OK, just before I go to the podium, do you hear me? Just a few verses. Because yesterday, we described one of the reasons why this gentleman, Elias Ibn Yusuf from Ganges in the region of Azerbaijan, chose the pen name Nezami. Of course, he was playing on the idea that Nezami, the regulator, sounds like the title of a great prime minister of the Seljuk sultans of the preceding century, Nezam ul Mork, the regulator of the kingdom. So openly, the poet proclaims that his role is one of advisor to kings and princes. But there is also another reason for this name. And he tells us, I'll first tell it to you in the original Persian and try to give an adequate translation. Darno me, Nezami, garnehi gom, bini adadeh zoro yeknoem. If you but place a foot into the circle of the name of Nezami, you shall find therein 1,000 and 1 names. 1,001 indeed, the princess Shirin tells her king, Khusro, tales to initiate him into deeper wisdom. And the poet says, hasor afsana azbar beshtorad, betanoze yakbar beshtorad, meaning 1,000 tales and more she has. In enchantment, she even has one more, meaning 1,001. Anybody with the slightest exposure to Nezami's poetry has been struck by the extraordinary resemblance between the construction of his tales and the 1,001 knights. And did Nezami have access to the 1,001 knights? It can be no doubt whatsoever that he did see something in his late 12th century corresponding to the book which, in Arabic, came to be known as Kitab al-Fleil al-Welaila, the book of 1,000 knights and one knight. After all, the tales themselves are originally Indian. From India, from the Sanskrit, they were translated into Middle Persian in the Sasanian capital of Tessiphon in something like the sixth century of the common era. And then they were put into Arabic from the Middle Persian by as early as the eighth century AD, in an early form when they were known as the alf afsana or hasor afsana, the 1,000 tales. 1,001, why? Because in ancient India, 101 or 1,001 are variants of a number which signifies infinity. Therefore, the tales which the queen tells her husband to initiate him into higher wisdom, a queen who is known as Humay Chere al-Zad, meaning Lady Phoenix of the noble countenance. When it's the Arabic transcription, Sheher al-Zad, which has nothing to do with city, it is Chere al-Zad. She tells these tales because they are infinite in number and they reflect the infinity of the world. And the infinity of the world is a reflection of the infinity of the divine. And that is why Jami, who wrote of Nizami, his tremendous appreciation, called out upon his god, saying, naguyaam kinam at hasor o yaquist, keba on hasor on hasor and aquist. I shall not say that thy name is even 1,001, for with all these thousands, a thousand is yet too little. And Jami continues speaking of Nizami. Rahimahu wa-da'Allah, way as ganjastu, faza'ilu kamalati way, rawshan, ityaj bashar, nadarad, on qadar, latah e fudaqa e qahqa e qidar, kitabe, panch ganch, darch karnas, kasra moyassar nist, belke maqdurinau e bashar nist. And I don't apologize for the Herati pronunciation there. So it means Nizami upon him, the mercy of God was born in Ganja, the treasure city. His virtues and merits are manifest and need no commentary. He has in chaste, as one puts into a treasure chest. So many beauties, subtleties and truths in his book of the five treasures that no one else would be able to do anything the like. No, it goes beyond what humankind can achieve. That is the kind of praise that a civilization gives to its Dante or to its Shakespeare. So without further ado, let us see what it looks like pictorially. So we'll just take a few glances at Shireen as the lady who tells stories to her spouse. And of course, Nizami reaches back into what, for him, and his civilization were the fabulous times of the great Sasanian Empire before the advent of Islam because that is the period of the tales of the thousand and one knights. So we have these evocations. Here is the historical character in the first of the two great Sasanian romances of Nizami. King Khosrow II, the victorious, seen here in the Taqibustan in Iran, the mighty warrior in chain mail who waged so many wars against the Roman Empire that he achieved the magnificent feat of wrecking both the Persian Empire and the Roman Empire, and within a decade, the Arabs conquered them both. However, this is what the drawing is taken from. You'll even notice the kind of symbol that we never really think about. It's on Sasanian monuments, on the crowns of Sasanian kings, you see a crescent moon and a sun and often a star. Why so? Because the Sasanian king was considered to be the brother of the sun and the moon. When the Muslims will take over, they will preserve the Sasanian crown symbol and put it on the top of the mosque because Allah now is the true king, hence the crescent. And this is the origin of the crescent that you see in so many Islamic standards and flags. It is the crescent moon of the old Sasanian royalty. I am the brother of the sun and the moon. The great Khosrow, the victorious, Khosrow II, as the mighty hunter, slaughtering game to feed his people and he bears upon his crown, you can see the wings of the sunbird, the Varagna bird, again the crescent moon and the solar disk. This lovely painting from Saugdiana, today's Tajikistan, a painting now preserved in the Hermitage Museum from Panchkant shows this kind of Sasanian type prints and is lovely lady. Did Nizami see art of this kind? Possibly, but in any case, this is the origin of so much of the Islamic figurative art that we've been looking at developing in later centuries. Then of course, when Nizami writes his poem and it is copied and illustrated for Muslim kings, then we'll see, as in this bizarre illustration, that the Persian king of Sasanian lore is a portrait of the ruling Sultan of Herat, Sultan Hussein Mirzar Bayqara. He is about to punish his son, the future King Khosrow II for misbehaving and the ministers plead and the ministers are of course, Jami, Taftazani the sheikh of Islam and Mirali Sheri Navoi, always a way of bringing the ancient story as close as possible to the rulers, to the patrons, telling them, warning them, this story concerns you and is about you. And as usual, you see in paintings of this age, O thou who openest all gates, yaw mufatehol abwab. When Mir Sayyid Ali depicts this wonderful representation of King Khosrow's court as if he were a Safavid prince, he takes great care to represent the musician, Barbad the minstrel of King Khosrow II because after all, Nizami himself told us, Barbad was the third of the great counselors to kings, I am the fifth. So symbolically, this is again, a representation of Nizami as Barbad the minstrel. Well, carry on. We've, for the question about the influence of Nizad related or Sultan Muhammad related paintings of Nizami's poetry and the influence on Matisse, you could see this, Queen Shirin. And I'm going to go a little further here. You have from the second half of the 16th century, King Khosrow discovering his lovely bride to be the lady Shirin. And if you look very carefully, you will see under the king's boot, the head of a monster in the stone. Do you see it? Very, very clear. And from now on, you can keep your eyes alert. These faces in stone occur all over Persian, Turkish, and Indian art from the late 14th to the 17th centuries. Do you see it? What does this stone stand for?  