Mahmoud Jaafari Dehaghi; leila varahram
Abstract
Comparative study of Indo-European poetry has been popular among Indo-Europeanists since the nineteenth century. This field, the main subject of which is the reconstruction of ancient literary texts, poetic texts, and the “Indo-European poetic language,” has been under the influence of modern literary ...
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Comparative study of Indo-European poetry has been popular among Indo-Europeanists since the nineteenth century. This field, the main subject of which is the reconstruction of ancient literary texts, poetic texts, and the “Indo-European poetic language,” has been under the influence of modern literary theory, especially formalism. According to the formalistic definition, the main characteristic of a poetic text is the “poetic diction” rather than its composition in metrical form. Moreover, the antithesis of a poetic speech is an ordinary text or idiomatic speech rather than prose. Indo-Europeanists argue that there is not a clear difference between poetry and prose in illiterate societies. However, for the early Avestan scholars, like Karl Friedrich Geldner, Avestan poetic texts are identical with Avestan metrical texts. In this paper, it is demonstrated that neither the meter nor the deviance in the ordinary speech is an appropriate criterion to distinguish poetic texts from non-poetic ones in the Younger Avesta, but the best criterion is comparing the poetic devices and the common poetic-text features in the Indo-European cognate languages.
Leila Varahram
Abstract
The last chapter in the saga of Rustam and his family, the fall of the house of sistanian heroes, and ravage of this territory by Bahman, Son of Isfandiar, is an episode, which relates the mythic and heroic parts of Iranian national saga to its historical part. This article has addressed the issue of ...
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The last chapter in the saga of Rustam and his family, the fall of the house of sistanian heroes, and ravage of this territory by Bahman, Son of Isfandiar, is an episode, which relates the mythic and heroic parts of Iranian national saga to its historical part. This article has addressed the issue of origin, date and place of versification of Bahmannameh, one of its variations which is the longest and most extensive one. The internal evidences of this epic poem demonstrates that it belongs to the people of northern Iran, the Deylamis. Moreover, through comparison of poet’s verses about his patron, Mohammad ibn i Malekshah, with the history of reign of this king it concludes that this book has been versified in 495 in city of Hamedan, where the poet eventually heard or read the mentioned version of the story.
