OMAR KHAYYAM: ASTRONOMER,MATHEMATICIAN AND POETl

By JOHN ANDREW BOYLE, B.A., Ph.D.

PROFESSOR OF PERSIAN STUDIES IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

GHIYATH al..Din Abu'I..Fath <Umar ibn Ibrahim al..Khaiyami-such is the full n~me of Omar Khayyam as it

appears in the Arabic sources. In Persian texts he is usuallycalled simply <Umar-i Khaiyam, that is, Omar the son (ordescendant) of the tent..maker (in Arabic khaiyiim) and it isreasonable to assume that his father or grandfather followed thattrade. He was almost certainly born in Nishapur, where hepassed the greater part of his life and where his grave is still to beseen.2 Our earliest authority, the Ta'rikh /:lukamii' al..Islam(" History of the Muslim Philosophers") by Zahir al..DinBaihaqi,3 written at some time before 54911154..5, states quitecategorically that Omar " was a Nishapiiri by birth, as also werehis father and his ancestors ". 4 On the other hand, a late work,the Ta'rikh..iAl/i{" Millenial History ") of Abmad Tatavi5 (1589)refers to another tradition according to which his family camefrom a village called Shamshad near Balkh in what is todayNorthern Afghanistan, though he himself was born in the vicin..ity of Astarabad (now re..named Gurgan) at the N.E. corner ofthe Caspian. So, too, the fifteenth..century writer, Yar AbmadRashidi Tabrizi, in his Tarab..Khiina or " House of Mirth ",6

says that Omar passed his early life in Balkh."The date of his birth ", says Minorsky in his magistral

article in the Encyclopaedia 0/ Islam,7 "is not known". Pro..fessor Rypka, in his recently published History 0/ Iranian Liter..ature, 8 thinks he may have been born as early as 412/1021 ..2;

1 A lecture delivered in the john Rylands Library on Wednesday, the 15th ofjanuary 1969. 2 See below, pp. 36-37 and p. 37, n. 1.

3 E. D. Ross and H. A. R. Gibb, .. The Earliest Account of cUmar Khayyam ",B.S.O.S., v (1928-30), 467-73. 4 Ibid. p. 470.

5 Quoted by B. A. Rozenfel'd and A. P. Yushkevich, cOmar Khaiiiim, Traktati(Moscow, 1961), p. 16.

6 Quoted by Rozenfel'd and Yushkevich, Ope cit. p. 20. The edition of thiswork by Professor jaIal ai-Din Huma'i (Tehran, 1963) was not accessible to me.

7 1st ed., i. 1053-7. 8 (Dordrecht, 1968), p. 190.

30

OMAR KHAYYAM 31Mr. Omar Ali-Shah, the co-author with Mr. Robert Graves of the new version of the Rubd'iydt,1 gives the even earlier date of 1015. Since it can be shown that Omar died in 1131,2 even the later of these two dates is highly improbable; he would have lived to the remarkable age of 110 and such longevity could hardly have gone unmentioned in the sources. In point of fact, thanks to the researches of the Indian scholar Govinda3 and the Soviet scholars Rozenfel'd and Yushkevich, the editors of Omar's scientific works, 4 it is possible to name, with almost absolute certainty, the actual date not only of his birth but also of his death. It so happens that BaihaqT, our oldest authority, gives the full details of his horoscope. The significance of this infor­ mation seems to have escaped Sir Denison Ross and Professor H. A. R. Gibb, who had the merit of publishing and translating Baihaqi's account of Omar, 5 for they abridged the passage in question, omitting a whole line of " supplementary astronomical data ". 6 Translated in full the passage reads : " His horoscope was Gemini; the Sun and Mercury were in the 3rd degree of Gemini, Mercury was in conjunction [with the Sun] and Jupiter was in trine to both of them." 7 On the basis of these data Govinda8 was able to calculate the exact day of Omar's birth. At the request of Rozenfel'd and Yushkevich the Institute of Theo­ retical Astronomy of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. checked Govinda's calculations and reached the conclusion that between the years 1015 and 1054 the astronomical conditions of the horoscope were satisfied on one day only, 18 May 1048 the very date that had been calculated by Govinda. That Khayyam was born in 1048 is confirmed by other evidence. TabrTzI in his Tarab-Khdna gives the length of his life in solar years. The figures are, however, corrupt in the manuscript: the first could

1 The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam (London, 1967), p. 34.2 See below, p. 32.3 Swami Govinda Tirtha, The Nectar of Grace, 'Omar Khayyam s Life and

Wor^s (Allahabad, 1941). This book is apparently not available in any British library, and I quote it at second hand from Rozenfel'd and Yushkevich. [Thanks to the generosity of Dr. Sohrab A. E. Hakim of Bombay I am now in possession of the rare and important work of Swami Govinda Tirtha, the former V.M. Datar of the Finance Department of the Nizam of Hyderabad].

4 See above, p. 30, n. 5. 6 See above, p. 30, n. 3. 6 Op. cit. p. 471, n. 1. 7 Op. cit. p. 467. 8 Rozenfel'd and Yushkevich, op. cit. pp. 17-18.