The demon who is known in Judeo-Christian lore as Asmadius, which itself is actually ancient Persian, Daesh Madaevah, horrible demon. The idea being in these paintings, when you see the face of a demon in a rock, it signifies that the protagonist of the painting, in this case, King Khosrow has subjugated the demon just as Solomon has done. It is also a call upon the contemplator of the painting to behave, to learn that he will not be able to marry the lovely Shirin until he has gone through so many tests and trials of initiation that he will finally be worthy of her. And in the meantime, he must keep the demon beneath his boot locked in stone. I'm going to go on with some of these when King Khosrow comes to the palace of Queen Shirin when painted by Sultan Muhammad, we are in an absolutely magical vision of the Caucasus Mountains in springtime. And you can see in this early 16th century painting how Sultan Muhammad handles what Shakespeare plays as double time. Outside, it is daylight. The palace is enveloped in magic night. And so much to heart did the sultans take these stories that we have here an official Ottoman chronicle written in Persian for Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent in the mid 16th century, describing Suleyman the Magnificent's wars against the Safavid Empire of Iran. And when Sultan Suleyman came upon a ruined castle somewhere on the borderlands of what are now Iraq and Iran, he was asked, he asked what it was the name of this castle. And he was told Kassar-e Shirin. It is the castle of Shirin. This is why the Ottoman artist represents Sultan Suleyman in exactly the same position as if he himself had become the protagonist of Nizami's story. Now, I'm going to conclude this brief look at the Khosrow-e Shirin tradition, which has so many sub-stories. With this picture by Oghur Mirak from about 1539 or 1540. And I promised you the meaning of the handkerchief. So I'm going to let you have the meaning of the handkerchief. Here Khosrow sits upon the throne, next to his bride-to-be, Shirin, the actual queen of this Christian kingdom is here. She is the aunt of the queen. And you notice that she holds a kerchief, symbol of sovereignty. And on the throne, Shirin holds the kerchief and not the male, Khosrow. Very strange. What then does this kerchief signify? See it? It comes from the old Imperial Roman, symbol of Imperial sovereignty. When the games would begin, not only in Rome, but in Constantinople, as in this example that you see on the left, the consul who gave his name to the year had the privilege of inaugurating the games by throwing a kerchief into the arena. Then the chariot races would begin or the gladiatorial combats would begin. And this kerchief held up in the fist, known in Latin as the mappa, when it's our word map, M-A-P-P-A. This became represented in Roman and then in Byzantine Imperial art as a symbol of power. And we can see it here on the right from the eighth century, the saint Demetrius protects the bishop who is on the left with the gospel and on the right is the secular governor, the Imperial governor who holds a wand of office and the Imperial kerchief. And it's extraordinary because I don't find it in the literature, but we find that caliphate Islamic art has adopted it so that here on your left, you have a ruler of what is today Northern Iraq, Badruddin Luqlo in Mosul, who sits enthroned with the halo of a Sasanian king, meaning the glow of good thought, which is the origin of the halo. He holds against his heart a magic cup, which is a symbol of his own heart. It is a magic cup which signifies, if you look into it, you can see mirrored the seven climbs of the world. If you are a good king, if you are a bad king, the clouds will gather into the cup and you will not be able to see anything in it, meaning it is a symbol of your heart. And in his other fist, he clutches the kerchief. When the Mongols conquered Iran and Iraq and Anatolia in the 13th century, and the Mongol ruler Ghazan Khan in Tabriz in 1295 was converted to Islam, he had himself depicted, as you can see on your right, as King Solomon himself, haloed with the crown, surmounted by winged victories, and he holds not a cup, but the equivalent symbol, the seal of Solomon against his heart. And his minister, ruler of men, Asaf, clutches the kerchief of sovereignty and Solomon himself, or the Mongol ruler, both Ghazan Khan holds the kerchief of sovereignty. And we will see that the ruler sits upon a throne with twin lions. We're also going to see a very Nizamian motif here, all through Islamic art, even in this 14th century young Egyptian Sultan. We see the same motifs. You can recognize the winged victories, the magic cup, and the kerchief, you see it? And suddenly this art becomes translucent. So when you get the kind of nonsensical explanations offered about, well, you know, figure it of art, all those Persians and Indians are not real Muslims like the Arabs are. Well, here's an Egyptian Sultan and he's depicted in exactly the same way. So this is nonsense. This symbolism pervaded the entire civilization. So we have the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed, and you recognize the kerchief. You have here on your left Sultan Hossein Mirza by Qara of Herat, with the kerchief, and the conqueror of Herat, Shaibani Khan, the Uzbek, also depicted by Bizaad, with the kerchief of a ruler in 1507, and Tamerlane himself, Timur Elan, as the ancestor of the Mughal dynasty with its two Mughal successors, Babur and Humayun, and you can see under the parasol of royalty and the world mountain uniting earth and heaven and the world tree which recognizes the true ruler of mankind, the emperor Timur clutches the kerchief. So these are not simply gratuitous symbols or indications that emperors and princesses and queens had to blow their noses. They were holding this kerchief for a reason. So in these two wonderful pictures from the 16th century, on the left, done by an Indian artist at the very end of the 16th century, you see Babur king of Kabul on the left, who's supposed to be paying a visit to his cousin Prince Badi Uzaman Mirza of Herat, but because the Indian artist was serving Akbar, who is the grandson of Babur, he shows Babur as the superior and therefore Babur holds the cup of sovereignty against his art and clutches the kerchief, the dustmall of sovereignty in his fist. And we saw Leili yesterday as queen of heaven and you can see that she has the kerchief of sovereignty dangling from her sleeve. So this will give us an idea of the extraordinary importance in Nizami's poetry given to these extraordinary female figures who are initiators of their menfolk. And in so far as Nizami did this, he is an extraordinarily revolutionary poet as we shall discover when we enter into the world of what is probably his supreme masterpiece, the Haft Paikar, the seven icons or seven beauties or the pavilion of the seven