ABSTRACT
IT is necessary to know that the first person to compose Persian poetry was Bahr!m G#r.’
Such is the assured statement of thirteenth-century author of the oldest extant history of Persian literature. His assertion was repeated by Daulatsh!h more than two hundred years later: it has remained for modern 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. was in fact not the
originator of the legend; he drew his information about the poetic outburst of ‘that great
sHunter’ of S!s!nian times from the Arabic-writing but Persian-born
polymath who died in 1038, and himself acknowledges his debt to the
ninth-century geographer Ibn Khurd!dhbih. 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 Bahr!m G#r, I am that B# Jabala.
