he had killed. She devours his liver , cuts his body into seventy pieces , then hastily accepts Islam to save herself. The Prophet and

4380-455: Is not actually attested until 600 years later when it appears in the Sassanid era (224–651 AD) inscriptions, so any form of the language before this date cannot be described with any degree of certainty. Moreover, as a literary language, Middle Persian is not attested until much later, in the 6th or 7th century. From the 8th century onward, Middle Persian gradually began yielding to New Persian, with

4526-468: Is one of Afghanistan's two official languages, together with Pashto . The term Dari , meaning "of the court", originally referred to the variety of Persian used in the court of the Sasanian Empire in capital Ctesiphon , which was spread to the northeast of the empire and gradually replaced the former Iranian dialects of Parthia ( Parthian ). Tajik Persian ( форси́и тоҷикӣ́ , forsi-i tojikī ),

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4672-570: Is one of the earliest attested Indo-European languages. According to certain historical assumptions about the early history and origin of ancient Persians in Southwestern Iran (where Achaemenids hailed from), Old Persian was originally spoken by a tribe called Parsuwash , who arrived in the Iranian Plateau early in the 1st millennium BCE and finally migrated down into the area of present-day Fārs province. Their language, Old Persian, became

4818-641: Is that the dastan was invented during the reign of Muawiyah I (661–79) to keep loyalty to the Prophet's family alive among the people, despite official hostility and vilification. In his study of the Arabian epic, Malcolm Lyons discusses Sirat Hamzat al- Pahlawan , which is a parallel cycle of tales about Amir Hamza in Arabic, with similarities of names and places to the Hamzanama : thus Anushirwan corresponds to Nausheravan,

4964-486: Is the appropriate designation of the language in English, as it has the longer tradition in western languages and better expresses the role of the language as a mark of cultural and national continuity. Iranian historian and linguist Ehsan Yarshater , founder of the Encyclopædia Iranica and Columbia University 's Center for Iranian Studies, mentions the same concern in an academic journal on Iranology , rejecting

5110-486: The Encyclopædia Iranica notes that the Iranian, Afghan, and Tajiki varieties comprise distinct branches of the Persian language, and within each branch a wide variety of local dialects exist. The following are some languages closely related to Persian, or in some cases are considered dialects: More distantly related branches of the Iranian language family include Kurdish and Balochi . The Glottolog database proposes

5256-502: The Kalila wa Dimna . The language spread geographically from the 11th century on and was the medium through which, among others, Central Asian Turks became familiar with Islam and urban culture. New Persian was widely used as a trans-regional lingua franca , a task aided due to its relatively simple morphology, and this situation persisted until at least the 19th century. In the late Middle Ages, new Islamic literary languages were created on

5402-412: The pari ("fairy") race. Their ultimate subject matter was always simple: " razm o bazm ," the battlefield and the elegant courtly life, war and love. Hanaway mentions five principal dastans surviving from the pre-Safavid period (that is, from the 15th-century and earlier): those that grew up around the adventures of the world-conqueror Alexander ( Alexander Romance ), the great Persian king Darius ,

5548-651: The British colonization , Persian was widely used as a second language in the Indian subcontinent . It took prominence as the language of culture and education in several Muslim courts on the subcontinent and became the sole "official language" under the Mughal emperors . The Bengal Sultanate witnessed an influx of Persian scholars, lawyers, teachers, and clerics. Thousands of Persian books and manuscripts were published in Bengal. The period of

5694-457: The Dasht-i Lut desert, Mujashi ibn Mas'ud arrived to Sakastan. However, he suffered a heavy defeat and was forced to retreat. One year later, Abd-Allah ibn Amir sent an army under Rabi ibn Ziyad Harithi to Sakastan. After some time, he reached Zaliq, a border town between Kirman and Sakastan, where he forced the dehqan of the town to acknowledge Rashidun authority. He then did the same at

5840-536: The Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages . Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and used officially within Iran , Afghanistan , and Tajikistan in three mutually intelligible standard varieties , respectively Iranian Persian (officially known as Persian ), Dari Persian (officially known as Dari since 1964), and Tajiki Persian (officially known as Tajik since 1999). It

5986-512: The Mughal emperor Akbar about 1562. The written text augmented the story as traditionally told orally in dastan performances . The dastan (storytelling tradition) about Amir Hamza persists far and wide up to Bengal and Arakan , as the Mughal Empire controlled those territories. The longest version of the Hamzanama exists in Urdu and contains 46 volumes comprising over 45,000 pages. In Persian, dastan and qissa both mean "story," and

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6132-655: The Sultanate of Rum , Turkmen beyliks of Anatolia , Delhi Sultanate , the Shirvanshahs , Safavids , Afsharids , Zands , Qajars , Khanate of Bukhara , Khanate of Kokand , Emirate of Bukhara , Khanate of Khiva , Ottomans , and also many Mughal successors such as the Nizam of Hyderabad . Persian was the only non-European language known and used by Marco Polo at the Court of Kublai Khan and in his journeys through China. A branch of

6278-688: The Turkic , Armenian , Georgian , & Indo-Aryan languages . It also exerted some influence on Arabic, while borrowing a lot of vocabulary from it in the Middle Ages. Some of the world's most famous pieces of literature from the Middle Ages, such as the Shahnameh by Ferdowsi , the works of Rumi , the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám , the Panj Ganj of Nizami Ganjavi , The Divān of Hafez , The Conference of

6424-494: The Yemeni army from interdicting tribute to Naushervan, and defending Mecca from predatory – but not religious – foes. Naushervan learns of these sundry exploits, and invites Hamza to his court, where he promises him his daughter Mihr Nigar in marriage. The girl is thrilled at this match, for she has long yearned for Hamza, and has had one soulful but chaste evening with him. First, however, Naushervan sends Hamza to Ceylon to fend off

6570-460: The angels pray over every piece of the body, and Hamzah is rewarded with the high celestial rank of Commander of the Faithful . In this new tale, Amir Hamza's adventures bring him to Hoshruba, a magical world or " tilism ". The tilism of Hoshruba was conjured by sorcerers in defiance of Allah and the laws of the physical world. However, being a creation of magic, Hoshruba is not a permanent world. At

