Search Results: Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyam (also given as Umar Khayyam, l. 1048-1131 CE) was a Persian polymath, astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher but is best known in the West as a poet, the author of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. His famous work has been embraced...

Statue of Omar Khayyam (l. 1048-1131 CE) in the Persian Scholar Pavilion in Vienna, donated by Iran.

Persian literature differs from the common definition of “literature” in that it is not confined to lyrical compositions, to poetry or imaginative prose, because the central elements of these appear, to greater or lesser degrees, in all the...

Persian literature derives from a long oral tradition of poetic storytelling. The first recorded example of this tradition is the Behistun Inscription of Darius I (the Great, r. 522-486 BCE), carved on a cliff-face c. 522 BCE during the period...

Early 20th-century CE edition of the Rubaiyat.

Zorvanism (also given as Zuvanism, Zurvanism) was a sect of the Persian religion Zoroastrianism which emerged in the late Achaemenid Empire (c. 550-330 BCE) and flourished during the Sassanian Empire (224-651 CE). It is often referenced as...

I first read Edward Fitzgerald’s celebrated, if controversial, version of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat when I happened upon it in my father’s extensive library when I was a sophomore at Notre Dame High School. I have since read it countless time...

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (l. 1048-1131 CE), illuminated by William Morris.

An agent of the Assassins (left, in white turban) fatally stabs Nizam al-Mulk, a Seljuk vizier, in 1092 CE. 14th-century CE manuscript Topkapi Palace Museum, Cami Al Tebari TSMK, Inv. No. H. 1653, folio 360b

Still from the TV series Farouk Omar.