The Language That Came Back
Persia: Empire and AfterwardsTwo Centuries of Silence
After the conquest, Arabic became the language of government, religion and serious writing across the caliphate. Persian did not disappear — people never stopped speaking it — but for roughly two centuries it largely stopped being written. Most of the conquered languages of the Middle East and North Africa never recovered from that. Persian is the great exception.
What Came Back Was Different
When Persian re-emerged in writing in the ninth and tenth centuries, it was not the Middle Persian of the Sassanids. It had lost much of the old grammatical complexity, absorbed a large Arabic vocabulary, and — most visibly — it was written in the Arabic script, with four extra letters invented for sounds Arabic did not have. New Persian is what Iranians write today, and it is a product of the conquest, not a survival from before it.
Where It Came Back
The revival did not happen in the old imperial heartland. It happened in the east — in Khorasan and Transoxiana, under the Samanids at Bukhara, far from Baghdad. Distance from the caliph's court gave local rulers both the freedom and the motive to patronise poetry in the local language. Rudaki, generally counted the first great poet of New Persian, wrote at the Samanid court in the tenth century.
The Second Language of Islam
What happened next is the thing that makes Persian unusual. It did not merely survive as a local tongue; it became the second great literary language of the Islamic world, and in much of Asia the first. Persian was the language of administration and poetry from Anatolia to Bengal for centuries. Court records in Delhi were kept in Persian into the nineteenth century. It travelled far past any Persian army.
Why It Matters Here
This is the pattern the rest of the era repeats. Persia was conquered and its state destroyed. What followed was not erasure but absorption running in both directions: Persian took the conqueror's script and vocabulary, and the conqueror's empire took Persian administration, ceremony and eventually its literature.
Key Dates to Remember
- 651 — The Sassanid state ends; Arabic becomes the written language
- c. 8th–9th c. — Persian is spoken but little written
- 9th–10th c. — New Persian emerges in the east, in Arabic script
- c. 940 — Rudaki writes at the Samanid court in Bukhara
- 11th–19th c. — Persian is a court language from Anatolia to Bengal