6716-483: The ezāfe construction, expressed through ī (modern e/ye ), to indicate some of the relations between words that have been lost with the simplification of the earlier grammatical system. Although the "middle period" of the Iranian languages formally begins with the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the transition from Old to Middle Persian had probably already begun before the 4th century BC. However, Middle Persian

6862-475: The pari king Shahpal, ruler of the realm of Qaf . In return for this act of kindness, Hamza gallantly agrees to subdue the rebellious elephant-eared Devs who have seized Shahpal's kingdom. The whole expedition to Qaf is to take eighteen days, and Hamza insists on fulfilling this debt of honor before his wedding. However, he is destined to be detained in Qaf not for eighteen days, but for eighteen years. At this point,

7008-530: The " Persianized " Turko-Mongol dynasties during the 12th to 15th centuries, and under restored Persian rule during the 16th to 19th centuries. Persian during this time served as lingua franca of Greater Persia and of much of the Indian subcontinent . It was also the official and cultural language of many Islamic dynasties, including the Samanids, Buyids , Tahirids , Ziyarids , the Mughal Empire , Timurids , Ghaznavids , Karakhanids , Seljuqs , Khwarazmians ,

7154-509: The 1871 Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami version published by Munshi Nawal Kishore press. The first is an abridged translation called The Romance Tradition in Urdu by Frances Pritchett of Columbia University . It is available in an expanded version on the website of the translator. In 2008 Musharraf Ali Farooqi , a Pakistani-Canadian author, translated the Lakhnavi/Bilgrami version into English as The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of

7300-494: The Auspicious Planetary Conjunction . He took seven years to translate this thousand-page adventure, producing a very close translation, without abridging the ornate passages. A Pakistani author, Maqbool Jahangir, wrote Dastan-e-Amir Hamza for children in the Urdu language. His version contains 10 volumes and was published by Ferozsons (also Ferozsons Publishers). The collection of Hamza stories begins with

7446-672: The Birds by Attar of Nishapur , and the miscellanea of Gulistan and Bustan by Saadi Shirazi , are written in Persian. Some of the prominent modern Persian poets were Nima Yooshij , Ahmad Shamlou , Simin Behbahani , Sohrab Sepehri , Rahi Mo'ayyeri , Mehdi Akhavan-Sales , and Forugh Farrokhzad . There are approximately 130 million Persian speakers worldwide, including Persians , Lurs , Tajiks , Hazaras , Iranian Azeris , Iranian Kurds , Balochs , Tats , Afghan Pashtuns , and Aimaqs . The term Persophone might also be used to refer to

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7592-470: The Dakhani Qissa-e jang-e amir Hamza because his plot agrees in many important particulars with the early Persian Qissa-e Hamza , though it disagrees in many others. However, the most popular version of the dastan in Urdu was that of Aman Ali Khan Bahadur Ghalib Lakhnavi published by Hakim Mohtasham Elaih Press, Calcutta in 1855. In the 1860s, one of the early publications of Munshi Nawal Kishore ,

7738-540: The Hamza story must have been popular in the Indian subcontinent from the days of Mahmud of Ghazni in the early eleventh century. The earliest solid evidence, however, seems to be a late-fifteenth-century set of paintings that illustrate the story; these were crudely executed, possibly in Jaunpur , perhaps for a not-too-affluent patron. In 1555, Babur noted with disapproval that the leading literary figure of Khurasan had recently "wasted his time" in composing an imitation of

7884-496: The Hamza story, and at least in Pashto it continues to flourish today, with printed pamphlet versions being produced. In Bengali it was popular among Muslims as early as the 18th-century, in a long verse romance called Amirhamjar puthi , which its authors, Fakir Garibullah and Saiyad Hamja, described as a translation from the Persian. This romance was printed repeatedly in pamphlet form in the nineteenth century, and even occasionally in

8030-587: The Hidden, and Zulmat the Dark, which contained countless dominions and smaller tilisms governed by sorcerer kings and sorceress queens, and where the dreaded Seven Monsters of the Grotto lurked. Emperor Afrasiyab was among the seven immortal sorcerers of Hoshruba who could not be killed while their counterparts lived. His fortune came to reveal itself on the palms of his hands . His left hand warned him of inauspicious moments and

8176-502: The Meccans from their hostility to the Prophet. The second is that wise courtiers devised the romance to cure a brain fever suffered by one of the Abbasid caliphs. The 1909 Indo-Persian version also gives two conflicting sources. The first is that the dastan was invented by Abbas , who used to tell it to the Prophet, his nephew, to cheer him up with stories of his other uncle's glory. The second

8322-558: The Middle Ages, and is because of the lack of the phoneme /p/ in Standard Arabic. The standard Persian of Iran has been called, apart from Persian and Farsi , by names such as Iranian Persian and Western Persian , exclusively. Officially, the official language of Iran is designated simply as Persian ( فارسی , fārsi ). The standard Persian of Afghanistan has been officially named Dari ( دری , dari ) since 1958. Also referred to as Afghan Persian in English, it

8468-532: The Ottoman Empire all spoke Persian, such as Sultan Selim I , despite being Safavid Iran's archrival and a staunch opposer of Shia Islam . It was a major literary language in the empire. Some of the noted earlier Persian works during the Ottoman rule are Idris Bidlisi 's Hasht Bihisht , which began in 1502 and covered the reign of the first eight Ottoman rulers, and the Salim-Namah , a glorification of Selim I. After

8614-521: The Persian language can be divided into the following three distinct periods: As a written language , Old Persian is attested in royal Achaemenid inscriptions. The oldest known text written in Old Persian is from the Behistun Inscription , dating to the time of King Darius I (reigned 522–486 BC). Examples of Old Persian have been found in what is now Iran , Romania ( Gherla ), Armenia , Bahrain , Iraq , Turkey, and Egypt . Old Persian

