Hasht-Bihisht

About This Book

Hasht Bihisht is a collection of speeches authored by the Indo-Persian poet Amir Khusraw around 1302. Written in Persian, it forms the final poem in Khusraw’s Khamsah (quintet) and is modeled on Nizami Ganjavi’s Haft Paykar, which itself draws inspiration from Firdausi’s Shahnameh. Like Nizami's Haft Paykar, Khusraw's Hasht Bihisht uses a legend about Bahram V Gur as its frame story and, in the style of One Thousand and One Nights, introduces folktales told by seven princesses. Most famously, Khusraw appears to be the first writer to have added The Three Princes of Serendip,, including the well-known episode involving the detection of a camel’s features through inference.

Summary sourced from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0.