the Textual Criticism of the Sulaymān position and his Role in the Evolution of the Iranian Epic

Abstract

The prophets of Israel became imbricatedwiththecharacters andmythsof ancient Persia, a fact which can, on the one hand, be ascribed to the efforts of Parsis and Muslims attached to ancient Persian culture to legitimise Persian mythology. On the other hand, to a gradual obliviousness to the fact that no actual historical connection existed. The appearance of holy figures in Shiism was another factor. Sulaymān occupied a central place in this narrative imbrication because of his resemblance to Persian king–priests such as Jamshid. In this paper, the reasons for the imbrication of national and religious elements in the emergence of Persian epic poetry constitute “variables” while the development of the figure of Sulaymān acts as an “index.” Through historical analysis, we trace the narrative role of Sulaymān in Persian epic poetry back to translations of the Khodāy-nāma and other texts that predate Ferdowsi’s Shāh-nāma. After Ferdowsi’s Shāh-nāma, the figure of Sulaymān evolved in popular oral lore and the songs of wandering minstrels. Influenced by the oral forms, it became fully rounded in – oral and later written – Persian epic poetry, most notably in the Shāh-nāma of Asadi. Finally, as the figure of ‘Ali entered Persian epic poetry in the Safavid era and the epic lost its national(heroic) character to become historical and religious, the figure of Sulaymān began to fade into the background.

Keywords

• imbrication of national and religious elements
• Shāh-nāma of Asadi
• national-religious epic
• Sulaymān
• Shāh
• nāma of Asadi
• national
• religious epic
• oral epic