princesses. Can we change here? Thank you very much. So this is the other Sasanian romance, telling the story of a great king, Bahram-e-Gour, which endless puns were made on that name in the medieval Persian period when the real meaning of Gour had become forgotten. So it was assumed that since Gour can mean a wild donkey, it meant that Bahram slaughtered many wild donkeys. Another pun often made was that this is the same word as tomb, Gour, and Bahram-e-Gour, despite all his conquests, ended up in a Gour, in a tomb just like everybody else over a khayyama, lots of poems like that. In fact, the old Persian word meant the great, Bahram the great. The theory is depicted in original Sasanian times, glorious as the warrior, who not only fought the Eastern Roman Empire to a standstill and compelled the Eastern Roman Emperor to sign a truce, but on his Eastern frontiers, Bahram-e-Gour defeated a tremendous invasion of a branch of the people known to the Romans as the Huns. People who left from Northern China several centuries before, Xiongnu, and they appear in the Eastern Mediterranean world as the Xionni, as the Hunni to the Western Romans, they also invaded the Iranian and Central Asian lands, Bahram-e-Gour defeated them soundly, so they settled for the second best and they conquered Afghanistan, which was quite a feat, and became rulers of Herat. In any case, in medieval Islamic times, Bahram-e-Gour is still remembered as in Ferdowsi's Book of Kings, and in these 16th century illuminations, we see him here on the right, setting off to war against the character known now as the Khan of Qin, as the Grand Khan of the Easterners, all described as Qin coming from China out there, and is actually given very East Asian features here. Bahram-e-Gour also became quite a figure in folklore. Ferdowsi tells an amusing story here about why Bahram-e-Gour became so fond of wine. Okay, Islamic mysticism, we know, wine is a symbol of sunlight. That's why it's described as red at dawn, golden at noon, and it fills the heart of the mystic, which is compared to a cup, filling with sunlight, filling with divine light. That's why Omar Khayyam's poetry is constantly exhorting people who read him or listen to him to wake up and drink wine at first dawn. It symbolizes the illumination of the soul after the dark night of the soul. But in this particular story, Bahram was very impressed to see a humble and cowardly shoemaker drink three drafts of wine and find the courage to ride a lion right into court. And if that's what wine can do, I want all my warriors to drink it, I will do. So back to Bahram-e-Gour, the Sasanian king, again the slaughterer of game. He kills lions like an Assyrian king to protect his people and he slays edible game to feed his people. Here again, his successor, Peros, seen on the left with the halo and you recognize the sun and moon of a great Sasanian king, slaughtering game. This imagery is going to be carried right into Islamic times and sultans are constantly shown as slaughterers of game. From the very first Umayyad age, all the way to the end of the mobile empire and in Khajar painting too because this is what a king does as Babur here impresses the Indians by all the gazelles he slays. A king feeds his people, he slaughters game. This extraordinary Byzantine silk from the sixth century, preserved now in a French church, is in fact our earliest depiction of King Bahram-e-Gour himself, turned into a mythological character who is supposed to have been able when seeing a lion leap upon the back of a wild ass, a wild donkey, an onigur to shoot a single arrow and pin them together. Represented here, you see it? This is carried over into Ferdowsi's Book of Kings here illustrated by Mir Sayid Ali showing a variant of that tremendous shot. King Bahram sees two coupling onigurs, swiftest animals of the desert. To hunt onigurs was no joke. The donkey is the degenerate domesticated version of an animal which once could run through the desert faster than almost any horse. Those creatures covered the steps of Iraq and Iran and southern Afghanistan until the outset of the 20th century and then you put human beings in automobiles and give them guns and you can count on them to wipe out the species. So today they only survive in a single reserve in Northwestern India.  Hence his folkloric sobriquet of Bahram-e-Gur, Bahram of the wild ass, Bahram the onigur. Then here we have the other version of the story where Bahram-e-Gur pins a lion to an onigur painted by Sultan Muhammad, the great artist of Shah Tahmas in the 1530s in Tabriz in Iranian-Azer by John and to the upper left what you see is a beautiful maiden who is playing upon a harp. She is the maiden whom Ferdowsi calls Azadeh, Azada. She is the free one. She is the proud one. She is the noble one. And we are told that never did the king go hunting without his favorite harpist singing girl to chant his praises. And this is where we're going to see how Nizami is going to take a tradition and turn it completely upside down. This is one of the very cruelest stories in the entire book of Kings of Ferdowsi. He had with him a damsel lovely as the moon, nimble and brisk to ride by the king's steric fitna, her name, because that's what Nizami calls her, meaning mischievous charm, sedition, trouble, and the thousand charms achieved to trouble the king's art just as he charmed and troubled her. Now we have this sixth century Sasanian Persian depiction of the king who within a century of his death had already turned into a figure of myth. Bahram Egor is seen here riding his camel and the tiny female riding behind him is his favorite singing girl who is supposed to sing his praises. And he's constantly trying to impress her. So he says, do you want me to try a shot that I've never done before? She said, yes, you're killing all these animals, but would you be capable of changing a buck into a row and a row into a buck? And the king says, certainly, here is another Sasanian depiction of the scene. The king takes two arrows, boom, boom, right into the head of a row. It turns into the horns of a buck and the animal dies. So you see that right there. Two arrows stuck right into the head. Ah, she says, but she hands him his arrows. Can you turn a buck into a row? Certainly, and he fits a special arrow to his bow with a crescent-shaped tip. And he shears off the horns of a buck and he has turned it to a row. And he turns back to her, says, okay, impressed, impressed. Not bad, not bad at all. I'd like to see now to try something really hard. Could you pin the rear hoof of a gazelle to that gazelle's ear with a single arrow? The king says, well, watch. First, the king takes a slingshot and he shoots a pellet of clay at a gazelle's ear and just scratches it. So the gazelle lifts its hind foot to scratch and a single arrow pins the hind foot to the head and dies. This is the shot of Bahram-e-Gur. Just watch how we have a Sasanian theme entering into the Islamic tradition. This is the illustration of the tale as told by Firdausi, but obviously of earlier origin. You can recognize very clearly the singing girl on the camel with Bahram-e-Gur and you have the buck which has just had its hind foot pinned to its forehead with a single arrow. Or here again, in tiles. Or here again, a further tile. These date from just about the time of Nizami's own life. They are late 12th century. We even have in this early 14th century illustration to the Shonama, the sequel of that horrible story in which the girl not only fails to be impressed but even says to the king, you are an absolutely horrible human being.  