32 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARYbe read either 7 or 8 and the second 2 or 3, so that we have the choice between 72, 73,82 and 83 as the age of the astronomer-poet at the time of his death.1 Now according to Nizaml-yi 'Arudi-yi Samarqandl, our second oldest authority, in a passage in his Chahdr Maqdla (" Four Discourses ") to which we shall return later, he must have died in 1131, for Nizam! visited his tomb in 1135, four years after his death. Born, then, in 1048 Omar died at the age of 83 ; and the corrupt figures in the Tarab-Khdna are to be emended accordingly.

Rozenfel'd and Yushkevich were also able to calculate the precise date of his death. A corrupt passage in the Tarab-Khdna apparently refers to his having died on Thursday, 12 Muharram 555. As it stands this date, which corresponds to 23 January 1160, a Saturday, is manifestly wrong. However, consulting com­ parative tables of the Christian and Muslim calendars for the period 1115-34, Govinda found that during this period 12 Muharram fell on a Thursday only three times, on the dates corresponding to 16 May 1117, 23 March 1122, and 26 December 1129. He concluded that Khayyam died on the second of these three dates, 23 March 1122, and to justify this con­ clusion was obliged to assume that Nizami had visited his tomb not four, but fourteen, years after his death and that in Tabrizi's statement about his lifespan the first figure must be read as 7 and the second regarded as a mistake for 4. Rozenfel'd and Yush­ kevich found another solution of the problem. Deducing from Ulugh Beg's account of the Maliki Calendar the Persian Cal­ endar as reformed by Omar Khayyam and his colleagues for Malik-Shah that in accordance with that era the days of the week fell one day earlier than in the Muslim and Christian calendars, they made the necessary modification to Govinda's calculations and found that according to Omar's system 12 Muharram fell on a Thursday during the period in question on the dates corresponding to 25 April 1119, 28 January 1127 and 4 December 1131.2 The last-mentioned date is in perfect agreement with the other evidence of Nizami and Tabriz!: if we accept it, it means that Omar Khayyam survived the 83rd anniversary of his birth by rather more than six months.

1 Op. cit. p. 32. 2 Op. cit. pp. 33-43.

OMAR KHAYYAM 33Of Omar's early life we know nothing. We must assume

that he pursued his studies in Nishapur, but the famous story of the Three Friends, familiar to all of us from FitzGerald's preface to the Rubdiydt, can now be finally dismissed as pure legend. Omar, it will be remembered, was said to have been a fellow- student at Nishapur with Nizam al-Mulk, the vizier of the Seljuq Sultans Alp-Arslan and Malik-Shah, and Hasan-i Sabbah, the founder of the sect of the Isma'llls or Assassins of Alamut. The three friends made a vow that whichever of them attained to greatness would share his fortune with the other two. In the course of time Nizam al-Mulk, who had risen to be Grand Vizier of the Seljuq Empire, was approached by his former fellow- students. Omar was content with a pension which allowed him to continue his favourite studies, but Hasan insisted on a place at Court, where he intrigued against his benefactor and was dis­ graced and forced to flee. That Nizam al-Mulk was afterwards assassinated by one of Hasan's emissaries is, of course, an his­ torical fact. The story of the Three Friends, when the only authority for it was a late and spurious work, the so-called Vasdyd or " Testamentary Instructions " of Nizam al-Mulk, was rejected by scholars out of hand. Since it was discovered to occur in the famous World History of the fourteenth-century statesman-historian Rashld al-Dln, the critics have attacked its authenticity with more reserve. In his recent book, The Assas­ sins, 1 Professor Bernard Lewis remarks that " the story presents some difficulties. . . . The dates make it very unlikely that all three could have been contemporaries, and most modern scholars have rejected the picturesque tale as a fable."2 Professor Rypka, who, as we have seen, 3 accepts the possibility of Omar's having been born as early as 412/1021-2, observes that if that " date be correctly estimated, there may after all be some truth in the legend . . .". 4 If, however, Omar was born, as seems reasonably certain, in 1048, then Nizam al-Mulk, who was born at the latest in 1020, would have been about 30 years of age at the time of his birth, and they cannot possibly have been fellow-students. That Omar and Hasan-i Sabbah should have studied together

1 London, 1967. 2 0p. cit. p. 403 See above, p. 30. 4 History of Iranian Literature, p. 190.

34 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARYpresents no chronological difficulties, but there is not the slightest evidence that Hasan, a native of Ray (near the present-day Tehran), received his education in Nishapur.

