 Hello. My name is Nargis Farsad. My name is Nargis Farsad and I teach Persian language and literature, mostly poetic literature, at Sewells University of London. I would like to take you on a journey with me. I hope it will be a little bit of an adventure as well. I would like to introduce you to the Persian language and tell you a little bit about its development. Persian's origins go back several millennia and we normally divide this continuum into three periods. Old Persian or Old Iranian, Middle Persian and New or Modern Persian. New Persian really refers to the Persian that was started to be written in the Perso-Arabic script after the arrival of Islam in Iran. In a moment I'll also show you a PowerPoint, some images that hopefully will put all the time saying into a more visual context, but first a little bit about the place of Persian amongst the languages of the world and its place in the heart of Europeans. Westerners have always had a very soft spot, not just for Persian language and poetry, but for many things, Persians, for its arts, for architecture and for its gardens. After all, the word paradise comes from the Persian word pardis, those heavenly gardens created on earth, which hopefully will also be our eternal dressing places. In June 1853, Frederick Engels, who was living in Manchester at the time and who was also a prolific writer, wrote a letter to his friend Carl Marx who was living in London and he, Frederick, tells Marx that he has just started learning Persian. He says that for the purpose he has been using a grammar book that was written by the 18th century judge and philologist Sir William Jones. Frederick Engels concludes that in comparison to several languages that he had attempted to learn, Persian is really a child's play and he tells Marx that he hoped to learn the Persian grammar in 48 hours. However, he does admit that coming to grips with learning the Persian Arabic script is a lot more challenging and he says that had it not been for this fairly complex script, Persian would indeed be an ideal candidate for a universal language and there it is already made. I mentioned the 18th century William Jones. He was indeed a linguistic genius and by the end of his life he knew eight languages very well. He could use them for academic purposes, you know, including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French etc. and of course Persian and he knew another 15 or so languages that he could function in and with the aid of dictionaries you could really get by using materials written in those languages. It reminds me actually of the first director of our university, Soaz. Sir Edward Denison Ross, Professor Ross, who was the director of Soaz from 1916 to 1937 and a polyglot himself. He actually was a scholar of Persian language and literature and used to teach Persian and Soaz when he was the director. Where was I? I'm sorry I do tend to go off on many tangents but I hope you stay with me. I was talking about Sir William Jones. He is associated with the term Indo-European languages. This is the title that he chose for a huge number of European languages and languages particularly in the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent that seem to have a lot in common. This means that Persian and Hindi and English and German and so on have a lot in common in terms of grammar, in terms of vocabulary, nouns, words that you might recognize but of course they may not be immediately obvious when you listen to a Persian speaker or a German speaker. You may not identify all these common denominators but with a little bit of detective work and a little bit of going deeper into the pronunciations or the place in the sentence, for example, you will soon see that we do have a lot in common. Now I think it's time to start our visual journey and for me to illustrate the similarities between all these languages. So I'm going to share my screen with you. I'm going to show you, start showing you a power point. I'm going to take you back to 553 BC. I'm going to take you to this beautiful setting where the court of the Achaemenid empire resided. This is the ceremonial palace of the Achaemenids. It is situated about 60-70 kilometers to the northeast of the magnificent city of Shiraz in Iran and as I mentioned the ceremonial palace of this mighty empire. You will perhaps heard names such as Xerxes, Darius, Cyrus and so on. These names are very popular boys names such as Kourosh, Tzeros, Darius and so on and several of these names, particularly the name of Xerxes, appear in the Bible in the book of Esther. This ceremonial palace was known as Parso to the Persians and the Greeks refer to it as Persepolis, which is still the name that Europeans use for it. In modern Persian we recall it Tachter Jamshid, the throne of Jamshid. The empire of Achaemenids was the largest empire of the ancient world and I chosen one of the many reliefs on the remains of this monument to show you so many features that are associated with the Persianate culture, bringing gifts, love of beautiful ornaments, love of celebrations and food and culinary culture and animals and of course all the ceremonial dress and all the attributes of a mighty court. Here is the iconic images of especially the lion which has a very prominent place in Persianate culture and I wanted to draw your attention to these other images. These are maybe the representatives, ambassadors, the princes of many vassal states coming up for a ceremony bringing gifts and here are the image of them all holding hands mostly to demonstrate the peace and mutual respect that ruled over this empire. Here is a map that shows the expanse of this world at its largest. It covers huge parts of