Practice makes perfect, that's all. The king is outraged and according to Firdausi and the older Sasanian versions, he casts her from his camel and tramples her to death beneath the pads of the drama dairy and then Firdausi tells us he never took a woman with him to the hunt again. End of story. Now watch. Again and again, this scene is depicted as in this Timurid period Shonama or in this Safavid period Shonama. And yet here we have an early 15th century, one of the earliest of the illustrations to Nizami's version and watch what happens now. Nizami takes a story that everybody knows, one of the most popular. First, he makes sure that the harpist rides on a horse, other than the horse of the king. He separates them because he has a reason for it. His reason is going to be as follows.   And the officer is about to kill the poor girl whose name now is Fitne, not Ozade, meaning troublesome. And the girl says, you know, officer, I have a better idea. The king is in a rage but the king really loves me. The king will repent of his wrath. The king cannot do without my counsel. The king will yearn for me and pine for me.  Well, says the officer, I'm not quite sure about that.  So the girl says, I have this idea. Hide me in your desert castle for a year which will give time for the king to calm down from his wrath. Hide me and within a year, the king will come hunting this way again and will stop in your castle and watch what happens. If the king is still in a rage against me, well, you can kill me then but if the king has repented and has yearned for me, then he will reward you. So you have everything to gain. The officer thinks about it and accepts. Then Nizami tells us a wondrous story. In the desert castle, the young woman every day exercises. She picks up a very newborn calf, puts the calf on her shoulders and climbs the steps to the castle terrace on the roof. And she does this every day until by the year's end, she is carrying a bowl on her shoulders to the top of the castle. I'm sorry, here we are. Sure enough, Bahram the king goes by the castle and stops for lunch, is entertained by the officer and while they're having lunch here in this Turkmen period painting from Shiraz from about 1445, 1446, you can see the king and his officer on the terrace and this veiled lady, one of the few places where Nizami mentions a veil but he needs one there. They are astounded, well, especially the king, to see this young woman carrying this huge bull on her shoulders to the very top of the terrace. So he gapes and he said, but how did you do this? And she said, well, I exercised every day and from a veal, I mean, I'm sorry, a calf. Gallus isn't there. I am able now to carry a bull. So the king says, oh, well then practice makes perfect. And the veiled girl says, isn't that what I told your majesty a year ago? And the king is amazed. He tears the veil off her face. He falls to the knees of the princess as in this Saffavid period, rather popular version from 1540 or so and he begs her forgiveness. This is the case where you have Nizami's deliberate twist of a famous story. The king not only begs her forgiveness, he weeps for her forgiveness and she becomes the very first initiator of the king into higher wisdom because she tells the king playing on Nizami's profound knowledge of Persian etymology. The name of the king, Bahram, goes back ultimately to a vastic verithragna, meaning the slayer of the verithra dragon. Bahram means the dragon slaying king. He is especially associated with the dragon and the message of the girl is, if you wish to be king, you must tame the dragon in your heart, meaning the dragon of wrath. This is a meaning which is going to be elaborated upon by Nizami's great answerer, as they called him in the culture, Amir Khosrow in Delhi at the turn of the 14th century, writing his Jawaal by Nizami, his answer unto Nizami and Amir Khosrow in Delhi coaxes out of Nizami the deeper meanings that the civilization saw. Watch now. If I try to find the origins of Nizami's story, of course here as so often we can see a Greek myth. Once upon a time, as in this Athenian sculpture from the archaic period of the early 6th century BC, the youth Milo, or Milon of Crotona, exercised carrying a calf on its shoulders until it turned into a bull. And then it was very lucky for completely different reasons. I was looking at the Satirakon by Petronius, an erotic tale of the first century AD, very ribbed and lots of fun, and there the madame of a body house tells her ladies exercise every day and you will be able to accommodate ever bigger men because after all you can start with a calf and you can end up with a bull. What this indicates is that even in a body house in the Roman Empire in the first century AD the story had become so current that it had pervaded. It was a proverb. And here we can point to the way it can even be used for ladies. In any case, this is, here we can show all the aspects of a given story, how Nazami seizes upon it, how Nazami completely transforms it and creates the lady fitna. Now watch the adventures of this lady. Here, in Amir Khosrow's version from the very first years of the 14th century, here painted by Basavan, one of the Hindu painters of Emperor Akbar, we see the great hunter, the great king Bahramegor kneeling before the lady who plays her harp like another Orpheus, another character that Nazami knew in one form or another because he attributes the adventures of Orpheus to his Plato character in his Alexander romance, the sage who is capable of charming all the beasts with song, meaning higher intellect charms the lower impulses. Your majesty, you are capable even of shooting a gazelle like this, but now you must kneel before higher wisdom and all the beasts are tamed. Here is the harpist and now watch what happens. Safavid Iran, 17th century, we have these glorious depictions of just the lady called Azadeh by Ferdowsi, called Fitne by Nazami, called Deloram, hearts repose at last, by Amir Khosrow and also by Mirali Sheri Navai. And then in Mughal India, we get these variations to which we now have the key. She is riding on the camel, the beast of wrath. And she dominates all these bestial impulses with her glorious harp. Indeed, the artist from Akbar's period has recognized who she is. She is the first of the angelic heavenly creatures who teach the king higher wisdom. The grotesque characters that you see making up the riding camel are Islam's own particular variation on Book Nine of Plato's Republic where Socrates describes how the soul must master its bestial impulses as if it were a master of beasts, taming lions and all sorts of other creatures. And this was something that Avicenna meditated upon and enters into