Metiochus and Parthenope

Metiochus and Parthenope is similar in style to Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe, from the first century BC or AD, and so is presumed to be equally old,[1] making it one of the first prose novels in the Western literary tradition.

[3] Drawing on surviving sources, Hägg and Utan reconstruct the following plot (The story refers to historical figures, but is anachronistic and fundamentally fictional.

In the 1950s, however, the Pakistani scholar Mohammad Shafi identified fragments of the text in the binding of a theological manuscript produced in Herat in AH 526 (1132 AD),[5] revealing 380 couplets (abyāt) of the poem.

In the tenth century, Ibn al-Nadīm records that Sahl b. Hārūn (d. 830 AD), secretary to Caliph al-Ma'mūn in Baghdad, composed a work of the same title.

[7] By the fifteenth century, Vāmiq u ‘Adhrā had become proverbial names of lovers in the Persian world,[8] and a huge number of stories about the 'lover and the virgin' circulated in Islamicate literature.