Sultan Sanjar & the Old Woman…

When I was excavating Islamic archaeology last summer in Turkmenistan near the mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar, I often wished that I could excavate the thousands of poems that travelers recited along the Silk Road in medieval times. In fact, even Sultan Sanjar himself appeared in the celebrated verses of the epic poet Nizami (d. 1209 CE), a giant of the Persian literary tradition. Since I was living at the time in a yurt in the desert, I decided to host a poetry festival in my yurt–to honor the poetic history of the Silk Road, and pepper the landscape with poems in many tongues.

In Nizami’s Khamsa (Quintet), he relates an allegory about “Sultan Sanjar and the Old Woman.” Medieval illustrations of this tale from Herat and Shiraz can be found today in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Morgan Library, Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard, Brooklyn Museum, and Hermitage.

In the section entitled “Treasury of the Secrets,” an old woman falls to her knees and clings to the hem of Sultan Sanjar’s cloak. Pleading for his attention, she recounts how the sultan’s soldiers physically and mentally mistreated her. She says:

What good is it to conquer territories,
if you do not control your own soldiers?

The old woman then warns the sultan that his tyrannical behavior and miscarriages of justice will inevitably lead to his downfall.

Today, many verses from Nizami’s moralizing tale ring as true as ever:

In our time, justice can no longer be found.

— Nizami