The Other Side of the Coin: Shahid-i Balkhi's Dinar and the Recovery of Central Asian Manichaean Allusions in Early Persian Poetry

This paper discusses some possible, and hitherto unnoticed, Manichaean allusions found in a fragment by Shahid-i Balkhi, an early New Persian poet flourished during the Samanid period. Through a close rethorical and philological analysis of the image of the dinar (golden coin) in Shahid-i Balkhi’s fragment and the comparison with some contemporary lines of poetry and various other sources, we propose that the word di- nar is used by the author in an amphibological way to cleverly allude to the “prophet” or the “elect” (dinar < dinavar) in the Central Asian Manichaean context, here identified with Chin/China. In a wider perspective, while interpreting the poetic image as a sort of iconographic motif encoded in the text through rethorical devices of allusion, we point to the necessity of recovering – to reconstruct a tenable socio-textual perspec- tive – the processes of textual transmission and semiotic-cultural interrelations subja- cent to a broad set of rhetoricized early Persian tropes and metaphors.