the creation of these extraordinarily elaborate allegories of 16th and 17th century Indo-Persian art. As here again, we recognize the lady. She dominates the camel that the demon and the beastial dog would like to lead astray. She dominates with her harp. Above, you have the artist's late 16th century reference to Atar's Montecoter, the canticle of the birds. Some birds will be slain on the way like this stork symbol of good fortune by a falcon. The other stork flies on. All this to signify Bahram as Veretragna conquer the Veretra dragon. Bahram is also the lord of the twin lions. Here, I beg you to be a little patient with me. This has concerned one of the subtlest verses in all of Nizami's canon in which he describes King Bahram becoming the king of Persia through an ordeal. Nobody knew who the true heir to the throne was like in the King Arthur stories. And instead of a sword, Excalibur, the Persian tail has the magi place the golden crown, crown between two unchained lions. Whoever dares pick up the crown from between these lions will be recognized as true king of Persia. Of course, only Bahram dares do this and he becomes king of Persia. And Nizami writes, Togezar, Darmion, Cheresio, Choum, Bacomidu, Ajdao, Durrimo, the crown of gold in between twin lions black, like within the jaws of two dragons, the pearl of the moon. We're going to look at the significance of these verses because they are the key to the character of Bahram. Now, Bahram as the dragon slayer means that the king who ruled under such a name, Bahram the fifth in the fifth century of the common era had the name of a legendary dragon slayer so that the attributes of the dragon slayer came to be attached to the historic Sasanian king. He is verethragna, meaning the slayer of the dragon verethra who withholds the reins that give life. And it is the task of the mythical Persian king to slay the dragon on 21 March, forcing the dragon of winter and darkness, the dark cloud to disgorge the life-giving reins through the thunderbolt or the arrow which symbolizes a sunray with which the mythical king destroys the dragon. And this is the meaning of the festival of 21 March. And in Ferdowsi's book, again and again, heroes emulate one another and reenact the slaying of the dragon. So verethragna, Bahram in modern Persian means the dragon slaying king. So here we have these dragon slaying scenes from Central Asia, from Panjkant, just before the rise of Islam, again here. And then we have this Mongol period, early 14th century depiction of Bahram-e-Gur's mythical victory over a dragon, tremendous Chinese influence, of course. In this case, we're illustrating Ferdowsi, but here, and those of you who are from Azerbaijan might appreciate this. This is a painting dated from 1370, done for the Inju dynasty, right after the Mongol period, showing the tremendous Chinese influence. Theoretically, this is an illustration to the Shanomah. Theoretically, however, you have the detail of the arrow lodged in the dragon's eye. Ferdowsi doesn't say that, Nizami says that, which means we have a case here of dual illustration where the painter represents a well-known scene and adds a visual illusion from another famous poet who treated of the same scene. It's fair to say that not only here do we have the very earliest illustration of Nizami's poetry known to me, the earliest. But also we have one of the main keys to Eastern Islamic art, which is the painter expects the patron to recognize illusion to one work by means of another. Just as today, anybody who sees West Side Story is expected, if they're not a total illiterate, to recognize Romeo and Juliet's theme. You don't even have to say it, it's assumed. There's a profound mythological meaning too when Nizami, with his extraordinary knowledge, tells us that King Bahram shot the dragon with twin arrows into both eyes. We find an extraordinary medieval rendition of the ancient Sumerian and Babylonian legend of Marduk, the sun god, who created the visible world by shooting the dragon of darkness and chaos, and he shot her in the twin eyes and out of her punctured eyes, poured forth the Tigris and the Euphrates, which gave life. The dragon, destroyed by the hero, is strangely enough the giver of the pearl of life. Baisankor of Herat, a lover of Nizami if ever there was one, has himself depicted in the 1430s as Bahram the dragon slayer, and that's a portrait of Baisankor Mirzoud, his little moustache himself. Here we have Bezod's renditions, where we even have the lady watching, playing her harp, as Bahram slays the dragon. Here we have another Bezod rendition, showing the king as very young, and this particular version of the tale, as told by Nizami, Bahram had been hunting in the desert when a female Onagir appeared unto him. The king gave chase and she drew the king to the lair of a dragon and made the king understand that her child had been devoured by the dragon, and the king slays the dragon, splits open its belly and the child emerges. Nizami is playing with the idea that one of the names of Bahram is Gour, which can mean the Onagir. This means strangely that the king, by slaying the dragon, has liberated his own self from the belly of the dragon. Here you have your arch-typical vision of the 16th century by Abdul Wahab, Bahram and Gour slaying the monster, or here, attributed to Gush Tasp, you can very clearly see the triumph of solar light over primal darkness. Here you have the variation of the tale of King Ardashir Bahman, Bahman Ardashir Daraudas, being swallowed by the dragon. He will re-emerge therefrom. What is the meaning of the hero being swallowed by the dragon? Well, in this 18th century Indian illustration to the Shana May, we see Bahram and Gour splitting open the belly of the dragon, and out of the dragon comes a young man, Barna, who is actually the king himself younger. Symbol, the sun, descends every evening into the mouth of the dragon of night, and miraculously re-emerges in the east at dawn the youthful sun. So you have an extraordinary solar myth which is described in the vision of King Bahram and the dragon. So we have so many variations for those of you who come from Azerbaijan. This is all supposed to have happened right next to where you live on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, the Kingdom of Colchis. Jason has gone to conquer the golden fleece only when he has been swallowed by the dragon which preserves the golden fleece and then is vomited forth by the dragon. Is the hero worthy to conquer the treasure of eternal life guided by the goddess Athena? Or here again, the ancient Persian king in Persepolis always portrayed as slaying the chaos monster, the re-enactment of the triumph of the sun on 21st March. Universal myth, even though we can go back to Mesopotamian origins as on the right, and see what you can see right down the street at the British Museum, the hero is the sun who slays the chaos monster and out of its remains torn apart creates this visible world, like the sun shining upon darkness and causing hidden shapes to emerge to view. Even in ancient Mexico, we get exactly the same idea. Sorry, even in ancient Mexico, the sun god