The Study and Dissemination of Inflectional and syntactical Characteristics of The History of Sistan

Iranian literary scholars have shown less interest in the study of prose works than those in verse. This is why a great number of Persian literary works in verse have had the chance to be revised and reedited and go to print again and again, while the number of the prose works presented to the culturati and scientific society has been fairly less. However, the necessity of introducing the importance and true validity of Persian prose and emphasizing its significance from different viewpoints is strongly felt. Then the present paper tries to conduct a research on The History of Sistan (written c.445 AH), a primary resource for the early Persian prose evolution. This book was one of the unknown and forgotten works of Persian literature until Etemad Al-Saltana, Naser Al-Din Shah Qajar’s secretary of publications, printed it in Nos. 474 – 564 of Iran Daily (1920 – 1923) as installments of a serial. Later in 1935, Mohammad Taqi Bahar, the well-known poet and scholar, revised and reedited it with a comprehensive introduction to be published in the form of a book. The present research, based on Bahar’s revision, explores its inflectional and syntactical features including parts of speech, their functions, simple and complex sentence structures, subject and verb agreement, order of the components, deletions, coordination, subordination, etc.