The Role of Exaggeration in Battle Visualizations in ‘Book of Kings’ and ‘the Mu'allaqat’: A Comparative Study of ‘Amr ibn Kulthūm’ and ‘Rostam and Sohrab’

One of the common features of epic texts is war and belligerence. A high volume of such texts is devoted to describing war as well as war methods and techniques. The tendency to exaggerate in depicting battles is a main feature of epic language. This feature can be clearly observed in ‘Rostan and Shorab’ tragedy and ‘Amr ibn Kulthum’. The present study made an attempt to comparatively analyze this literary device in the lines depicting battles in ‘Rostam and Sohrab and ‘Amr ibn Kulthūm'. The results show that natural factors form the main elements of exaggeration accompanied by such literary devices as metaphor and simile. In ‘Rostam and Sohrab’, the psychological aspects are also visualized besides the sensory aspect, but the visualizations in ‘Amr ibn Kulthum’ do not go beyond visual and sensory aspects and no abstract element is represented. Among the different types of exaggeration, auxesis is very frequent in Ferdowsi’s poem whereas overstatement and hyperbole predominate ‘Amr ibn Kulthum’. Another difference between the two literary works is the chain of exaggerative visualizations, which are absent from Arabic pre-Islamic poetry in general and from ‘Mu'allaqat’ in particular.