8760-425: The Persian language, a language historically called Dari, emerged in present-day Afghanistan. The first significant Persian poet was Rudaki . He flourished in the 10th century, when the Samanids were at the height of their power. His reputation as a court poet and as an accomplished musician and singer has survived, although little of his poetry has been preserved. Among his lost works are versified fables collected in

8906-401: The Persian model: Ottoman Turkish , Chagatai Turkic , Dobhashi Bengali , and Urdu, which are regarded as "structural daughter languages" of Persian. "Classical Persian" loosely refers to the standardized language of medieval Persia used in literature and poetry . This is the language of the 10th to 12th centuries, which continued to be used as literary language and lingua franca under

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9052-487: The Perso-Arabic script. Persian was the first language to break through the monopoly of Arabic on writing in the Muslim world , with Persian poetry becoming a tradition in many eastern courts. It was used officially as a language of bureaucracy even by non-native speakers, such as the Ottomans in Anatolia , the Mughals in South Asia, and the Pashtuns in Afghanistan. It influenced languages spoken in neighboring regions and beyond, including other Iranian languages,

9198-531: The Press. These four volumes by Jah proved immensely popular, and are still considered the heart of the cycle. After Jah, the two main architects of the cycle, Ahmad Husain Qamar (nineteen volumes) and Tasadduq Husain (nineteen volumes) took over the work from 1892 to its completion around 1905. These writers were not the original creators of the tales and by the time the Nawal Kishore Press began publishing them, they had already evolved in their form and structure. As these dastans were mainly meant for oral rendition ,

9344-496: The Prophet Muhammad 's uncle Hamza , the legendary king Firoz Shah, and a trickster-hero named Samak the Ayyar . Of all the early dastans, the Hamza romance is thought to be the oldest. The romance of Hamza claims to go back to the life of its hero, Hamza ibn Abdul-Muttalib , the paternal uncle of the Prophet, who was slain in the Battle of Uhud (625 CE) by a slave instigated by a woman named Hind bint Utbah , whose relatives Hamza had killed at Badr . Hind bint Utbah then went to

9490-428: The Sasanian Empire (224–651). However, it is not descended from the literary form of Middle Persian (known as pārsīk , commonly called Pahlavi), which was spoken by the people of Fars and used in Zoroastrian religious writings. Instead, it is descended from the dialect spoken by the court of the Sasanian capital Ctesiphon and the northeastern Iranian region of Khorasan , known as Dari. The region, which comprised

9636-427: The Sassanids (who were Persians, i.e. from the southwest) from the preceding Arsacids (who were Parthians, i.e. from the northeast). While Ibn al-Muqaffa' (eighth century) still distinguished between Pahlavi (i.e. Parthian) and Persian (in Arabic text: al-Farisiyah) (i.e. Middle Persian), this distinction is not evident in Arab commentaries written after that date. "New Persian" (also referred to as Modern Persian)

9782-407: The Seljuks, the Sultanate of Rum , took Persian language, art, and letters to Anatolia. They adopted the Persian language as the official language of the empire. The Ottomans , who can roughly be seen as their eventual successors, inherited this tradition. Persian was the official court language of the empire, and for some time, the official language of the empire. The educated and noble class of

9928-478: The Urdu cycle grew, the eighth daftar had to become longer and longer until it comprised twenty-seven volumes. This astonishing treasure-house of romance, which at its best contains some of the finest narrative prose ever written in Urdu, is considered the delight of its age; many of its volumes were reprinted again and again, well into the twentieth century. Although towards the end of the nineteenth century dastans had reached an extraordinary peak of popularity,

10074-405: The administrative reorganization of 1964 to form the province of Nimruz, with capital Zaranj. Sistan has a very strong connection with Zoroastrianism and during Sassanid times Lake Hamun was one of two pilgrimage sites for followers of that religion. In Zoroastrian tradition, the lake is the keeper of Zoroaster 's seed and just before the final renovation of the world, three maidens will enter

10220-441: The area of Lake Urmia in the records of Shalmaneser III . The exact identity of the Parsuwash is not known for certain, but from a linguistic viewpoint the word matches Old Persian pārsa itself coming directly from the older word * pārćwa . Also, as Old Persian contains many words from another extinct Iranian language, Median , according to P. O. Skjærvø it is probable that Old Persian had already been spoken before

10366-412: The art of dastan-goi (storytelling), including the Hamzanama . [REDACTED] Media related to Hamzanama at Wikimedia Commons Persian Language Russia Persian ( / ˈ p ɜːr ʒ ən , - ʃ ən / PUR -zhən, -⁠shən ), also known by its endonym Farsi ( فارسی , Fārsī [fɒːɾˈsiː] ), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of

10512-468: The battle, which lasted until the Caliph died. After the battle, Hamza left, inexplicably, for Sarandip ( Ceylon ) and China , leaving behind 5000 warriors to protect the powerless against the powerful. His disciples wrote the account of his travels and expeditions in a book Maghazi-e-Amir Hamza , which was the original source of Dastan-e-Amir Hamza . As these stories circulated, they eventually transferred to

10658-417: The battlefield and mutilated the dead Hamza's body, cutting off his ears and nose, cutting out his liver and chewing it to fulfill the vow of vengeance she had made. Later, when the Prophet conquered Mecca , Hind bint Utbah accepted Islam, and was pardoned. It has been argued that the romance of Hamza may actually have begun with the adventures of a Persian namesake of the original Hamza: Hamza ibn Abdullah,

10804-457: The code fas for the dialects spoken across Iran and Afghanistan. This consists of the individual languages Dari ( prs ) and Iranian Persian ( pes ). It uses tgk for Tajik, separately. In general, the Iranian languages are known from three periods: namely Old, Middle, and New (Modern). These correspond to three historical eras of Iranian history ; Old era being sometime around the Achaemenid Empire (i.e., 400–300 BC), Middle era being

10950-512: The collapse of the Sassanid state, Parsik came to be applied exclusively to (either Middle or New) Persian that was written in the Arabic script . From about the 9th century onward, as Middle Persian was on the threshold of becoming New Persian, the older form of the language came to be erroneously called Pahlavi , which was actually but one of the writing systems used to render both Middle Persian as well as various other Middle Iranian languages. That writing system had previously been adopted by

