A literary history of Persia / [Edward Granville Browne].

  • Edward Granville Browne
Date:
[1902-1924]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A literary history of Persia / [Edward Granville Browne]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    language almost to the exclusion of their own in writing on certain subjects, notably theology and philosophy ; while during the two centuries immediately succeeding the Arab invasion the language of the conquerors was, save amongst those who still adhered to the ancient national faith of Zoroaster, almost the sole literary medium employed in Persia. To ignore this literature would be to ignore many of the most important and characteristic manifestations of the Persian genius, and to form an altogether inadequate judgment of the intellectual activity of that ingenious and talented people. The term “ Persian ” as used by us, and by the Greeks, Jews, Syrians, Arabs, and other foreigners, has a wider sig¬ nification than that which it originally bore. ^en^PersLan6 The Persians call themselves Irani and their land franj- and of this land Parsa, the Persis of the Greeks, the modern Fans,1 2 is one province out of several. But because that province gave birth to the two great dynasties (the Achaemenian in the sixth century before, and the Sasanian 1 Iran, Eran, Air an, the Airiyaua of the Avesta, is the land of the Aryans (Ariya, Airiya of the Avesta, Sanskrit Arya), and had therefore a wider signification than the term Persia, which is equivalent to Iran in the modern sense, has now. Bactria (Balkh), Sogdiana (Sughd), and Khwarazm were Iranian lands, and the Afghans and Kurds are Iranian peoples. 2 The ^-sound does not exist in Arabic, and is replaced by /. Fars, Isfahan, &c., are simply the arabicised forms of Pars, Ispahan. The adjective Farsi (or Par si) denotes the official language of Persia (which is at the same time the mother-tongue of the great majority of its inhabi¬ tants, and the national language in as full a sense as English is the national language of Great Britain and Ireland), and in this application is equiva¬ lent to Irani. As applied to a man, however, Farsi means a native of the province of Fars. In India Par si (Parsee) means of the Persian (i.e., the ancient Persian, or Zoroastrian) religion, and the term has been re-imported in this sense into Persia. To call the province of Fars “ Farsistan,” as is sometimes done by European writers, is quite incorrect, for the termina¬ tion -istan (“ place of,” “ land of ”) is added to the name of a people to denote the country which they inhabit (e.g., Afghanistan, Baluchistan), but not to the name of a country or province.
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