who is a winged creature coming down to the dragon of the depths, tempting forth the dragon with his own foot offered in sacrifice, as texts, of course, and once the dragon has snapped off the foot of the god, the god tears apart its jaws and creates this visible world. It's an extraordinary recurrence of human representation. And we can go now back to our Mediterranean world, Horus, even in Roman times, seen as a sun lord with his sun lance. He is a bird of prey, dressed as a Roman general, spearing the monster of the deep, the Egyptian crocodile, or in Christianity, Michael, of course, is a solar bird, spearing down the reptile that is Satan. George, of course, another variation of this theme, so many variations of George, and when we come back to the Islamic world, we find that Rostam is such a dragon slayer so that even the Sultan of Turkey to show himself as a Rostam will not only clutch the kerchief and hold the cup, but even wear a striped coat that shows that he is a dragon slayer. The king also slays two lions we have seen as in Sasanian times, or here, again in Sasanian times, or in the Sasanian throne, Heraldry, the king is represented under his crescent moon, under his crescent moon, upon the throne, upheld by twin lions. Who are these two lions? We see them everywhere. The Jews who lived in Mesopotamia under Sasanian rule in the third and fourth centuries attributed such a lion throne to King Solomon himself. It's a borrowing from Persian civilization with the idea that the twin lions will forbid anyone who is not a true successor of Solomon to sit upon the true king's throne. Just so the Mongol lord, representative Solomon, sits upon Bahram's throne with the twin lions. We can go back to ancient Persia with the symbol. Two monsters and the pearl of life, the winged sun. What does it mean that we see in world art this pairing of monsters on either side? Every time you go into a museum or a palace sometimes, you see twin lions as guardians or twin dragons, twin monsters, this pairing signifies. These creatures guard the treasure of life from those who are unworthy. Only the hero can overcome the monsters and capture the treasure of life. But in doing so, he reveals that these monsters are not only evil, but they are also good because they bestow the gift of life, having protected it, and they bestow it to those who are worthy. And Mizami goes so far as to call himself the Gangeshin Marr. He himself is a dragon who preserves the treasure. So these creatures are ambiguous and we see this universal symbolism. Darius the Great between the twin lions on his seal. And here I have a very ancient representation of King Bahram between the twin lions, again preserved on a Byzantine imitation of a Sasanian silk, which is now kept in a French church. And then the Islamic version, Bahram upon the throne between the twin lions with his mace, the head of a bull, not an ox, a bull. Fertility and vigor, power, thunderbolt. You have here what Mizami tells us. You have twin lions. And if you look at the throne, you have twin dragons. They are equivalent symbols. You have it again in Islamic heraldry. Here's Caliph Al-Ma'amun on his twin lions as if you were himself King Bahram Gore with the crescent moon upon his crown. And even the Caliphs of Cordova in Spain. We find even in Arabic literature of the Western Mediterranean in the 12th century, such expressions as man achad ataj wa zaynata min bein al-assadain fahu'a bil-mulk aw lah. He who can lift and carry up the crown and the regalia from between twin lions, he is of kingship the most worthy. It may come as a surprise to you that the mythology of King Bahram through the Spanish Arabs seeped so deeply into Western European folklore that when King Edward the first Plantagenet issued his challenge to Philippe de Valois, King of France, saying, by right, I am the true King of France. He sent a priest to the pope asking that an ordeal should be arranged whereby the crown of France should be placed between two unchained lions and let us see who of Edward Plantagenet or Philippe de Valois will dare snatch up the crown. And the French historians of the 20th century saying, where did they get this story? Well, we actually have the old French romance translations from the Arabic. Ultimately, it's the story of King Bahram Igor. So here is the story of King Bahram Igor, represented in Islamic Spain, late 11th century. The same motif in ancient Achaemenid art, again in Achaemenid art, the hero between the twin monsters in Kushan Central Asian art, Sasanian art, even in Christianity, Christ rises as a triumphant warrior. The life, I go soon be, ya veritas ed vita, I am the way and the truth and the life between the dragon or serpent and the lion, equivalent symbols. This wonderful 12th century Christian pulpit from Southern Italy gives us all the meaning of the dragon myth. The book of life was held up, the Gospel of John, between the two monsters who represent Leviathan, Jonah's whale, which is not a whale, but a dragon in the Bible. Jonah is swallowed by the monster, like the sun descends into night, and he is regurgitated forth after the third day to Christian readings of the Bible, meaning a prefiguration of Christ's descent in death into the jaws of the dragon of hell and his triumphant resurrection therefrom, just as the sun rises from the dragon of death. So the dragon is shown as dual. He has swallowed and he has restored, and the twin dragons also guard the book of life, offering us such a key to so much world art. Christ on the dragon throne in 12th century France, Venice, the justice on Solomon's throne between the twin lions in the 15th century, or here King Charles V of France on the throne, which is Solomonic and Bahramian at once, twin lions, twin dragons in Islamic heraldry. Wait, this is the symbol of the pearl. The Chinese derive this actually from the Manicheans of Central Asia. The dragon preserves a pearl of great price. It is water, the gift of life. It is the monster that the emperor must subdue. The dragon and the pearl in Chinese heraldry and in Islamic heraldry, you've all seen these images. The sword of the kings of Granada, the holiest name between twin lions. Well, oh, I live in the law, there is no conqueror but God between the guardian lions. Or you have in Iran, 16th century Iran, the holiest names, Allah, Muhammad Ali, between twin dragons.  