KHAMSA

Nizami is best known for his five long narrative poems, which have been preserved. He dedicated his poems to various rulers of the region as was custom of that time for great poets, but avoided court life. Nizami was a master of the Masnavi style (double-rhymed verses). He wrote poetical works; the main one is the Khamsa (Persian: Five Treasures), also known by the Persian pronunciation of the Arabic word Khamsa ("Quintet" or "Quinary"). The first of his five 'Treasures', called The Storehouse of Mysteries, was influenced by Sanai of Ghazna's (d. 1131) monumental Garden of Truth. The other ‘Treasures’ were medieval romances. Khusaw and Shirin, Bahrām-e Gur, and Alexander the Great, who all have episodes devoted to them in Ferdowsi's Book of Kings,appear again here at the center of three of four of Nizami's narrative poems. The adventure of the paired lovers, Leyli and Majnun, is the subject of the second of his four romances, and derived from Arabic sources.In all these cases, Nizami reworked the material from his sources in a substantial way.


The Khamsa was a popular subject for lavish manuscripts illustrated with painted miniatures at the Persian and Mughal courts in later centuries. Examples include the Khamsa of Nizami (British Library, Or. 12208), created for the Mughal Emperor Akbar in the 1590s.