14. Some more Quatrains of Abxi Sa'id bin Att'l Khair 



Edited with a Translation and Notes by 



H. D. Graves Law, I.C.S. 



§1. On the Sources of the Text. 



In two comparatively recent issues 2 of this journal Maulvi 

 'Abd-ul Wall published 400 * quatrains of the famous mystic 

 and poet Abu Sa'id bin Abu'l Kbair of Khorasan. These 

 formed the first published collection of the Ruba'iyat of the 

 Saint which could claim to be anything like complete or really 

 authentic, and were an important addition to our knowledge 

 of Sufi Literature. These quatrains were copied from two 

 MSS., one in the Library of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the 

 other in the British Museum. The only other printed collec- 

 tion of Abu Sa'id's Ruba'iyat is that of Dr. Hermann Ethe 

 who in 1875 and 1878 published in a philological and literary 

 journal in Munich 92 quatrains which he had found in various 

 anthologies and memoirs, such as the Haft Iqllm, the Nafa- 

 hat-ul-Uns, the Khuldsat-ul Afkdr and others. 3 



The chief difficulty which confronts the editor of 'Umar 

 Khayyam— the multiplicity and extreme variety of the texts 

 at his disposal 4 — does not exist in the case of Abu Sa'id. The 

 materials for our knowledge of what the older poet wrote, far 

 from embarrassing us by their richness, are meagre and scanty. 

 But that fact makes matters no easier. For we have no really 

 old and genuine collection of Abu Sa'id's writings to rely on, the 

 oldest MS. having been written in the XV1L century a.d., 600 

 years after the poet's death; and the more recent the MS., the 

 greater the suspicion that attaches to it as an authentic collec- 

 tion of a poet's works. Not entirely, I venture to think, 

 because the bulk of his utterances are forgotten, or their author- 

 ship lost sight of in the years that follow. On the contrary, 

 when there is no old and authentic Dhvdn, the number of verses 

 attributed by posterity to a great poet, instead of diminishing, 

 seems to grow with the centuries as steadily as his fame. The 

 earliest MS. of 'Umar Khayyam, for example, dating from the 

 end of the XV century a.d., contains but 158 quatrains; the 

 most recent has 801. 



But a large proportion of the verses thus added by later 

 ages are, we may be sure, the work of other hands. It is quite 



1 Vol. V, Xo. 11 (December 1909) and Vol. VIII, Xo. 10 (Nov. 1911). 

 ' l Actually 401 : but one quatrain had been inadvertently repeated. 

 8 Of these 92 quatrains, 46 are also in Abd-ui Wall's collection. 

 4 See Introduction to " The Quatrains of Omar Khayyam " edited by 

 E. H. Whinlieid, page xiv. 