11096-733: The control of the Seleucid Empire , which traded it to the Mauryan dynasty of India in 305 BC. After the fall of the Mauryans, the region fell to their Greco-Bactrian allies in 180 BC, before breaking away and becoming part of the Indo-Greek Kingdom. The Indo-Parthian king Gondophares was the leader of Sakastan around c. 20–10 BCE as it was part of the Indo-Parthian Kingdom which was also called Gedrosia , its Hellenistic name. After

11242-511: The course of countless retellings before faithful audiences, the Indo-Persian Hamza story seems to have grown generally longer and more elaborate throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the eighteenth century, the Hamza story was so well-known in India that it inspired an indigenous Indo-Persian imitation, the massive Bostan-e Khiyal (Garden of " Khiyal ") by Mir Muhammad Taqi. By

11388-627: The court of Sultan Abdullah Qutb Shah (1611-72) of Golconda . The Haji writes, "I had brought with me a number of manuscripts of the Rumuz-e Hamza . When I presented them in the king's service, I was ordered, 'Prepare a summary of them.' In obedience to this order this book Zubdat ur-Rumuz (The Cream of the Rumuz) has been prepared." At least two other seventeenth-century Indo-Persian Hamza manuscripts survive, dated 1096 AH [1684–85 CE] and 1099 AH [1687–88 CE], as well as various undated and later ones. In

11534-399: The cycle was into eight daftars or sections. The first four daftars —the two-volume Naushervan-nama (The Book of Naushervan ); the one-volume Kochak Bakhtar (The Lesser West); the one-volume Bala bakhtar (The Upper West); and the two-volume Iraj-nama (The Book of Iraj )—were closer to the Persian romance, and were linked more directly to Hamza's own adventures, especially those of

11680-502: The cycle. The great emperor Akbar (1556–1605), far from sharing his grandfather's attitude, conceived and supervised the immense task of illustrating the whole romance, producing a manuscript now known as the Akbar Hamzanama . As Akbar's court chronicler tells us, Hamza's adventures were "represented in twelve volumes, and clever painters made the most astonishing illustrations for no less than one thousand and four hundred passages of

11826-657: The dastan narrative also conditioned Urdu theatre: the trickster Ayyar , permanent friend of Hamza provided the convention of the hero's [comic] sidekick that achieved culmination in the Hindi cinema of the sixties . The story is also performed in Indonesian puppet theatre , where it is called Wayang Menak . Here, Hamza is also known as Wong Agung Jayeng Rana or Amir Ambyah. Frances Pritchett's former student at Columbia University , Pasha Mohamad Khan, who currently teaches at McGill University , researches qissa /dastan (romances) and

11972-403: The earlier Hamza, who was an orthodox Muslim champion acceptable to all. The seventeenth-century Zubdat ur-Rumuz actually gives two conflicting origin-stories for the Hamzanama . The first is that after Hamza's death, ladies living near the Prophet's house told praising anecdotes to get the Prophet's attention; one Masud Makki then produced the first written version of these stories to divert

12118-479: The earlier part of his life. Then came the fifth daftar , the Tilism-e Hoshruba itself, begun by Jah (four volumes) and completed by Qamar (three volumes). The remaining three daftars , though they make up the bulk of the cycle in quantity, emphasize the adventures of Hamza's sons and grandsons, and are generally of less literary excellence. Though no library in the world has a full set of the forty-six volumes,

12264-517: The eastern part of present-day Afghanistan . In Ferdowsi's epic, Zabulistan is in turn described to be the homeland of the mythological hero Rostam . In prehistoric times, the Jiroft Civilization covered parts of Sistan and Kerman Province (possibly as early as the 3rd millennium BC). It is best known from excavations of the archaeological site of Shahr-i Sokhta , a massive third millennium BC city. Other smaller sites have been identified in

12410-430: The emperor also commanded magic slaves and magic slave girls who fought at his command and performed any and all tasks assigned them. As Hoshruba's time neared its end, Emperor Afrasiyab resolved to defend his empire and tilism, and foil the conqueror of the tilism when he appeared. The story of Hoshruba opens where the false god Laqa—an eighty-five-foot-tall, pitch-black giant – and one of Amir Hamza's foremost enemies –

12556-584: The extent of its influence on certain languages of the Indian subcontinent. Words borrowed from Persian are still quite commonly used in certain Indo-Aryan languages, especially Hindi - Urdu (also historically known as Hindustani ), Punjabi , Kashmiri , and Sindhi . There is also a small population of Zoroastrian Iranis in India, who migrated in the 19th century to escape religious execution in Qajar Iran and speak

12702-521: The fantastic adventures of Hamza as he and his band of heroes fight the enemies. The stories, from a long-established oral tradition, were written down in Persian, the language of the courts of Persianate societies , in multiple volumes, presumably in the era of Mahmud of Ghazni (r. 998–1030). In the West, the work is best known for the enormous illustrated manuscript, the Akbar Hamzanama , commissioned by

12848-684: The fate of dastan literature was sealed by the first quarter of the twentieth century. By the time of the great dastan-narrator Mir Baqir Ali's death in 1928, dastan volumes were being rejected by the educated elite in favor of Urdu and Hindi novels—many of which were in fact very dastan-like. The Hikayat Amir Hamzah is the classical Malay version translated directly from the Persian originally written on traditional paper in old Jawi script . Versions are also found in other languages of Indonesia, including Javanese ( Serat Menak ), Sundanese ( Amir Hamjah ), Bugis , Balinese and Acehnese . Two English-language translations have been published based on

12994-616: The following phylogenetic classification: Sistan Sistan derives its name from Sakastan ("the land of the Saka "). The Sakas were a Scythian tribe which migrated to the Iranian Plateau and Indus valley between the 2nd century BC and the 1st century, where they carved a kingdom known as the Indo-Scythian Kingdom . In the Bundahishn , a Zoroastrian scripture written in Pahlavi ,

