"His Takhallus or poetical name (Khayyam) signifies a Tent-maker, and
he is said to have at one time exercised that trade, perhaps before
Nizam-ul-Mulk's generosity raised him to independence. Many Persian
poets similarly derive their names from their occupations; thus we
have Attar, 'a druggist,' Assar, 'an oil presser,' etc.[2] Omar
himself alludes to his name in the following whimsical lines:--
"'Khayyam, who stitched the tents of science,
Has fallen in grief's furnace and been suddenly burned;
The shears of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his life,
And the broker of Hope has sold him for nothing!'
"We have only one more anecdote to give of his Life, and that relates
to the close; it is told in the anonymous preface which is sometimes
prefixed to his poems; it has been printed in the Persian in the
Appendix to Hyde's Veterum Persarum Religio, p. 499; and D'Herbelot
alludes to it in his Bibliotheque, under Khiam.[3]--
"'It is written in the chronicles of the ancients that this King of
the Wise, Omar Khayyam, died at Naishapur in the year of the Hegira,
517 (A.D. 1123); in science he was unrivaled,--the very paragon of his
age. Khwajah Nizami of Samarcand, who was one of his pupils, relates
the following story: "I often used to hold conversations with my
teacher, Omar Khayyam, in a garden; and one day he said to me,
'My tomb shall be in a spot where the north wind may scatter roses
over it.' I wondered at the words he spake, but I knew that his were
no idle words.[4] Years after, when I chanced to revisit Naishapur, I
went to his final resting-place, and lo! it was just outside a garden,
and trees laden with fruit stretched their boughs over the garden
wall, and dropped their flowers upon his tomb, so that the stone was
hidden under them."'"
Thus far--without fear of Trespass--from the Calcutta Review. The
writer of it, on reading in India this story of Omar's Grave, was
reminded, he says, of Cicero's Account of finding Archimedes' Tomb at
Syracuse, buried in grass and weeds. I think Thorwaldsen desired to
have roses grow over him; a wish religiously fulfilled for him to the
present day, I believe. However, to return to Omar.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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