Samanid Bukhara and the rise of New Persian literature

The Samanids remained in name governors for the Abbasid caliphs — their rulers styled themselves only amir — but in practice they ruled an independent realm from the steppe frontier to Khurasan. Its high point came under Ismail’s grandson Nasr II, who succeeded at the age of eight in 914. His regent and vizier, Abu Abdallah al-Jayhani, was also a geographer who questioned foreign visitors about distant lands and their roads; in 921 he met Ibn Fadlan, the secretary of the caliph’s embassy to the Volga Bulgars, which passed through Bukhara. From 922 the vizier was Abu’l-Fadl Bal’ami. Nasr built a new palace at the Registan, Bukhara drew scholars and poets and had a celebrated library, and the silver of the Samanid mints travelled far to the north: thousands of Samanid coins have been found around the Baltic and in Scandinavia. The scholar al-Tha’alibi of Nishapur later called Samanid Bukhara “the Kaʿba of empire” and “the meeting-place of the unique figures of the age”.

The court’s lasting achievement was literary. New Persian, written in the Arabic script, had had poets before, but little of their work survives; under the Samanids it became a language of high literature. Rudaki (c. 858 – 940/941), from Panjrud near Samarkand, was court poet under Nasr II and Bal’ami: at Nasr’s order Bal’ami had the Indian fables of Kalila and Dimna translated from Arabic into Persian, and readers recited the text to the blind poet, who put it into verse. Rudaki is said to have composed more than 180,000 verses, of which only a small part survives. Later in the century the poet Daqiqi began a versified Book of Kings, the Shahnameh, but was reportedly murdered by his slave in 977, after some thousand verses, and his contemporary Ferdowsi took up the work. In 963 the vizier Abu Ali Bal’ami, at the order of the amir Mansur I, began the Tarikhnama, a free Persian reworking of al-Tabari’s universal history and one of the oldest surviving works of New Persian prose.

The young Ibn Sina, born about 980 near Bukhara, studied in the city and at seventeen became physician to the amir Nuh II. But from the 940s real power had increasingly lain with Turkish slave commanders — one of them, Alp-Tegin, seized Ghazni in 962, where the Ghaznavid dynasty arose — and the Karakhanids were pressing from the steppe; in 999 Bukhara fell to them. The court culture created in Bukhara outlived the dynasty: the Ghaznavids copied the Samanid administration and in their turn became patrons of Persian poets.