Introducing Types of Compact Allegory and Tracking its Footprints in the Poetry of Early Persian Poets

Allegory has been discussed in both the old and new rhetorical books. In ancient books, it has been considered as compound simile and allegorical metaphor, while in modern times it is a subset of imagination and imagery. Structurally, the Persian allegories can be divided into two groups of descriptive (short or compact) and narrative (extensive) allegories. The narrative allegory includes stories about humans and animals, symbolic stories, fables, parables, and so on, the best examples of which are found in the Persian mystical and didactic literature. In contrast, descriptive allegory typically consists of only one or few more sentences and its most important types of which are: allegorical simile, allegorical metaphor, proverb and oslub-e-moadeleh (techniques of sameness). In this article, types of compact and descriptive allegories and their footprints in the early Persian poetry as well as the role of poets in development of allegory in the 3rd and 4th centuries are studied. To this end, about 2000 lines of verse composed during the two centuries were studied. It is argued that the history of different types of compact allegories is as long as the Persian literature.