We first hear of the adult Omar in Samarqand, in what is now the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan ; it was here that he composed his treatise on algebra under the patronage of the chief cadi Abu Tahir <Abd al-Rahman ibn 'Alaq (1039-1091).1 By Abu Tahir he must have been presented to the Qara-Khanid ruler Shams al-Mulk Nasr (1068-80), who, so BaihaqT informs us, " used to show him the greatest honour, so much so that he would seat the Imam 'Umar beside him on his divan ".2 He was presumably still at Shams al-Mulk's court in Bukhara in 1074, when peace was concluded with Sultan Malik-Shah, who had in­ vaded the Khan's territory, and it must have been now, at the age of 26, that Omar entered Malik-Shah's service. The reformation of the Persian calendar and the building of an observatory at Isfahan,3 undertakings in which Omar played a leading part, are mentioned by the thirteenth-century Arab historian Ibn al- Athlr (d. 1234) under A. H. 467, which began on 27 August 1074 and ended on 15 August 1075.

And in it [i.e. A.H. 467], says Ibn al-Athlr, the Nizamu'1-Mulk and Sultan Malikshah assembled a number of the most notable astronomers, and fixed the Naw-ruz [Persian New Year's Day] in the first point of Aries, it having been hitherto at the passage of the Sun through the middle point of Pisces, and what the Sultan did became the starting-point of [all subsequent] Calendars. 4 In it also was constructed the Observatory for Sultan Malikshah, for the making of which a number of notable astronomers were assembled, amongst them 'Urnar ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyami, Abu'1 Muzaffar al-Isfizarf, Maymiin ibnu' n-Najfb al-Wasitf, and others. A great amount of wealth was expended upon it, and the Observatory remained in use until the King died in A.H. 485 (A.D. 1092-3), but after his death it was disused. 5

1 Rozenfel'd and Yushkevich, op. cit. p. 22. 2 Ross and Gibb, op. cit. p. 472.3 So according to Rozenfel'd and Yushkevich, op. cit. p. 24. According to

Professor E. S. Kennedy: " The place of the observatory is moot, conjectures locating it at various cities ranging from Marv to Baghdad." See his chapter (" The Exact Sciences in Iran under the Saljuqs and Mongols ") in the Com- bridge History of Iran, vol. v (The Saljuq and Mongol Periods), ed. J. A. Boyle (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 659-79 (p. 672).

4 Rozenfel'd and Yushkevich, op. cit. p. 24, translate differently : "... and there appeared the calendar, created by the Sultan."

5 Translated by E. G. Browne in his Revised Translation of the Chahdr Maqdla . .. of Nizdmt-i-'Arudi of Samarqand. .. (London, 1921), pp. 136-7.

OMAR KHAYYAM 35The Malikl or Jalall Era is referred to by Gibbon:

The reign of Malek was illustrated by the Gelalaean aera; and all errors, either past or future, were corrected by a computation of time, which surpasses the Julian, and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian, style.1

In fact, Gibbon does less than justice to the labours of Omar and his colleagues.

The Jalall Calendar, as Sir John Morris Jones2 seems to have been the first to remark, was actually more accurate than the Gregorian, although 500 years earlier. 3

With Sultan Malik-Shah Omar was on terms of intimacy, being admitted to the company of his nadims or favourite courtiers, but Sultan Sanjar, whom he had treated as a boy for small-pox, conceived a dislike for him,4 and it is perhaps significant that we have no record of his activities after Sanjar's accession to the Sultanate in 1119. In 1112 or 1113 he was in Balkh in the com­ pany of Abu'l-Muzaffar Isfizarl, who had collaborated with him in the computation of the Jalall Era : it was here that Nizam! heard him make his famous prophecy about his place of burial. 5 In 1113 or 1114, probably in Nishapur, he was visited by Baihaqi and his father and catechized the former, then a boy of eight, on Arabic philology and geometry. 6 Finally, in the winter of 1114-15 we find him at Merv, whence he was summoned to make a weather forecast for the Sultan, that is, presumably, Sultan Muhammad, the second son and third successor (1105-18) of Malik-Shah ; it is less likely to have been his brother Sanjar, although the latter had ruled over Khurasan (of which Merv was then part) since 1096. The story is told by Nizaml-yi 'Arudi:

In the winter of the year A.H. 508 (A.D. 1114-15) the King sent a messenger to Merv to the Prime Minister Sadru'd-Din [Abu Ja'far] Muhammad ibn al- Muzaffar (on whom be God's Mercy) bidding him tell Khwaja Imam 'Umar to select a favourable time for him to go hunting, such that therein should be no snowy or rainy days. For Khwaja Imam 'Umar was in the Minister's company, and used to lodge at his house.

The Minister, therefore, sent a messenger to summon him, and told him what had happened. So he went and looked into the matter for two days, and

1 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vi. ch. Ivii.2 See the notes to his Welsh translation of Omar in Caniadau (Oxford, 1907),

p. 184.3 For the details see H. Suter's article " Djalall " in the Encyclopaedia of

Islam, ii. 1006-7. 4 See Ross and Gibb, op. cit. p. 472. 5 See below, p. 36. 6 See Ross and Gibb, op. cit. pp. 472-3.

