Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Mahmoud Fazilat ¹
• Abdolreza Seif ²
• Arad Gholami ³

¹ Professor of Persian Language and Literature, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

² Professor of the Department of Persian Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

³ PhD student in Persian Language and Literature, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

The roots of many literary stories can be found in historical narratives. In this research, we focus on four historical and literary narratives that have a special type of deception as their motif. At first, we give a summary of each of these four narratives (descriptive level) and then we explain their commonalities and differences (analytical level). The first narrative is about a Persian man named Zopyrus, who helped Darius the Great to conquer Babylon. The second narrative tells the story of a man from the companions of the ruler of the Hephthalites, who led to the defeat of the Sassanid army by gaining the trust of Peroz I. The third narrative depicts the conflict between crows and owls which ends in favor of the first group with the cleverness and cunning of a crow. The fourth narrative is the story of a Jewish king who, with the trick of his minister, causes internal conflict and mass killing of Christians. In all these narratives, gaining the enemy’s trust by harming oneself is used as a motif, but the method of processing this motif is different in the aforementioned stories. This research, according to its topic and method, is conducted as library research. The findings of this research show that the main plot is the same in these four narratives, but their processing is different. In addition, the historical narrative of Zopyrus can be considered an ancient source for three other narratives; a source that has been neglected until now.

Keywords

• Comparative analysis
• Deception
• Kelileh va Demneh
• Masnavi
• Motif
• Zopyrus

Main Subjects

• Persian the literature