Mīrhusayn Muʿammā’ī Nishābūrī’s Dastūr-i Muʿammā

Abstract

There seems to be an enormous research gap in the study of literary wordpuzzles, which practically covers various areas of inquiry from literary history and investigation into their functions and applications to the revival of manuscript copies and explanation of the rules and procedures of puzzle making. Mīrhusayn Muʿammā’ī Nishābūrī (d. 904/1499), who followed ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī in composing wordpuzzles and was a prominent puzzle maker of the 9th/15th and 10th/16th centuries himself, wrote a treatise on the rules and procedures of puzzle making entitled Dastūr-i Muʿammā. The treatise, completed in 904/1499, contains 650 literary wordpuzzles composed by the author together with brief notes on puzzle making rules and procedures. More than one hundred manuscript copies of the treatise have been preserved at libraries across Iran and the world. The complexity of the puzzles distinguishes the treatise from other works of the same genre, prompting various literary scholars to write commentaries and provide explanatory notes on the puzzles from its completion in the 10th/16th century to the 12th/18th century. In order to fill part of the research gap and revive an important treatise on word puzzles, Dastūr-i Muʿammā was critically edited on the basis of MS 4495/1 preserved at the Central Library and Documentation Center of the University of Tehran as the base copy, adopting an eclectic method of emendation and providing a systematic method for the explanation and solution of the puzzles.

Keywords

• mīrhusayn muʿammā’ī nishābūrī
• literary wordpuzzle
• riddle
• dastūr-i muʿammā
• codicology