The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

It almost became firmly established in the minds of lovers of quatrains that each collection attributed to Omar Khayyam is the brainchild of this poet-philosopher, had it not been for an article by the Russian professor Shukovsky in 1981, which proved that eighty-two of them appear in the collections of other Persian poets, and that about half of this number are three of their major ones. They are Farid al-Din al-Attar, Hafez, and Jalal al-Din al-Rumi, and the other half are forty others, such as Abu Sa`id, Ibn Sina, al-Firdawsi, Anwari, and Abdullah al-Ansari, and they called them "the vagrant quartet." It seems that those who supplied it in their copies were wrapping it similar to the Khayyamiya Rubaiyat, adding it to it, intentionally or unintentionally. Their number has increased since the appearance of that article, reaching 101. As for the quatrains whose attribution to him is undoubtedly no different from the eleven, which are the ones that were added by his name to those of his contemporaries who mentioned him in their works that remain until today.