ميراث مكتوب زبان طبري

The Written Heritage of Tabari

The Tabari language can be categorized into two historical periods: pre-modern and modern. The pre-modern period corresponds to the texts written from the tenth to eighteenth centuries. Despite the loss of the early major works in Tabari, a number of poems and individual verses, sentences, and words are preserved by means of the Persian works connected to the province, most notably in Ibn Isfandlarʹs Tarikh-i Tabaristan ʹHistory of Tabaristanʹ, compiled in the early thirteenth century. The bulk of the pre-modern Tabari materials, however, are found in several manuscripts of the Koran with Tabari words and sentences inserted interlineally into the text or along the margines. There is also a Tabari translation of Maqamat al-Hariri, a medieval Arabic work, kept in a single manuscript at Malik library in Tehran. The only detailed study of these translations is published by Ellwell-Sutton on the manuscript of the Koran kept at the Grand Lodge in Edinburgh. Moreover, individual Tabari words are found in works such as Tuhfat al-Muʹmimn of Hakim Muʹmin of Tunkabun (seventeenth century), which is particularly rich in the Tabari flora and fauna. In a number of Persian lexicographical works, particularly the Farhang-i Anjumanara-yi Nasi.ru one finds sporadic citations of Tabari lexemes. Modern Tabari, also called Mazandarani, is known since the first half of the nineteenth century, when several European travelers, scholars, and diplomats undertook the task of documenting the language. The resulting data is substantial, among which stands out Kanz al-Asrar, compiled by Bernhard Andreevich Dorn (1860-66), which includes several collections of verses attributed to the legendary Tabari poet Amir Pazvari as well as stories translated from Persian. More collections of popular poems and songs as well as prose texts and individual sentences and words were published by Aleksander Borejko Chodzko (1842), Iiʹya Nikolaevich Berezin (1853), B. A. Dorn (1865), G. V. Melgunov (1868), and Jacques de Morgan (1904). From the mid-nineteenth century has survived a versified Tabari-Persian dictionary, which is edited by Sadiq Kla. An ongoing project by this author aims at transcribing, translating, and glossing these works. This paper aims to identify the surviving Tabari texts and introduce the extents of modern scholarship on the history of the language. A comprehensive bibliography is furnished.