ABSTRACT
T t is necessary to know that the first person to compose I Persian poetry was Bahram Gur.’ Such is the assured state-
A m ent of Muhammad ‘Aufi, thirteenth-century author of die oldest extant history of Persian literature. His assertion was repeated by Daulatshah more than two hundred years later: it has remained for modem critical scholarship to raise incredulous eyebrows at so improbable a pronouncement. However, the Arab writers had long claimed Adam as the inventor of Arabic poetry, so that the Persian pretension seems by comparison surprisingly modest. ‘Aufi was in fact not the originator of the legend; he drew his information about the poetic outburst of ‘that great Hunter’ of Sasanian times from Tha‘alibi the Arabic-writing but Persian-born polymath who died in 1038, and Tha'alibi himself acknowledges his debt to the ninth-century geographer Ibn Khurdadhbih. The alleged first-fruits of the Persian literary genius amount indeed to very little-a couplet of princely boasting that may be rendered speculatively (for the text is naturally corrupt) somewhat as follows:
I am that vengeful lion, I am that mighty tiger, I am that Bahram Gur, I am that Bu Jabala.
