Day 4: The Persian Cosmopolis

 For the majority of today, I read an article that Dr. Dar sent to me about The Persian Cosmopolis! The article went through the history of the Persian language, and how the language that's spoken today first originated.

The Persian Cosmopolis was a place where everything culturally came together through Persian texts, as said in the article. This area was between the Balkans and Bengal. The article also goes more in-depth about how Modern New Persian came about, after there was already the languages of Middle Persian and Arabic. All of this first came about after the Sasanian Empire was overthrown, and then came the Ummayyad Dynasty. The dynasty caused for there to be not a lot of use of the Persian Language, as they instated to use Arabic for everything, like education and literature (Eaton). 

The article then goes further into how Modern New Persian was a combination of the former Middle Persian, as well as Arabic. This specific integration being when the Ummayyads were taken over, and the Abbasid Dynasty was ruling the Persian Cosmopolis. During the Abbasid Dynasty, they were integrating different Persian ideas, which is what allowed for Modern New Persian to start to come about (Eaton). 

I thought that all of this was super interesting, since I've never really learned about the history of the Persian language before in such depth. I think that this article helped build some more context for me behind the language, and it's definitely going to help me for the exhibits that we're going to start seeing in the next few days!