Sadi’s Scroll of Wisdom

In his preface, Arthur Naylor Wollaston (1842-1922) describes the Pand-nāma (Book of Counsel) as ‘a small volume of poetry embodying precepts which would do no discredit to the philosophy of this, the twentieth century of the Christian era’ (p.25), whereas Encyclopaedia Iranica deems it ‘a dry moral rule-book in abrupt and grammatically very simple language with trite wording’. Little read today, in the 19th Century it was accorded high status among European orientalists, in part because of its misattribution to Sa‘di (1210-1291/92). Today the authorship is disputed, though it is commonly ascribed to ‘Attar (1145/46-1221). It was translated by Francis Gladwin into English and by Silvestre de Sacy into French (a portion of the latter being rendered into English by Louisa S. Costello in her 1845 anthology, The Rose Garden of Persia), before Wollaston, an archivist in the India Office, produced this version for the Wisdom of the East series in 1906.

This copy was owned by William Howard Livens (1889-1964), an army officer and pioneer of chemical warfare. He experimented with flamethrowers and invented the Livens Projector, a device used by the British Army to deliver gas attacks during the First World War. He has autographed the front free endpaper, with the date of Novemebr 1908, and left an inscription on the title page from the Book of Isaiah: ‘All flesh is grass, the grass withereth and the flower fadeth, but the word of the Lord endureth for ever.’ Within the text he has marginally highlighted a single line in a passage describing humility: ‘Humility exalteth a man’ (p.34). The front cover is pencilled with the original retail price of one shilling.