Omar Khayyám, the astronomer-poet of Persia, was born at Nishapur, the capital of Khorassan, about the middle of the 11th century, and took his takhallus or poetical name, 'Khayyám,' from his father's calling of tent-maker. He was brought up under the great Sunni teacher, Imām Muaffik, and formed a close friendship with two of his fellow-pupils, Nizām-ul-Mulk and Hassan-ibn-Sabbah, of whom the one became vizier to the sultan Alp-Arslan, and the other founded the sect of the Assassins. Omar himself had an offer from his old friend of a place at court, but accepted instead a yearly pension of 1200 gold pieces. He, however, obeyed the summons of Malik Shah to Merv, and during his sultanate helped to reform the calendar. The result was the Jalāli era—‘a computation of time,’ says Gibbon, ‘which surpasses the Julian, and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian style.’ To appease the odium theologicum that he had roused against himself he is said to have made the pilgrimage to Mecca; and he died in 1122 at Nishapur, where the north wind, as he predicted, still scatters roses on his tomb.
Of some mathematical treatises by him in Arabic, one on algebra has been edited and translated by Woepke (Paris, 1851); and it was almost solely as a mathematician that he was known to the western world, until in 1859 Edward Fitzgerald (q.v.) published his ‘translation’ of seventy-five of his Rubāyāt or quatrains. The poet of Agnosticism, such was Omar Khayyām, though some in his poetry see nothing save the wine-cup and roses, and others read into it that Sufi mysticism with which, indeed, it was largely adulterated long after Omar’s death. He was a true poet; yet his fate has been that of the man in the story who lost his shadow, to find it years afterwards grown to a great nobleman, through whom he perished. For Fitzgerald’s translation is so infinitely finer than the original that the value of the latter is such mainly as attaches to Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s prototypes.
There are editions of the Rubāyāt by Nicolas (464 quatrains; Paris, 1867), Monbir Muhammad Sadik Ali (nearly 800 quatrains; Lucknow, 1878), and E. H. Winfield (253 quatrains; Lond. 1883), who also translated them into very literal English verse (1882). A prose translation by Justin H. McCarthy (1889) has little to recommend it. See an article by Professor E. Cowell in the Calcutta Review (January 1858), and vol. iii. of Fitzgerald’s Letters and Literary Remains (1889).