Literature in New Persian, a language based on Middle Persian but containing a large admixture of Arabic loan words, and written in a modified form of the Arabic script, began to be composed in eastern Iran in the late third/ninth century (some two centuries after the Arab conquest), and by the mid- to late fourth/tenth century boasted a flourishing school of writers centred on the Sāmānid court in Khurāsān. As with a number of literatures that have grown up in the shadow of prestigious external cultures, a great deal of energy in the early years was given to translation, a process which both exemplifies and facilitates the adoption of originally foreign literary criteria and models. Although the surviving translations from Arabic are in prose (the most famous of these is al-Ṭabarῑ’s Taʾrῑkh (History), translated and in places extensively modified by Balʿamῑ), the influence of Arabic poetic models on Persian prosody was also clearly extensive. Virtually the whole Persian vocabulary concerned with prosody is Arabic, and all but two of the numerous metres used in Persian verse are Arabic in origin. Most telling of all in this regard is the fact that the few surviving examples of pre-Islamic Persian verse indicate that it was written in accentual metres, whereas poetry in New Persian was written using the quantitative metres of the Arabic ʿarūḍ system. Such a radical shift in the basic metrical structure of verse implies the presence of massive culture intimidation and assimilation.