PERSIA HISTORY, LANGUAGE, LITERATURE 361 



the Moors of Spain. So well was Avicenna's Canon known in the 

 fourteenth century that Chaucer refers to its author familiarly in 

 The Pardoner's Tale, on the subject of poisoning, and even uses the 

 technical word fen, by which the sections of the Canon are designated. 

 In metaphysics, moreover, Ibn Sina's fame as a thinker is known 

 to every student of scholastic philosophy, because his writings, 

 which were influenced by Aristotle and neo-Platonism, found their 

 way to Europe through the so-called Arabian philosophy of the 

 Moors, became widely known through translations, and exercised 

 a strong influence on Scholasticism. Persian Sufiism also, with its 

 transcendental ideas, although not the result of Persian thought 

 alone, presents many interesting analogies to European mysticism 

 of the Middle Ages, in whatever manner we may seek to explain the 

 likenesses. In the realm of science, furthermore, Nasir ad-Din of Tus 

 in Khorasan was an astronomer who enjoyed a great reputation in 

 the East, 1 and many of us call Omar Khayyam " the astronomer-poet 

 of Persia," without recalling the fact that he wrote also an algebra. 

 In the department of history and chronology the name of Mirkhond 

 may be mentioned with praise, and I may add that a number of 

 the Eastern medieval writers whom we think of as Arabs were really 

 Persians, but chose the language of their conquerors as a vehicle 

 to express their thoughts. 



The student of social institutions, political economy, and science 

 of government may learn something also from the code of the 

 Avesta, or better still from the organization of the Persian Empire 

 by Darius. His system of administration by satraps, his distribution 

 of taxes among the provinces, his management of financial pro- 

 blems, fixing the ratio of silver to gold at a precise figure, and his 

 encouragement of agriculture, as enjoined by Zoroaster, may be 

 mentioned as single illustrations. The contrast between the present 

 and the past of Iran in these respects is no less instructive, and the 

 hand of a Darius, if not of a Cyrus, is needed once more if we are 

 to have a Persia rediviva. 



Nothing has been said thus far regarding the language of Persia, 

 and our interest in that study. The discovery and translation of the 

 Avesta by Anquetil du Perron marked a new era in philology as well 

 as in the study of religion, and the decipherment of the cuneiform 

 inscriptions of the Achaemenian kings by Grotefend and Rawlinson 

 added a chapter to the story told by Herodotus, corroborating the 

 facts of ancient history previously known from other sources, and 

 throwing fresh light on the monuments of the past. The researches 

 into the Middle Persian or Pahlavi texts and inscriptions, supple- 



1 See the sketch by my friend, Professor Paul Horn, Was verdanken wir 

 Persien ? in Nord und Sud, Heft 282, p. 289, Breslau, 1900, to which I am indebted 

 for several suggestions. 



