This local glossary is a shelf-specific companion to the central Good Works Glossary. It begins with the main text-world currently visible in the Persian shelf.

Shelf Terms

The Epic of Kings - Helen Zimmern's English prose retelling of selected hero tales from Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, published in 1883.

Shahnameh - Ferdowsi's Book of Kings, the great New Persian epic of Iranian mythic, heroic, and royal memory.

Rustem - Zimmern's spelling of Rostam, the central heroic champion in the shelf text.

Bakhtyār Nāma — “The Book of Bakhtyār,” an anonymous Persian frame romance in which a condemned royal favorite delays execution through cautionary tales while ten envious viziers argue for his death. The shelf edition preserves Sir William Ouseley's historical English translation inside W. A. Clouston's 1883 comparative apparatus.

Bakhtyār — The accused young courtier at the center of the romance; his name joins bakht (“fortune”) and yār (“friend” or “companion”). His concealed identity binds the inserted tales to the frame's final recognition.

Āzādbakht — The king in the frame narrative and Bakhtyār's unknown father. His repeated willingness to postpone judgment gives the embedded stories their narrative function.

Frame tale — A narrative structure in which one continuing story encloses a sequence of other tales. In the Bakhtyār Nāma, each delay of execution permits another exemplary story, so storytelling becomes both argument and survival.