Sir William Jones and the Shahnameh

The second half of the eighteenth century was a period of transition in European aesthetics. It was also a time of increasing contact between Europe and Asia. The rise of Oriental literary scholarship was a natural outgrowth of the public interest in things Oriental. While the earlier part of the century had sought to reaffirm the basic tenets of the Enlightenment with the help of its indirect knowledge of the Oriental literatures, the later generations became increasingly fascinated with the new possibilities of the literary heritage of the East. The Shahnameh first attracted the attention of the eighteenth-century Orientalists such as Sir William Jones as the supreme example of Oriental epic poetry. The present essay proposes to study Jones's conception of Persian literature and his remarks on the poetry of Firdawsi, as well as his fragmentary translations of the Shahnameh.