36 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARYmade a careful choice ; and he himself went and superintended the mounting of the King at the auspicious moment. When the King was mounted and had gone but a short distance, the sky became over-cast with clouds, a wind arose,. .. and snow and mist1 supervened. All present fell to laughing and the King desired to turn back ; but Khwaja Imam ['Urnar] said, " Let the King be of good cheer, for this very hour the clouds will clear away, and during these five days there will not be a drop of moisture." So the King rode on, and the clouds opened, and during those five days there was no moisture, and no one saw a cloud.2

Omar was in his 67th year when he made this prediction. Over the remaining sixteen years of his life there is drawn an impenetrable veil. His death scene is described by his son-in- law, the Imam Muhammad al-Baghdadl, who told BaihaqT that " he used to use a golden toothpick. He was studying the meta­ physics in [Avicenna's] Shifd, and when he came to the chapter on ' The One and the Many ', he placed the toothpick between the two pages and said, * Summon the righteous ones that I may make my testament'. He then made his testament, arose and prayed, neither ate nor drank. When he prayed the last evening prayer he prostrated himself saying as he did so, * 0 God, Thou knowest that I have sought to know Thee to the measure of my powers. Forgive my sins, for my knowledge of Thee is my means of approach to Thee ', and died."3 For an account of his final resting place we turn again to Nizami-yi 'Arudi:

In the year A.H. 506 (A.D. 1112-13) Khwaja c Umar-i-Khayyamf and Khwaja Imam Muzaffar-i-Isfizarf had alighted in the city of Balkh, in the Street of the Slave-sellers, in the house of Amfr... Abu Sa'd Jarrah, and I had joined that assembly. In the midst of our convivial gathering I heard that Argument of Truth (Hujjattil-Haqq) Umar say, " My grave will be in a spot where the trees will shed their blossoms on me twice a year ". This thing seemed to me impos­ sible, though I knew that one such as he would not speak idle words.

When I arrived at Nfshapur in the year A.H. 530 (A.D. 1135-6), it being then four4 years since that great man had veiled his countenance in the dust, and this nether world had been bereaved of him, I went to visit his grave on the eve of a Friday (seeing that he had the claim of a master on me), taking with me one to point out to me his tomb. So he brought me out to the Hfra5 Cemetery; I turned to the left, and found his tomb situated at the foot of a garden-wall, over which pear-trees and peach-trees thrust their heads, and on his grave had fallen so

1 In the Persian text (p. 64) dama, " snow-storm, blizzard ".2 Brown, op. cit. p. 72. 3 Ross and Gibb, p. 473.4 So in the Istanbul manuscript, which is the oldest and most reliable; the

other manuscripts have " some years ". See Browne, op. cit. p. 71, n. 5.5 According to Sam'anl and Yaqut a large and well-known quarter of Nishapur

on the road to Merv.

OMAR KHAYYAM 37many flower-leaves that his dust was hidden beneath the flowers. Then I remembered that saying which I had heard from him in the city of Balkh, and I fell to weeping, because on the face of the earth, and in all the regions of the habitable globe, I nowhere saw one like unto him. May God (blessed and exalted is He !) have mercy upon him, by His Grace and His Favour I 1

Omar Khayyam, says BaihaqI, " was niggardly in both com­ posing and teaching, and wrote nothing but a compendium on physics, a treatise on Existence, and another on Being and Obligation, though he had a wide knowledge of philology, juris­ prudence and history ".2 In fact, his surviving scientific works, if one excludes the spurious Nauruz-Ndma, a treatise on the Persian New Year's Day, occupy only 130 pages in Rozenfel'd's translation. For an assessment of these works I must refer you

1 Browne, op. cit. pp. 71-72. On the vicissitudes of Omar's tomb I am grate­ ful to Dr. James Dickie of Lancaster University for the following details : " From the 11 th century to the 16th it would appear to have been no more than a simple recumbent gravestone at the foot of the rear enclosure wall of the precinct of Imamzadeh Mahruq, where doubtless there were numerous burials in close prox­ imity to the saint's tomb forming the Hira Cemetery of which Nizaml-i 'Arudii speaks. But about 1570 in the reign of Shah Tahmasp the shrine adjacent to the tomb was reconstructed with a dome preceded by a triadic wan, and it is to be presumed that from this time also dated the triple arched wing to the east of the shrine with the grave of the poet marked by a plain tarkjiba without inscription under the central alcove. In this state it endured till the present century to be described and photographed by travellers such as Sykes and Jackson. In 1934, stimulated by the recent erection of the Firdausl Mausoleum at Tus, the Na­ tional Monuments Commission dismantled the triple recess, thereby freeing the tomb from the shrine ; and a photograph in The Times (July 16th) shows the grave protected by a canopy of branches, with the scattered masonry of the new tomb awaiting erection. In its completed form this consisted of a platform flanked by rose-beds, and approached by a low flight of steps with the grave at the rear sur­ mounted by a shahid eight feet in height and described as being of alabaster, al­ though probably yellow Yazd marble is meant. This stele bore an inscription. [According to Rozenfel'd and Yushvevich, pp. 35-36, the inscription consisted of the astronomer-poet's name, followed by the date of his death given (in agreement with Govinda) as 516/1122 and a rubffi of which the last line was a chronogram indicating the date of the erection of the stele, that is the solar year 1313 corres­ ponding to 1934.] In 1961 the poet's remains were translated to a new site in the middle of the garden, off to the left of the central avenue. Here was erected an enormous structure comprising eight parabolic arches intersecting so as to pro­ duce an alternate rhythm of solid and void, the solid interstices being filled with rubd'iyat in faience and the others left open to allow blossom to fall upon the grave in fulfilment of the poets own wishes. Thus both the present structure and its immediate predecessor were hypaethral, open to the dew and the rain, a formula greatly esteemed amongst Muslims as betokening a proper humility on the part of the deceased." 2 Ross and Gibb, op. cit. p. 471.