13140-562: The formation of many modern languages in West Asia, Europe, Central Asia , and South Asia . Following the Turko-Persian Ghaznavid conquest of South Asia , Persian was firstly introduced in the region by Turkic Central Asians. The basis in general for the introduction of Persian language into the subcontinent was set, from its earliest days, by various Persianized Central Asian Turkic and Afghan dynasties. For five centuries prior to

13286-471: The formation of the Achaemenid Empire and was spoken during most of the first half of the first millennium BCE. Xenophon , a Greek general serving in some of the Persian expeditions, describes many aspects of Armenian village life and hospitality in around 401 BCE, which is when Old Persian was still spoken and extensively used. He relates that the Armenian people spoke a language that to his ear sounded like

13432-509: The fortress of Karkuya, which had a famous fire temple , which is mentioned in the Tarikh-i Sistan . He then continued to seize more land in the province. He thereafter besieged Zrang , and after a heavy battle outside the city, Aparviz and his men surrendered. When Aparviz went to Rabi to discuss about the conditions of a treaty, he saw that he was using the bodies of two dead soldiers as a chair. This horrified Aparviz, who in order to spare

13578-523: The governor Abu Yazid Khalid made himself independent. He was followed by a series of emirs with brief reigns until 923, when Ahmad ibn Muhammad restored Saffarid rule in Sistan. After his death in 963, Sistan was ruled by his son Khalaf ibn Ahmad until 1002, when Mahmud of Ghazni invaded Sistan, ending the Saffarid dynasty. A year later in 1003, Sistan revolted. In response, Mahmud brought an army to suppress

13724-425: The head of a magnificent army to conquer Hoshruba. With him are five matchless tricksters headed by the prince of tricksters, the incomparable Amar Ayyar , whose native wit, and wondrous talents are a match for the most powerful sorcerer's spells. Upon learning of Prince Asad's entry into the tilism with his army, Afrasiyab dispatches a number of sorcerers and five beautiful trickster girls to foil his mission. When

13870-582: The inhabitants of Sakastan from the Arabs, made peace with them in return for heavy tribute, which included a tribute of 1,000 slave boys bearing 1,000 golden vessels. Sakastan was thus under the control of the Rashidun Caliphate. However, only two years later, the people of Zarang rebelled and defeated Rabi ibn Ziyad Harithi's lieutenant and Muslim garrison of the city. Abd-Allah ibn Amir then sent 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Samura to Sistan, where he managed to suppress

14016-597: The land. The Parthian Empire then briefly lost the region to its Suren vassals around 20 CE. The regions of Sistan, and Punjab were ruled together by the Indo-Parthians . As the Kushan Empire expanded in the mid 1st century AD, the Indo-Parthian lost their Indian dominions and recentered on Turan and Sakastan . The Kushans were defeated by the Sasanian Empire in the mid-3rd century, first becoming part of

14162-461: The language of the Persians. Related to Old Persian, but from a different branch of the Iranian language family, was Avestan , the language of the Zoroastrian liturgical texts. The complex grammatical conjugation and declension of Old Persian yielded to the structure of Middle Persian in which the dual number disappeared, leaving only singular and plural, as did gender. Middle Persian developed

14308-617: The legendary publisher from Lucknow , was Ashk's Dastan-e Amir Hamza . Nawal Kishore eventually replaced Ashk's version with a revised and improved Dastan-e amir Hamza (1871), explaining to the public that the Ashk version was marred by its "archaic idioms and convoluted style." Munshi Nawal Kishore commissioned Maulvi Syed Abdullah Bilgrami to revise Ali Khan Bahadur Ghalib's translation and published it in 1871. This version proved extraordinarily successful. The Bilgrami version has almost certainly been more often reprinted, and more widely read, than any other in Urdu. In 1887 Syed Tasadduq Husain,

14454-645: The mid 2nd century BC, much of the Indo-Greek Kingdom was overrun by tribes known as the Indo-Scythians or Saka , from which Sistan (from Sakastan) eventually derived its name. Around 100 BC, the Indo-Scythians were defeated by Mithridates II of Parthia (r. c. 124–91 BCE) and the region of Sakastan was incorporated into the Parthian Empire . Parthian governors such as Tanlismaidates ruled

14600-432: The middle-period form only continuing in the texts of Zoroastrianism . Middle Persian is considered to be a later form of the same dialect as Old Persian. The native name of Middle Persian was Parsig or Parsik , after the name of the ethnic group of the southwest, that is, "of Pars ", Old Persian Parsa , New Persian Fars . This is the origin of the name Farsi as it is today used to signify New Persian. Following

14746-552: The moment of its creation a person was named who would unravel this magical world at an appointed time using the tilism key. With the passage of time, the whereabouts of the tilism key were forgotten, and the usurper Afrasiyab became the Master of the Tilism and Emperor of Sorcerers. Afrasiyab and his sorceress Empress Heyrat ruled over Hoshruba's three regions named Zahir the Manifest, Batin

14892-670: The most famous Lucknow dastan-narrators, to compose the stories. This version of the Dastan-e Amir Hamza was an extraordinary achievement: not only the crowning glory of the Urdu dastan tradition, but also surely the longest single romance cycle in world literature, since the forty-six volumes average 900 pages each. Publication of the cycle began with the first four volumes of Tilism-e Hoshruba ("The Stunning Tilism") by Muhammad Husain Jah; these volumes were published between 1883 and 1890, after which Jah had differences with Nawal Kishore and left

15038-760: The most famous storytellers of Hamza dastan were Mir Ahmad Ali (who belonged to Lucknow but later moved to Rampur ), Mir Qasim Ali, Hakim Sayed Asghar Ali Khan (who came to Rampur during the tenure of Nawab Mohammad Saeed Khan i.e. 1840–1855), Zamin Ali Jalal Lucknowi , Munshi Amba Prasad Rasa Lucknowi (a disciple of Mir Ahmad Ali who later converted to Islam and was rechristened Abdur Rahman), his son Ghulam Raza, Haider Mirza Tasawwur Lucknowi (a disciple of Asghar Ali), Haji Ali Ibn Mirza Makkhoo Beg, his son Syed Husain Zaidi and Murtuza Husain Visaal. The final arrangement of