the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, of course modern day Iran, bits of the Caucasus, bits of Mesopotamia, chunks of Anatolia and North Africa. You can imagine how multilingual and multicultural such a vast empire would have been but the languages of official them were old Iranian, old Persian, which was written in Cuneo form similar to other ancient Near Eastern languages like Akkadian for example, the language of the Babylonians but Iranians used Greek for inscriptions on their coinage. The Cyrus cylinder had a very popular visit to Iran over 10 years ago. The object is currently at the British Museum so it went to Iran in 2010 and was there for several months with cues of people coming to see it and then it also had a very successful tour of several United States and museums about 2013 if I'm not wrong. Cyrus cylinder is often referred to as the first charter of human rights because the inscription on it written in Akkadian refers to the necessity of allowing the citizens to exercise freedom of religion, freedom of speaking in the language that they are associated with and generally having respect for multi-face, multi-cultural societies. This period is also associated with the Greco-Persian wars, the rivalry between the two mighty empires the Persians and the Greeks and the downfall of the Akkadians is associated with the arrival of Alexander not so great if you don't mind me not calling him Alexander the Great but call him Alexander the Macedonian who invaded, conquered Iran and also it is alleged set fire to the Persepolis which was destroyed very rapidly due to all the textiles all the timber and so on that was used in that palace. The language as I told you was the cuneiform and here is an example of it many examples can be found in museums around the world and of course on the monuments and rock reliefs in the region. The coinage was a very important part of the might of the ruler and as I said the inscriptions are often in the Greek language and there are many examples of these coins at museums all over the world. The next prominent rulers who arrived on the scene were the Parsians, the magnificent dynamic Parsians who ruled over a vast region albeit as you see from the map a more shrunken empire compared to the Akkadians and they ruled over Iran from 247 BC to 224 AD which is almost 500 years. The Parsians were great horsemen, great champions of the arts and also as you can see they were snazzy dressers and it's thanks to them that the tunic trouser combination is the staple of many a wardrobe. With the Parsians we move more towards the emergence of middle Persian as the language of the empire to begin with Greek imperial Aramaic and Hebrew and so on were more used and as you see in the coinage gradually middle Persian emerges but the inscriptions again are in Greek. There are very significant images on this coinage but perhaps discussion of them can wait for another time. Parsians loved beautiful objects and their love of ceremony is very prominent in this archaeological material that again are displayed all over the world in museum. This is a drinking cup, a drinking vessel and it goes back to the construction of it, it goes back to the Akkadian period but it was produced and reproduced throughout the ages. Parsians also had the language, you know, Parsian Persian but that language is extinct. The Persian rule ended in 224 when Ardeshir the first already ruler of a region revolted against the Persian kings and brought down the empire and established his own dynasty of the Sasanians, the house of Sasan. They often referred to as the Neo-Persian empire and their end came with the arrival of the Arab Muslims in around in 651 AD. Again you see from the map that here the immediate enemies, rivals are not the Greeks but the Romans and here are the rule of the Romans on the eastern edges of the empire. The language of the Sasanians is the middle Persian and is written in the Pahlavi script. This is a very famous rock relief near Naqsharostam and you will see Shahpul the mighty finder of dynasty and he is looking at the emperor Valerian who is kneeling beside Shahpul's horse and Valerian is really the first Roman emperor who was held captive, who was imprisoned and this really sent shudders down the spine of the Roman military and administrators and really shook that empire. Sasanians again here there's another image you will see the headwear is changed and there is a relationship between church and state. Here is the king receiving, here's the king on the left receiving a diadem if you like a mandate from the representative of the divine to rule on his behalf. Here are examples of the Pahlavi script and you can see it's becoming much more sort of you know curly worthy and it does look also not dissimilar to a Syriac or a royal army and more coinage from this period and you can now see that the inscription is in middle Persian. It's very important to note that there were several other languages that already had a script at this time and people who lived in Iran of the time and one crucial language is Hebrew and there were many many Jewish Persians who didn't really feel the necessity to learn the Arabic script and adapt it to you know Persian for their use. They already had the Hebrew script so they've created this huge audio work known as the Judeo-Persian literature and manuscripts whose production continued through really you know the classical period to 14th, 15th century and here are some examples of Judeo-Persian texts. I think this is a good place to pause and take a break. In the next episode I'll fast forward to the era of new passion and we can take the first steps to learning some Persian Farsi. Bye for now.