ix
place was given to him as an estate in lieu of salary. There is a document preserved in the Tiflis Synodal Archives, dated 1190 (?), signed by him as royal treasurer; he must have been singularly precocious if the date of his birth were really 1172. The popular story tells how, hopelessly in love with his queen, he retired to the monastery of Holy Rood at Jerusalem, where, on a pillar, over a portrait is the inscription: "May God pardon Shot'ha, the painter of this. Amen. Rust'haveli."[1] It seems strange that the word "Rust'haveli" should be added after "Amen"; in any case there is a portrait which readers can accept as not discordant with the character displayed in the epic. Many legends are attached to his name; they represent him as enamoured of T'hamara and married to an unworthy wife.
The oldest manuscript is said to be an undated parchment, which, according to Plato Ioseliani, was the property of a Colonel Gregory Tseret'heli; another copy, on paper, is alleged to be of the year 1443; and a third is dated 1678. These were used by King Vakhtang VI. for his edition of 1712; but they have apparently been lost, and, so far as we know, there is no existing manuscript earlier than the seventeenth century, and none dated before 1646.[2] It is most desirable that attention should be devoted to the purification of the text.
The poem is written in quatrains of rhyming lines of sixteen syllables, with an accentuation dividing the lines into halves.[3] It is meant to be sung to the "Davidic" harp (1574), which may have come to the Caucasus with the Jews of the Babylonish Captivity. In the remoter parts of the country, minstrels may perhaps even now be heard chanting the story of Tariel.
- ↑ Journal of Biblical Literature, Boston, 1894, p. 179; translated from Professor Tsagareli's Svyedeniya. The portrait has been defaced.
- ↑ Professor Khakhanov, Ocherki, ii. 247, 248; E. T'haqaishvili, Opisanie rukopisei, t. ii. 57, 893, 395, 468, 554–592.
- ↑ A Sinai manuscript, apparently of the tenth century, contains a hymn for Christmas in honour of the B.V.M., written in rhymed lines of sixteen feet; it is not, however, divided into quatrains (Marr, t. xii., p. liv).