So with all this, we can say truly a caduceus of which Bahram is the master, the gift of life from between the twins serpents in Islamic symbolism or in Greek or Roman symbolism or here again from Indian Islam. Even the cup of the dervish will have twin dragons guarding the heart. Now this takes us to the seven brides because only now is the king ready to hear their message. Do we have time or do you want to stop? We have time, one minute. Okay, I think you can see now why working on Nizami is like working on Dante or working on Shakespeare. Single verse can take you around world mythology. Now we come to this wonderful motif. The king is ready. The king has mastered his wrath. The king has slain the dragon. Now the king can be initiated into higher wisdom. We have Sasanian representations like this one of the king who listens to a favorite wife. Is she telling him tales? This we don't know, but what we do know is that by the eighth century and Islamicized Eastern West Asian times by then it is considered that the king is initiated into higher wisdom by the tales which his wife or wives can tell him. It's the homay chere azad motif. So according to Nizami, the king of Persia at the time Yazdegard thought it best because his throne was unsteady, many revolts to entrust his son Bahram to be brought up by the Arabs of the Vassal Kingdom of Hira on the Euphrates, which is why later traditions say Bahram brought up by Arabs but as a Persian prince will be the first to master both Arabic and Persian and when he will become king, he will be entitled Malik al Arab wal Ajam, king of the Arabs and the non Arabs, meaning king of the whole world. And there his guardian king Munzer of Hira has a wonderful castle built for his royal ward. Here illustrated by Bezad and the extraordinary thing about this castle is that its domes mirrored the movement of the sun with different colors. So the king was very pleased with what his architect had done. His architect even added a wonderful fresco inside the castle which you see on the right showing Prince Bahram hunting and when the king went to visit his new castle, Khawarnaq, up on the terrace with his architect, he complimented the architect. You built all these domes which mirror the shining of the sun and the architect says, well, you know your majesty, if you had paid me more I could have even created something better than that and the king is horrified and pushes the architect to his doom right from the top of the castle. Ivan Grozny in Russia is supposed to have done the same thing to the architect or the great cathedral of St. Basil the happy. Oh, don't you ever build anything like that for anybody else? Never though so, it became a proverb in Arabic. Poor Sin Maris reward. However, before he died, the wondrous architect had created a secret inner chamber and Bahram was able to obtain the key and entered this chamber in this early 15th century painting done in Shiraz where Bahram discovers the wonderful images of seven princesses from seven different climes of the world, each one under a different colored dome and each princess corresponds to, if we take them from right to left we start with black. That is the princess of Saturn. So she is the princess of India. Then we have yellow gold. That is the princess of Byzantium. She is the princess then of Sunday, sum. The next one is Monday. She is the princess associated with the moon. So it's a green dome made of green cheese, right? So she sits there and she is the princess of the Turkic peoples, Kharaism from Central Asia. Then we have the princess sitting under the red dome. That's Mars. So that's Tuesday and she is dressed in red and she is the princess of Russia. We can remember that Nizami lived on the very edge of the traditional Islamic world and just over the mountains was the Russian world and Nizami knew it. Wasn't particularly fond of them either but he definitely seems to have known that the very word for beautiful in Russian, red, also means beautiful. It's an extraordinary association. Then we have, let me think, Wednesday, Thursday. That was Tuesday. Wednesday, the color has shifted a bit. This should be turquoise. It's a color that's associated with mourning. She is the princess of Wednesday and she is the princess of either Spain or Morocco. Go figure. Marib. No, that's the red princess. She's the Slavic princess. So she is the princess of the most distant West. Then you have the sandalwood color dome corresponding to Thursday and the planet Jupiter, previous one is Mercury. She is the princess of China and finally the last one, dome of Venus, pure white at Persia, of course. So when Bahram becomes king, he orders such a castle to be built with seven domes and here comes Nizami's magic time. The king will enter into the palace of the seven domes on the first day of winter. He will emerge after listening to the seven tales of the seven princesses on seven successive nights. So that should have been just a week, but he entered on 21 December. He emerges 21 March. So he's actually been there for months, not just for a week, but more when he emerges from the seven domes. He finds out that the minister that he left in charge had been misgoverning the kingdom in his absence for seven years. So in actual fact, the king has disappeared into the magic palace for seven entire years and we learn that each princess is in fact the guardian of the star under whose sign she dwells. Here we have the prototype. This is the only representation that I've ever been able to find through a 16th century sonoma of Cehre Azad, Cehre Azad herself, with her king, Bahman Ardashir, known in the Arabian Knights and the Arabic version as Shahriar, which just means great emperor. She is multiplied into seven queens by Nizami and when Amir Khosrow takes up the theme and Emperor Akbar orders that his court artists prepare for him what were considered to be the two jewels of his empire, the Khamsatein, meaning the Khamsa, the five tales of Nizami and the Khamsa of Amir Khosrow as a Javab, as an answer. The emperor listens to both books and Manohar, the or the Hindu artist, represents the seven brides here. You see that they are angels. Just as Deloram Fitnah had been turned into an angel, some of these seven brides are angels. What does this really mean? It means that the invocation of the book and of all of Nizami's poems is the miraculous journey of the prophet in a vision, the Meiraj. We know the tradition. The prophet was asleep one night in Mecca and he was awakened by a blinding light and when he was awakened he spilled over a pot of water. Before the water had reached the ground, the entire journey took place. The archangel Gabriel appeared before the prophet, the archangel Gabriel being a configuration of the divine active intellect which bestows our capacity for abstract thought on the human mind in Islamic philosophy. The archangel Gabriel is such intellect. The prophet is invited to mount a strange beast composed both of human and bestial components, a beast which can fly as fast as lightning. So it's called al-Buraq, the lightning beast. Head of a young woman, body sort of like a sphinx. This creature can carry the prophet through the seven spheres. Each sphere is guarded by an angel. Every angel answers the prophet with wisdom. When the prophet has reached the very summit of the spheres only then does Gabriel intellect step aside. The horse with the woman's head disappears. All these cosmic forces which the prophet had ridden disappear. The prophet now stands on the threshold of the loathe of the extreme limit and comes into the divine. Kaaba kausene al-Adna, within twin bow shots or even closer and then reemerges therefrom like Moses descending from Sinai with a message to humanity. In medieval Islamic mysticism it is considered, and this is an absolutely central key to Nizami's vision. You are invited to read my book and begin with the invocation of the prophet's