A Study of the Four Elements in " Tarikh-e-Vassaf"

Tārikh-e Vassāf is one of the artificial and technical texts in Persian language whose scholarly author has taken advantage of most of his contemporary sciences in its composition. As a result, terminologies from sciences like philosophy, logic, jurisdiction, medicine, astrology, geography, versification, rhetoric, etc. have granted this historical context a special feature, thus serving the author’s use of figures of speech. The author’s special look at the four elements indicates the very characteristic of the book. The altars love of the four elements led him to devise the first plan of the book based on four volumes, though later he added a fifth volume. This study attempts to extract, criticize, and analyze instances of employing the four elements from the five volumes in a descriptive-analytical manner and review the positive and negative aspects of using the elements within the text. The present study revealed that the obligation to the application of the four elements has caused several features to appear in this work, the most important of which include reinforcement of the text imaginary elements, taking advantage of most grammatical and syntactic capacities of Persian language along with the application of the mentioned elements, formation of miscellaneous words, terms and compounds, expanding the scope of Persian language vocabulary, and eventually creating literary terms with the help of the elements. Besides these characteristics, obligation to use of four elements throughout the text has occasionally led to the formation of loose compounds, grammatical anomalies, and extreme use of figures of speech in the text.