15184-525: The most widely spoken. The term Persian is an English derivation of Latin Persiānus , the adjectival form of Persia , itself deriving from Greek Persís ( Περσίς ), a Hellenized form of Old Persian Pārsa ( 𐎱𐎠𐎼𐎿 ), which means " Persia " (a region in southwestern Iran, corresponding to modern-day Fars ). According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the term Persian as

15330-625: The narrative genre they refer to goes back to medieval Iran. William L. Hanaway , who has made a close study of Persian dastans, describes them as "popular romances" that were "created, elaborated, and transmitted" by professional storytellers. At least as early as the ninth century, the dastan was a widely popular form of story-telling. Dastan-narrators told tales of heroic romance and adventure—stories about gallant princes and their encounters with evil kings, enemy champions, demons, magicians, jinns , divine emissaries, tricky secret agents called ayyars , and beautiful princesses who might be human or of

15476-461: The nationalist movement of the time. The academy was a key institution in the struggle to re-build Iran as a nation-state after the collapse of the Qajar dynasty. During the 1930s and 1940s, the academy led massive campaigns to replace the many Arabic , Russian , French , and Greek loanwords whose widespread use in Persian during the centuries preceding the foundation of the Pahlavi dynasty had created

15622-495: The necessity of protecting the Persian language against foreign words, and to the standardization of Persian orthography , were under the reign of Naser ed Din Shah of the Qajar dynasty in 1871. After Naser ed Din Shah, Mozaffar ed Din Shah ordered the establishment of the first Persian association in 1903. This association officially declared that it used Persian and Arabic as acceptable sources for coining words. The ultimate goal

15768-414: The next period most officially around the Sasanian Empire , and New era being the period afterward down to present day. According to available documents, the Persian language is "the only Iranian language" for which close philological relationships between all of its three stages are established and so that Old, Middle, and New Persian represent one and the same language of Persian; that is, New Persian

15914-516: The nineteenth century, however, Persian was in a slow decline as an Indian language , for its political and cultural place was being taken by Pashto and the Indic languages. It is in these languages that the dastan found a hospitable environment to survive and flourish. The Hamza romance spread gradually, usually in its briefer and less elaborate forms, into a number of the modern languages of South Asia. Pashto and Sindhi were particularly hospitable to

16060-713: The northern part of Greece). Vardar Yenicesi differed from other localities in the Balkans insofar as that it was a town where Persian was also widely spoken. However, the Persian of Vardar Yenicesi and throughout the rest of the Ottoman-held Balkans was different from formal Persian both in accent and vocabulary. The difference was apparent to such a degree that the Ottomans referred to it as "Rumelian Persian" ( Rumili Farsisi ). As learned people such as students, scholars and literati often frequented Vardar Yenicesi, it soon became

16206-529: The official language of the Achaemenid kings. Assyrian records, which in fact appear to provide the earliest evidence for ancient Iranian (Persian and Median) presence on the Iranian Plateau, give a good chronology but only an approximate geographical indication of what seem to be ancient Persians. In these records of the 9th century BCE, Parsuwash (along with Matai , presumably Medians) are first mentioned in

16352-628: The present territories of northwestern Afghanistan as well as parts of Central Asia, played a leading role in the rise of New Persian. Khorasan, which was the homeland of the Parthians, was Persianized under the Sasanians. Dari Persian thus supplanted Parthian language , which by the end of the Sasanian era had fallen out of use. New Persian has incorporated many foreign words, including from eastern northern and northern Iranian languages such as Sogdian and especially Parthian. The transition to New Persian

16498-561: The province is called "Seyansih". After the Arab conquest of Iran , the province became known as Sijistan/Sistan. The previous Old Persian name of the region, prior to Saka dominance, was zaranka ("waterland"). The older form is also the root of the name Zaranj , capital of the Afghan Nimruz Province . In the Shahnameh , Sistan is also referred to as Zabulistan , after the region in

16644-660: The rebellion. Furthermore, he also defeated the Zunbils of Zabulistan , seizing Bust and a few cities in Zabulistan. During the First Fitna (656–661), the people of Zarang rebelled and defeated the Muslim garrison of the city. In 658, Yazdegerd III's son Peroz III reclaimed Sistan and established a kingdom there, known in Chinese sources as the "Persian Area Command". However, in 663, he

16790-631: The region during the following centuries. Persian continued to act as a courtly language for various empires in Punjab through the early 19th century serving finally as the official state language of the Sikh Empire , preceding British conquest and the decline of Persian in South Asia. Beginning in 1843, though, English and Hindustani gradually replaced Persian in importance on the subcontinent. Evidence of Persian's historical influence there can be seen in

16936-590: The region in surveys by American archaeologists Walter Fairservis and George Dales. The site of Nad-i Ali in Afghan Sistan has also been claimed to date from the Bronze Age (Benseval and Francfort 1994). Earlier the area was occupied by Iranian peoples Eventually a kingdom known as Arachosia was formed, parts of which were ruled by the Medes by 600 BC. The Medes were overthrown by the Achaemenid Empire in 550 BC, and

17082-589: The reign of Sultan Ghiyathuddin Azam Shah is described as the "golden age of Persian literature in Bengal". Its stature was illustrated by the Sultan's own correspondence and collaboration with the Persian poet Hafez ; a poem which can be found in the Divan of Hafez today. A Bengali dialect emerged among the common Bengali Muslim folk, based on a Persian model and known as Dobhashi ; meaning mixed language . Dobhashi Bengali

17228-702: The reigning king, Kobad , and then to his successor, Naushervan . Nonetheless, a bitter rivalry has been seeded, for the widow of the wicked dead vizier bears a son she names Bakhtak Bakhtyar, and he in turn becomes a lifelong nemesis of both Hamza and Buzurjmehr. The latter soon relates a vision to Naushervan that a child still in embryo in Arabia will eventually bring about his downfall; Naushervan responds in Herod-like fashion , dispatching Buzurjmehr to Arabia with an order to kill all pregnant women . Emerging unscathed by this terrible threat are Hamza and Amar Umayya , who