38 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARYto his and Yushkevich's introductory essays and commentary and to Professor E. S. Kennedy's chapter (" The Exact Sciences in Iran under the Saljuqs and Mongols ") in volume v of the Cambridge History of Iran.1 I will speak, instead, of composi­ tions to which Omar can have attached no importance, which he took no steps to preserve for posterity and which were first col­ lected together in anthologies only some two centuries after his death. These are the rubd'iydt or quatrains which, mirrored in FitzGerald's masterpiece, have won for Omar the poet a fame far greater than was vouchsafed to Omar the scientist.2

The rubd f i (pi. rubd'iydt) is a four-lined epigram of which the first, second and fourth lines rhyme, while the third usually does not. As an epigram it is complete in itself and cannot be joined together with other rubd'is to form a composite poem. Fitz- Gerald has produced the effect of such a poem by selecting and re-arranging his material; in the manuscript he used, as in all such collections, the rubd'is appear in alphabetical order accord­ ing to the last letter of the rhyme. The rubd'i or quatrain is one of the earliest forms of Persian verse and either native in origin or at any rate a native development of Arabic prosody. Though not disdained by the professional poets, these brief poems seem more often to have been the work of scholars and scientists who composed them, perhaps, in moments of relaxation to edify or amuse for their content can be both grave and gay the inner circle of their disciples. We have rubd'is by Avicenna (d. 1037), the greatest of the Persian philosophers, whom Omar regarded as his master and whose encyclopaedic work, the Shifd, he was

1 See above, p. 34, n. 3.2 On FitzGerald's poem and its relationship to Omar's Ruba'iydt see A. J.

Arberry, Omar Khayyam and FitzGerald (The Iran Society, London, 1959); idem. The Romance of the Rubdiydt (London, 1959) ; F. R. C. Bagley, " Omar Khayyam and Fitzgerald," Durham University Journal, lix/2, n.s. xxviii/2 (March, 1967), pp. 81 -93. Bagley, op. cit. p. 90, rightly stresses " the skill with which he [FitzGerald] often conveys what can be conveyed of the original meaning to readers who will mostly have had no opportunity to learn anything about Iranian and Moslem culture ... ". The Victorian paraphraser's achievement was admir­ ably summed up by Mr. Julian Symons in a letter to the New Statesman for 29 December 1967 : " Fitzgerald was not in general a particularly interesting writer or personality, and his Rubaiyyat is a freak of literature. Yet it remains on any count a notable and memorable poem, and the fact that it is appreciated in a time so unreceptive as ours of his bitter-sweet determinism testifies to its durability.'

OMAR KHAYYAM 39reading at the time of his death1; by Ghazzall (d. 1111), the Thomas Aquinas of the Muslims, a contemporary but no friend of Omar2 ; and by Nasir al-Dm Tus! (d. 1274), an astronomer like Omar and the builder of an observatory of which, unlike Omar's, the remains can still be traced. 3 Such vers d'occasion would at first have been transmitted mainly by word of mouth, but writers of the next generation or two would quote them in their works and gradually, over the centuries, they would be col­ lected together in anthologies, etc. This is at any rate what happened to Omar's poems. The Persian version of the Book of Sindbad,* written in 1161, only thirty years after his death, con­ tains five of his rubd'is but does not name the author; the Sufi mystic Najm al-Dln Daya, in his Mirsdd al-'Ibdd ("Watch- Tower of the Servants of God "), written in 1233, refers to Omar in a passage to which we shall return5 and in so doing quotes two of his rubd'is ; the historian JuvainI, in his history of the Mongol invasion completed in 1260, quotes one of his rubd'is a propos the mass extermination of the people of Merv ; finally, the fourteenth century historian Hamd Allah Mustaufl, in his Tari^h-i Guzlda (" Select History "), composed in 1330, also quotes one rubd f i*

1 See above, p. 36.2 " One day the Imam, the Proof of Islam, Muhammad al-Ghazzali, visited

him and questioned him on the greater prominence of one of the polar sections of the celestial sphere than of the other sections, although the sphere itself is sym­ metrical. The Imam 'Umar made a discourse of inordinate length, beginning with the statement that movement belonged to such and such a category, but dealt very meagrely with the point under discussion for such was the usual way of this much-revered shaykh. At length the mosque attendant whose duty it was to give the signal (to the mu'adhdhin) at midday rose to his task, and the mu'adh- dhin issued the call to prayer, whereupon the Imam al-Ghazzall quoted 'The truth has come and falsehood has passed away ', and went off " (Ross and Gibb, op. cit. pp. 471-2).