journey because the seven tales told by the seven princesses to Bahram are Bahram's own initiation into higher wisdom. Every single soul in purity can rise through seven intellectual levels to the highest level. However, only the prophet returns with a law. You are absorbed into the divine. So this book is the mystical transformation of the thousand and one night's tradition into one of the most beloved books of mystical initiation in all Islamic culture. So I suppose we should be concluding. I can point the parallel to Dante who is guided by the lady Beatrice, his own configuration of the active intelligence through the seven spheres to the throne of God. And then we can just go through the princess of India and I'll tantalize you because there's so many stories. We can go through the princess of the Turkic peoples. So here we are on some, no, that Byzantine princess. That's Sunday, but another lecture will give you all these stories. Tuesday, Mars, the one I won't resist is this one. The, in the prophet's journey, when he reaches one of those planets, he is shown the torments of hell. That is one of the prefigurations of Dante's own divine comedy and Nizami's tale of the turquoise princess is the goblin story, the vampire story of Islamic literature.  So here we will conclude with this one because it's so much fun. Here we have Mahan, the Egyptian, riding a horse into the western desert, of course, going from east to west, into western darkness, finds himself surrounded by goblins, as you can see, and his own horse changes into a seven-headed dragon. As this, why? Because as Plato says and as reinterpreted by Avicenna and in medieval Islamic philosophy, the horse that you ride is a symbol of your own body. If your intellect dominates the horse, then you can ride it. But if you let your body gallop away without being able to control it, then it's as if a demon had become master of your horse. And this is why we get these extraordinary Indo-Persian interpretations of the mount, Avicenna's Daba, where the rider is a demon. Here, done for Emperor Akbar, Solomon is shown as dominating the beast with fancy, wahm, fantasy going on ahead, whereas here the demon has taken control. So many of these demonic depictions in Islamic art are derived from very, very nasty Maniki and caricatures of Hindu deities, as this one from Central Asia, Pocho. So you can see even Ganesh and Vishnu and his avatars, the boar and Brahma. And they're the ones who turned into these Islamic-looking demons, which are charged caricatures of Hindu gods. You can recognize Ganesh among the demons who carry Solomon's palanquin. This, again, should alert us all. Just as in European Gothic art, you have a register of two styles, the courtly-saintly style and the caricatural grotesque. So you have it in Islamic art. We have a group of painters around a master whom we can know as Master Mehmed or Mohamed of the Black Pen, Siyah Qalam, who seems to have worked in Tabriz in Iranian-Azerbaijan in the 1480s who created these extraordinary pictures, which are essentially meditations on Nizami's tale of the turquoise pavilion. Here you can see the double register, the courtly style for Solomon, the Queen of Sheba and their minister, Asaf, and the demons who bear the palanquin. Rustam conquering the demon. Here, done in 17th century India, the motif of Rustam overcoming the demon who is this composition of all the bestial forces and animal impulses as we had seen in the Solomonic Rider of the Elephant. Here, by Master Mohamed Siyah Qalam, his masterpiece, every human impulse can be either an angel or a demon depending on whether or not intellect controls. And here, Solomon is conquering so the angels have roped their corresponding dragons and here you have Ganesh with his elephant trunk and here you have Sahr, the stone demon locked in stone. See him here? Further demons chained by Solomon or here unchained or here with a dragon or here dancing or here dancing again. This is exactly as Nizami describes them, exactly with castanets of bones and howting and shouting. Well, even in South India in the Deccan with its relations with its Safavid court, these demons were represented and this is, I have been able to ascertain an illustration to Nizami's Tale of the Turquoise Pavilion where poor Mahan crawling through the desert after having been buffeted by all these demons seems to reach an oasis, a wonderful castle with beautiful maidens. So he thinks he's out of trouble. Ha ha, that's what you think because hardly has he come into the embrace of one of these maidens that she turns into another horrible goblin and gives him a very bad night. Ha ha, when he wakes up, he finds out that the castle is a cemetery, that all the wonderful wines he had to drink had been nothing but urine and the musical instruments are bones and carrion. He's really a mess. So now he finally repents, repents and lo and behold, he's crossed the entire Sahara, he's reached the Atlantic and who is there to greet him? Well, I've given you a little Jerome Bosch type variations on this. See, Europeans are doing the same sort of thing. Or here, the ultimate Sanskrit prototype, the shipwrecked traveler who on an island is entertained by a beautiful woman who is in fact a horrible vampire as will be revealed by the end of the night. It's the same motif and in the Buddhist versions, of course, the Buddha touches the ground with his finger and all the illusions finally disappear. For poor Mahan, it means being greeted by Chisar, the evergreen prophet who Nizami tells us, appears unto the traveler with the very features of the traveler himself. Meaning that Chisar is the immortal principle of your own purified soul and Mahan is saved. And so he can go on to some of these other stories of so many, so many. Just we emerge in spring, Bahram executes justice and the last scene of the poem, this is again one of the very early illustrations to Nizami's Tale of King Bahram. Bahram has become the all-wise king thanks to the tales of the seven princesses and now that he's on the verge of old age, he rides forth into the desert and there again appears that wonderful she-anagar. The gore, the same one who had led him to the dragon and she gallops forth into the desert and he follows her and he follows her and she disappears into a dark cavern and he follows her into the dark cavern and has never been seen again. He has followed himself, gore, into the cavern of the other world. The extraordinary psychology of Nizami corresponds to the zenith of Islamic literature attained in that generation that was born around the middle of the 12th century of the common era and flourished into the early 13th. That's the zenith and then as it were, the baton of creativity is handed from the poets to the painters and after Hafez, the creativity of the civilization expresses itself in the visual arts whereas before it had been the literary arts and this is kind of the masterpiece that you have from the close of the 15th century who this wonderful figure is, we have no idea with this kind of psychological depth suggests some of the richness we derive from reading Nizami. Thank you. Thank you.