Literary Arts (Apr 2017)
History and species of autobiography in Ancient Persia
Abstract
Autobiography is one of the genres that have been neglected in the researches of Persian literature; While Persian literature is full of examples of autobiography and if we want to refer to provided history of this genre in Persian literature, we will get Ghazzali and Avicenna. We see many examples of this genre in our ancient Iranian culture and literature that language and literary characteristics of them indicate the authenticity and origin of this genre in our culture and literature. Therefore, this article introduces and discusses examples of this genre in ancient Persia. The inscriptions and books of ancient Persia which have autobiographical traits are statistical population of the study. However, because of the varieties of inscriptions only style and narration of three inscriptions of the kings of Achaemenid and Sassanid; Cyrus, Darius and first Shapour have been investigated and the autobiography of "Mani" and one of the priests of the Sassanid period called "Kartir", have been analyzed from amongst the books of this genre. Methods of this article at first will be checking the content of these records and a compare and classification of their themes, then, index elements of structure of the autobiographies such as Narratology, characters, time and place will be discussed. Results show that we must search the first of autobiographies in ancient Persia. They have been published in the form of inscriptions from kings of this period. They also fit with the culture of that time when ideal king was selected based on the principle of race, culture and art. For this reason, king highlighted these three principles in his autobiography. The second category that has a fundamental role in the creation of this genre is religious figures such as Kartir and Manny. So we have mentioned two kinds of political and religious ancient Iranian autobiography. Structure of autobiographies in ancient Persia is so similar that they can be considered like modern forms – their questions are clear and autobiographer just fills them out. This implies the formality of this kind of writing in ancient Persian's courts, So that the structure does not change even by the change in the position of autobiographer. For example, "Kartir" has written structure of his writing inscriptions like kings of ancient Iran in the form of text and epilogue but they are different in terms of content, because the content is affected by his position and experience.