3 See G. D. Mamedbeili, Osnovatel' Maraginskpi observatorii Nasireddin Tusi (Baku, 1961); J. A. Boyle, "The Longer Introduction to the Zlj-i-llkhdni of NasIr-ad-Dln JusT ", Journal of Semitic Studies, viii/2, 244-54 ; E. S. Kennedy, op. cit. pp. 672-3.

4 On the famous book about Sindbad and the Seven Wise Masters see B. E. Perry, The Origin of the Book of Sindbad (Berlin, 1960), in particular pp. 34 ff. and 58 ff. The Persian version was published by the late Professor Ahmed Ate§ in Istanbul in 1948. 5 See below, p. 45.

6 On the quotations from ancient sources see Browne, op. cit. pp. 135-8, also Arthur J. Arberry, Omar Khayyam: A New Version Based upon Recent Discoveries (London, 1952), p. 14.

40 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARYWith the fourteenth century we come to the anthologies, of which the earliest, the Nuzhat al-Majdlis (1331), contains as many as thirty-one rubd'is.1 Not until the middle of the fifteenth century three hundred years after his death do the first attempts appear to have been made to collect together the whole corpus of his poems. Of these collections the best known by far is the Bodleian MS., used by FitzGerald : it was compiled in Shiraz in 865/1460-1 and contains 158 rubd'is. Of the manu­ scripts preserved in the Istanbul libraries one, bearing the same date as the Bodleian MS., has as many as 315, while another, four years older, has only 131 rubd'is. 2 Mention should be made here of a manuscript published in 1925 by Friedrich Rosen : it is dated 1321, but the date is belied by the fact that it is written in the nasta lliq style of writing which had not then been invented ; it was probably copied in the sixteenth or even the seventeenth century. 3 To other manuscripts, apparently of even greater antiquity, we shall refer later.

From now onwards the Rubd'iydt were copied with ever great frequency and increased in number with each copy, the copyists tending to incorporate the work of other poets and sometimes, perhaps, their own as well. In addition to the Bodleian manu­ script with its mere 158 rubd'ts FitzGerald also consulted the transcript of an undated Calcutta MS., probably eighteenth- century, which contained no less than 516. So, too, Nicolas' edition of the Persian text (Paris, 1867), based on a Tehran litho­ graph, comprised a total of 464 rubd'is. Even these figures pale into insignificance compared with the 604 in the Bankipur MS. and the 770 in the Lucknow lithographed edition of 1894-5. The quantity was however drastically reduced by the researches of such scholars as Zhukovski, Ross and, above all, Christensen. The final verdict of the last-named scholar was that of more than 1,200 rubd'is known to be ascribed to Omar, only 121 could be regarded as reasonably authentic. 4 H. H. Schaeder went so far

1 On the anthologies see Arberry, loc. cit; V. Minorsky, " The Earliest Collections of 0. Khayyam" in Yddndme-ye-Jan Rypkfl. (Prague, 1967), pp. 112-13. 2 Arberry, op. cit. p. 9.

3 Arberry, op. cit. pp. 9-10; Minorsky, op. cit. pp. 112-13.4 Quoted by Arberry, Omar Khayyam and Fitzgerald, p. 15.

OMAR KHAYYAM 41as to declare that Omar had written virtually nothing and that " his name must be struck from the history of Persian literature 'V It was certainly possible to argue that Omar's status as a poet of the first rank was a comparatively late development and that to his contemporaries and to the immediately succeeding generations he was a scientist pure and simple.

The appearance in 1947-52 of three2 anthologies of Omar Khayyam bearing thirteenth-century dates changed (or seemed to change) the situation completely. Of these the first to arrive in the West was the smallest, a manuscript dated 1260 and con­ taining 172 rubd'is. Acquired in 1947 by the late Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, it was published in 1949 by Professor A. J. Arberry with a literal English translation.3 The largest of the three manuscripts, dated 1208 and containing 252 rubd'is, appeared in England in 1950 and was purchased by the Cambridge Uni­ versity Library. This version was translated into English by Professor Arberry (1952)4 and into French by M. Pierre Pascal (Rome, 1958), both verse translations, whilst the text, with a Russian prose translation, was published by the Soviet scholars R. M. Aliev and M. N. 0. Osmanov (Moscow, 1959). These two manuscripts, as Professor Arberry remarked, 5 imposed " the necessity of making an entire re-estimate of Omar's position ". The " most significant fact " about the Cambridge MS. was " its being described as a selection of the poems ; and a selection amounting to 252 items points to a corpus of at least 750 ". Moreover, Omar appeared in the manuscript in the company of a poet like Sana'l, " who cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as of minor importance; therefore, the copyist, a well-read man writing within 75 years of Omar's death, regarded him as much more than a trivial poet ".

