Customs of Ayyaran in the Story of Samak-e-Ayyar

Samak-e-Ayyar is the oldest existing example of storytelling in Persian; it is the first long prose story available today and one of the most beautiful stories in Persian language and literature written in simple and smooth prose. In this book one can understand the social and cultural situation of Iran in the sixth and seventh centuries AH. Among the social information, firstly, comes the situation of Ayyaran and their customs during their own time and before. Samak-e-Ayyar is not only a love story; it can be said that it is a prose epic belonging to the middle and lower classes of the society in the oral form until it was written down. Folk stories have a primeval root in the history of a nation and in this story, Ayyaran respect all moral humane, and social principles. Rituals, manners and moral qualities of Ayyaran are mentioned many times in the book and this study tried to extract and analyze them.