Contemporary persian literature

Ancient Iran

The Iranian languages belong, together with the Indo-Aryan languages of the Indian subcontinent, to one of the oldest branches of the Indo-European linguistic family: the Indo-Iranian branch.
There exist documents written in the Old Iranian languages that have survived for nearly three millennia.
The oldest texts are the Gāthās, 16 (or perhaps 17) short hymns written in an archaic form of an Old Iranian language called Avestan, named for the Avesta, the holy book of Zoroastrianism.
The Gāthās have been handed down as a part of the Avesta along with several more recent texts.
It is generally accepted that they contain the original teachings of the prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra), who lived in the first half of the 1st millennium bce.
His hymns show traces of versification, the precise prosody of which is still imperfectly known.
Also important to early Iranian literature are the remnants of ancient myths preserved in the Avesta, especially in the yashts, which are texts addressed to Iranian deities.
The names of several kings and heroes who later appear as semihistorical figures in Persian epic poetry are also here mentioned; the myths to which these texts refer were well known to the original audience but are now lost.

Do contemporary Persian poets and novelists commit themselves to revolutionary ends?

Overview

Persian literature, body of writings in New Persian (also called Modern Persian), the form of the Persian language written since the 9th century with a slightly extended form of the Arabic alphabet and with many Arabic loanwords.
The literary form of New Persian is known as Farsi in Iran, where it is the country’s official language, and as Dari in .

The Arab invasion

The Sasanian empire, which at the beginning of the 7th century was still one of the two great powers in the Middle East, crumbled almost instantaneously when the Bedouin invaded Iran.
The conquest was completed about 640.
The Caliphate that came to be established was an Islamic state ruled by Arabs, but very soon non-Arabs who had assimilated themselves to the new situation began to participate in the affairs of the Muslim community.
The contribution made by the descendants of the Sasanian elite to the development of the political and administrative institutions of the Caliphate increased in the 8th century after Baghdad was founded as the capital of the Abbasid dynasty, close to the place where the Sasanian kings once had their palace.
Iranians contributed much to the development of the scholarly traditions of Islam.
The linguistic and literary sciences dealt primarily with the Qurʾān and with the poetry of the pre-Islamic Arabs, both of which provided the norms for classical Arabic and its use in Arabic literature.
These sciences included, on the one hand, grammar and lexicography and, on the other, the theories of metrics, rhyme, and rhetorics.
They also included philological conventions for the collection, arrangement, and preservation of texts.
Together these constituted a tradition of dealing with literary texts that became a model to all literatures that subsequently emerged in the Islamic world.
Among its features were the divan (dīwān)—the collection of one poet’s output in a systematically arranged volume—and several types of anthologies.
Tools of this kind were important for the preservation of literature and its distribution to outlying parts of an extensive empire.
They also contributed to the standardization of form and style in poetry.

What is Persian literature?

Who advocated modernism in Persian literature?

Who are some famous Persian poets?