1 Quoted by Arberry, loc. cit.2 On a fourth anthology in private possession in Tehran see Minorsky, op. cit.

p. 109. " We know nothing of its contents, but its date (654/1256) puts it in the same period, namely the early part of the 13th century, claimed for the ' earliest * three MSS."

3 The Ruba 'iyat of Omar Khayyam edited from the newly discovered manuscript dated 658/1259-60 in the possession of A. Chester Beatty, Esq. Sixty of the ru6a7s from this manuscript were translated in verse by Major J. C. E. Bowen under the title of A New Selection from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (London, 1961).

4 See above, p. 39, n. 5. 5 Omar Khayydm : A New Version, pp. 12-13.

42 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARYThe first doubts were raised by the appearance in New York

in 1951 of yet a third manuscript dated 1216 and containing 247 rubd'is, only five less than the Cambridge MS. In an article1 on this manuscript, which he had examined at the request of Mr. A. Upham Pope, the well-known authority on Persian art, Professor Arberry drew attention to a curious coincidence in the wording of the colophon of this and the Cambridge MS.; he also prepared a comparative table of the contents of all three manuscripts.2 This and the " Table of Manuscripts and Editions " appended to Arberry's translation of the Cambridge MS.3 were used by the late Professor Minorsky in a posthumous article4 to draw some far-reaching conclusions. With the aid of the former table he was able to demonstrate that the Chester Beatty and New York manuscripts were " disguised abridge­ ments " of the Cambridge MS., blocks of rubd'is having been reshuffled and the connection with that MS. masked by the insertion of small groups of rubd'is from other parts of it. Arberry's other table showed that correspondences between the Cambridge MS. and the edition of the Rubd'iydt by Rosen (1925) are greater than those between it and the edition of Furughi and Ghani (Tehran, 1942)5 ; in fact, 8 rubd'is are to be found elsewhere only in Annexe I to Rosens' edition. Alluding now, for the first time, to the possible spuriousness of the manu­ script, Minorsky suggested that the explanation of the closer resemblance to Rosen's text might be that it was prepared in the interval between the two editions, that is, between 1925 and 1942; alternatively the compiler might have been "cautious about using a quite recent Tehran edition, but thought that time had sufficiently bedimmed the memory of its predecessor".' Minorsky's conclusions tend to confirm Professor Minovi's state­ ment, made in 1963,7 that the three anthologies8 belong to a whole series of forgeries perpetrated in Tehran " during the last 20 years". " The calligrapher", to quote Professor Minovi's

1 " Omar Again ", RS.O.AS., xiv/3, pp. 413-19 (414-15).2 Op. cit. pp. 415-16. 3 Op. cit. pp. 151 -9. 4 See above, p. 40, n. 1.5 On this edition containing 178 rubd'is see Minorsky, op. cit. p. 113.6 Op. cit. p. 115.7 In a letter to Rahnema-ye Ketab, Tehran, 1342/1963, vi/3, pp. 238-40.8 As also the fourth one mentioned above, p. 41, n. 2.

OMAR KHAYYAM 43precise words,1 " who wrote these manuscripts or most of them (dated from 485/1066-658/1260) is someone still living". A final verdict cannot, of course, be pronounced without technical tests of the ink and paper.

But the spuriousness or authenticity of these manuscripts seemed a matter almost of indifference when there was published in 1967 a new translation of the Rubd'iydt by Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah,2 based, it was claimed, on a manuscript which had been preserved in the latter's family for the last eight hun­ dred years. Dated 1153 it was, according to Mr. Graves, 3 pre­ sented to Mr. Ali-Shah's ancestor by " the then Sultan ", that is, presumably Sanjar (1118-57), who, as we have seen,4 had no liking for Omar. A manuscript of such almost incredible anti­ quity, written only twenty years after Khayyam's death, would, if properly authenticated, establish his poetical status once and for all. Unfortunately there is incontrovertible evidence that the Graves-Ali-Shah translation is not based on this or any ancient manuscript. A curious circumstance of the text is that the quatrains occur in more or less the same order as in Fitz- Gerald's paraphrase, and Mr. Ali-Shah5 suggests that FitzGerald may have had access to a manuscript which followed the same arrangement as his own. Quite apart from the fact (already men­ tioned) that FitzGerald arbitrarily re-arranged the material he found in his sources, it is difficult to conceive of any motive for his suppressing all reference to a third manuscript used in addi­ tion to the Bodleian and Calcutta manuscripts. In fact, it has been conclusively demonstrated by Mr. L. P. Elwell-Sutton6 that this new version is a translation of the rubd'is in the notes to Edward Heron-Alien's edition of FitzGerald's poem. 7 In these notes Heron-Alien set against each English quatrain the rubd'i on which he believed it to be based. In the Graves-Ali-Shah

1 Op. cit. p. 239. 2 The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam.3 In a letter to the New Statesman for 2 February 1968.4 See above, p. 35. 5 See his Historical Introduction, p. 41.6 See his article, " The Omar Khayyam Puzzle ", R.C.A.J., lv/2 (June, 1968),

pp. 167-79, also his reviews of the Graves Ali-Shah translation in Rahnema-ye Ketab, 1347/1968, xi/4, pp. 183-9, and Delos (Austin, Texas, 1969), iii. 170-90.