17374-581: The rest Arachosia was soon annexed. The archaeological site of Dahan-e Gholaman was a major Achaemenid centre. n the 4th century BCE , Alexander the Great annexed the region during his conquest of the Empire and founded the colony of Alexandria in Arachosia . The city of Bost, now part of Lashkargah , was also developed as a Hellenistic centre. Alexander's empire fragmented after his death, and Arachosia came under

17520-406: The revolt, the people of Sakastan supported him. Nevertheless, Bahram II managed to suppress the revolt in 283, and appointed his son Bahram III as the governor of the province. During his early reign, Shapur II (r. 309–379) appointed his brother Shapur Sakanshah as the governor of Sakastan. Peroz I (r. 459–484), during his early reign, put an end to dynastic rule in province by appointing

17666-688: The revolt. Mahmud's Hindu troops sacked the mosques and churches of Zarang massacring the Muslims and Christians inside. In 1029, Tadj al-Din I Abu l-Fadl Nasr founded the Nasrid dynasty , who were a branch of the Saffarids . They became vassals of the Ghaznavids . The dynasty then became vassals of the Seljuks in 1048, Ghurids in 1162, and the Khwarezmians in 1212. Mongols sacked Sistan in 1222 and Nasrid dynasty

17812-487: The right hand revealed auspicious ones. Whenever anyone called out his name in the tilism, Afrasiyab's magic alerted him to the call. He possessed the Book of Sameri that contained an account of every event inside and outside the tilism. Afrasiyab used a magic mirror that projected his body into his court during his absence, and many magic doubles who replaced him when he was in imminent danger. Besides sorcerers and sorceresses,

17958-429: The righteousness of their cause. After eighteen years, much suffering, and more divine intervention , Hamza does finally escape from Qaf; he makes his way home, and is reunited with his loyal companions. In the longest and most elaborate scene in the dastan, he marries the faithful Mihr Nigar. But by this time, the story is nearing its end. About two-fifths of the text deals with Hamza's early years, about two-fifths with

18104-507: The rule of Durrani Empire in 1747. Between 1747 and 1872 Sistan was contested by Persia and Afghanistan . The border dispute between Persia and Afghanistan was solved by Sistan Boundary Mission, led by British General Frederick Goldsmid , who agreed to most of Sistan to be in Persia but the Persians won the withdrawal of the right bank of the Helmand. The countries were not satisfied. The border

18250-586: The shape of the story radically changes: adventures take place simultaneously in Qaf and on earth, and the dastan moves back and forth in reporting them. While Hamza in Qaf is killing Devs, trying to deal with Shahpal's powerful daughter Asman Pari whom he has been forced to marry, and looking desperately for ways to get home, Amar in the (human) World is holding Hamza's forces together, moving from fort to fort, and trying to defend Mihr Nigar from Naushervan's efforts to recapture her. While Hamza and his allies navigate various shoals of courtly intrigue, they also wage

18396-607: The site of a flourishing Persianate linguistic and literary culture. The 16th-century Ottoman Aşık Çelebi (died 1572), who hailed from Prizren in modern-day Kosovo , was galvanized by the abundant Persian-speaking and Persian-writing communities of Vardar Yenicesi, and he referred to the city as a "hotbed of Persian". Many Ottoman Persianists who established a career in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul ) pursued early Persian training in Saraybosna, amongst them Ahmed Sudi . The Persian language influenced

18542-561: The standard Persian of Tajikistan, has been officially designated as Tajik ( тоҷикӣ , tojikī ) since the time of the Soviet Union . It is the name given to the varieties of Persian spoken in Central Asia in general. The international language-encoding standard ISO 639-1 uses the code fa for the Persian language, as its coding system is mostly based on the native-language designations. The more detailed standard ISO 639-3 uses

18688-741: The standard Persian. The Hazaragi dialect (in Central Afghanistan and Pakistan), Herati (in Western Afghanistan), Darwazi (in Afghanistan and Tajikistan), Basseri (in Southern Iran), and the Tehrani accent (in Iran, the basis of standard Iranian Persian) are examples of these dialects. Persian-speaking peoples of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan can understand one another with a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility . Nevertheless,

18834-645: The story." The illustrated manuscript thus created became the supreme achievement of Mughal art : "of all the loot carried off from Delhi by Nadir Shah in 1739 (including the Peacock Throne), it was only the Hamza-nama , 'painted with images that defy the imagination,' that Emperor Muhammad Shah pleaded to have returned." The Hamza story left traces in the Deccan as well. One Persian romance-narrator, Haji Qissah-Khvan Hamadani, records his arrival in 1612 at Hyderabad , at

18980-426: The storytellers added local colour to these tales. Storytelling had become a popular craft in India by nineteenth century. The storytellers narrated their long winding tales of suspense , mystery , adventure , magic , fantasy , and the marvellous rolled into one to their inquisitive audiences. Each day, the session would end at a point where the curious public would be left to wonder as to what happened next. Some of

19126-637: The trickster girls kidnap the prince, Amar Ayyar and his band of misfits continue the mission of the conqueror of the tilism with the help of Heyrat's sister, Bahar Jadu, a powerful sorceress of the tilism, who Afrasiyab had banished from his court to please his wife. The immense popularity of the dastan had a long-lasting effect on other forms of fictional narratives . The earliest novels in Urdu as well as Hindi often seem nothing more than simplified or bowdlerized forms of Dastans. Babu Devaki Nandan Khatri 's Chandrakanta and Chandrakanta Santati and Ratan Nath Dhar Sarshar 's Fasana-e-Azad are only

19272-399: The twentieth. Various Hindi versions were produced too—but above all, the story of Hamza flourished in Urdu . The earliest Hamza retelling in Urdu exists in a late Dakhani prose version called Qissa-e Jang-e Amir Hamza (Qissa of the War of Amir Hamza) (1784). Very little is known about this work's background. It was probably translated from a Persian text. In 1801, Khalil Ali Khan Ashk,