7 Edward FitzGerald's Rubd'iyydt of 'Omar Khayyam with their Original Persian Sources (London, 1899).

44 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARYversion the quatrains (except for one transposition and a few omissions) follow precisely the same order. As the sources for FitzGerald's ninth and tenth quatrains Heron-Alien quotes in either case the halves of two completely different rubd'is. It is significant that these combinations, which betray their separate origin by the fact that the first half does not rhyme with the second, are here duly translated as quatrains Nos. 9 and 10. Clearly, the translators have been misled as to the nature of their text, which cannot have the remotest connection with an eight- hundred-year old manuscript in the Hindu Kush. Until that or some other pre-fourteenth-century manuscript is produced and authenticated, we must still repeat what was written by E. G. Browne as long ago as 1906,1 namely " that while it is certain that 'Umar Khayyam wrote many quatrains, it is hardly possible, save in a few exceptional cases, to assert positively that he wrote any particular one of those ascribed to him ".

" Mons. Nicolas . . .", says FitzGerald,2 " does not con­ sider Omar to be the material Epicurean that I have literally taken him for, but a Mystic, shadowing the Deity under the figure of Wine, Wine-bearer, etc. as Hafiz is supposed to do ; in short, a Sufi Poet like Hafiz and the rest.. . whenever Wine, Wine- bearer, etc., occur in the text which is often enough Mons. Nicolas carefully annotates ' Dieu ', 'La Divinite ', etc.: so carefully indeed that one is tempted to think that he was in­ doctrinated by the Sufi with whom he read the Poems." Mr. Graves and Mr. Ali-Shah go much further : they see in Omar not merely a Sufi, but a Sufi teacher who compiled his Rubd'iydt as a Sufi textbook. Now while he may well, like Avicenna before him, have had his mystical side, he was after all, like his master, a Philosopher, that is, a champion of Greek learning, and as such regarded with equal hostility by the orthodox and the Sufis we have seen that he was disliked by Ghazzall, who was in a sense a representative of both parties. 3 That the Sufis or some of them adapted his poems to their own ideas we know from an often quoted passage from the History of the Philosophers of

i A Literary History of Persia, ii. 257.2 Golden Treasury Edition of the Rubdiydt, pp. 17-18 and 19.3 See above, p. 39 and n. 1.

OMAR KHAYYAM 45Qifti (1172-1248) : " The later Sufis have found themselves in agreement with some part of the apparent sense of his verse, and have transferred it to their system, and discussed it in their assemblies and private gatherings, though its inward meanings are to the [Ecclesiastical] Law stinging serpents, and combinations rife with malice."1 On the other hand the celebrated Sufi mystic Najm al-Dln Daya (d. 1256) speaks of 'Umar as one of " those poor philosophers, atheists and materialists who... err and go astray " and as proof of this assertion quotes two of his rubd l ls, which, he says, demonstrate " the height of confusion and error ".2 Similar sentiments are expressed by an authority who is now, I think, cited for the first time : the celebrated Sufi poet and thinker Farid al-Dln 'Attar (c. 1142-c. 1220), the author, in addi­ tion to his mathnavis or narrative poems, of the Tadhkirat al- Auliyd (" Memorial of the Saints ") containing ninety-seven bio­ graphies of ancient mystics. 3 In his lldhl-Ndma or " Book of the Divinity " he tells the story of a clairvoyant who could read the thoughts of the dead. Taken to the tomb of Omar Khayyam the seer is asked to practise his art, and speaks as follows :

This is a man in a state of imperfection.At that Threshold towards which he turned his

face he laid claim to knowledge.Now that his ignorance has been revealed to him,

he is sweating because of the confusion of his soul.He is left between shame and confusion ; his

very studies have made him deficient. 4

Thus this great expert on Sufism, writing less than a century after Omar's death, saw in the astronomer-poet not a fellow mystic, but a free-thinking scientist, who all his life had exalted Reason over Revelation and who now, in his tomb, awaited with fear and trepidation the final reckoning on Judgement Day.

1 See Browne, A Literary History of Persia, 11. 250-1.2 See Browne, op. cit. pp. 249-50; Revised Translation of the Chahdr Maqdla,

PP. 135-6.3 Ed. R. A. Nicholson, 2 vols. (London, 1905-7). See also Arberry, Muslim

Saints and Mystics : Episodes from the Tadhkirat al-Auliya (" Memorial of the Saints ") (London, 1966).

4 Ed. H. Ritter (Istanbul, 1940), p. 272, lines 12-15, ed. F. Rouhani (Tehran, 1340/1961), p. 215, lines 5173-6. See also Rouhani, Le Livre divin (Paris, 1961), p. 321. The version quoted in the text is from a translation of the poem to be published by the Manchester University Press. [The passage was, in fact, known to Govinda, who quoted it on p. Ix of his Introduction.]