19418-444: The two most stellar examples of this genre. Chandrakanta bears the direct influence of dastans as witnessed in the case of eponymous protagonist Chandrakanta who is trapped in a tilism and the presence of notable ayyars . The dastan also influenced Munshi Premchand (1880-1936) who was fascinated and later on inspired by the stories of Tilism-e Hoshruba that he heard at the tobacconist shop in his childhood days. The conventions of

19564-422: The use of Farsi in foreign languages. Etymologically, the Persian term Farsi derives from its earlier form Pārsi ( Pārsik in Middle Persian ), which in turn comes from the same root as the English term Persian . In the same process, the Middle Persian toponym Pārs ("Persia") evolved into the modern name Fars. The phonemic shift from /p/ to /f/ is due to the influence of Arabic in

19710-409: The vizier Buzurjmihr is synonymous to Buzurjmehr , and there are parallels for the Persian capital Midan and also jinn of Jabal Qaf . But it is difficult to prove who has borrowed from whom. The Hamza story soon grew, ramified, traveled and gradually spread over immense areas of the Muslim world. It was translated into Arabic ( Sīrat Amīr Ḥamza ); there is a twelfth-century Georgian version, and

19856-607: The years in Qaf, and only one-fifth with the time after his return. The remaining years of Hamza's long life are filled with activity; some of it is fruitful, but usually in a kind of equivocal way. Hamza and Mihr Nigar have one son, Qubad, who is killed at an early age; soon afterwards, Mihr Nigar herself is killed. Hamza, distraught, vows to spend the rest of his life tending her tomb. But his enemies pursue him there, kidnap him, and torment him; his old companions rally round to rescue him, and his old life reclaims him. He fights against Naushervan and others, travels, has adventures, marries

20002-416: Was already complete by the era of the three princely dynasties of Iranian origin, the Tahirid dynasty (820–872), Saffarid dynasty (860–903), and Samanid Empire (874–999). Abbas of Merv is mentioned as being the earliest minstrel to chant verse in the New Persian tongue and after him the poems of Hanzala Badghisi were among the most famous between the Persian-speakers of the time. The first poems of

20148-415: Was defined more precisely with the Second Sistan Boundary Commission (1903-1905) headed by Arthur Mac Mahon, who had a difficult task due to lack of natural boundaries. The part assigned Persia was included in the province of Balochistan (which took the name of Sistan and Baluchistan in 1986) being the capital Zahedan. In Afghanistan it was part of the Sistan province of Farah-Chakansur that was abolished in

20294-501: Was ended by Khwarezmians in 1225. During Ghaznavid times, elaborate Saffarid palaces were built at Lashkari Bazar and Shahr-i Gholghola . In 1236, Shams al-Din 'Ali ibn Mas'ud founded Mihrabanid dynasty , another branch of Saffarids, as melik of Sistan for Ilkhanate . Mihrabanid contested with Kartids during Mongol rule. Sistan declared independence in 1335 after demise of Ilkhanate. 1383 Tamerlane conquered Sistan and forced Mihrabanids to become vassals. Overlordship of Timurids

20440-416: Was ended in 1507 due to Uzbek invasion in 1507. Uzbeks were driven in 1510 and Mihrabanids became vassals of Safavids until 1537 Safavids deposed the dynasty and gained full control of Sistan. Safavid rule lasted until 1717 except during Uzbek rule between 1524-1528 and 1578-1598 when the Hotaki dynasty conquered it. Nadir Shah reconquered it in 1727. After assassination of Nadir Shah, Sistan went under

20586-461: Was forced to leave the region after suffering a defeat to newly established Umayyad Caliphate , who had succeeded the Rashiduns. Sistan became a province of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates . In the 860s, the Saffarid dynasty emerged in Sistan and proceeded to conquer most of the Islamic East, until it was checked by the Samanids in 900. After the Samanids took the province from the Saffarids, it briefly returned to Abbasid control, but in 917

20732-484: Was patronised and given official status under the Sultans of Bengal , and was a popular literary form used by Bengalis during the pre-colonial period, irrespective of their religion. Following the defeat of the Hindu Shahi dynasty, classical Persian was established as a courtly language in the region during the late 10th century under Ghaznavid rule over the northwestern frontier of the subcontinent . Employed by Punjabis in literature, Persian achieved prominence in

20878-431: Was quite an undertaking in its own right: 520 large pages of typeset Devanagari script, in a prose adorned not with elegant Persian expressions but with exactly comparable Sanskritisms , and interspersed not with Persian verse forms but with Indic ones like kavitt , soratha , and chaupai . The Amir Hamza Ki Dastan , with its assimilation of a highly Islamic content into a self-consciously Sanskritized form, offers

21024-488: Was taught in state schools, and was also offered as an elective course or recommended for study in some madrasas . Persian learning was also widespread in the Ottoman-held Balkans ( Rumelia ), with a range of cities being famed for their long-standing traditions in the study of Persian and its classics, amongst them Saraybosna (modern Sarajevo , Bosnia and Herzegovina), Mostar (also in Bosnia and Herzegovina), and Vardar Yenicesi (or Yenice-i Vardar, now Giannitsa , in

21170-449: Was the longest Urdu masnavi ever written in North India , with the exception of versions of the Arabian Nights . Yet Shayan is said to have composed it in only six months. This version too apparently found a good sale, for by 1893 Nawal Kishore was printing it for the sixth time. In 1881, Nawal Kishore finally began publishing his own elaborate multi-volume Hamza series. He hired Muhammad Husain Jah, Ahmad Husain Qamar, and Tasadduq Husain,

21316-425: Was to prevent books from being printed with wrong use of words. According to the executive guarantee of this association, the government was responsible for wrongfully printed books. Words coined by this association, such as rāh-āhan ( راه‌آهن ) for "railway", were printed in Soltani Newspaper ; but the association was eventually closed due to inattention. A scientific association was founded in 1911, resulting in

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