The Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar was born in 1146 in the province of Khorasan in northeastern Iran, specifically in Nishapur (also the birthplace of Omar Khayyam), and he died there around 1220, when the Mongols invaded, pillaging and slaughtering. The name "Attar" is a literary pseudonym—during the Middle Ages, Persian poets did not use their given names but preferred to sign their poems with another. The word "attar" means essence or distilled perfume, and the poet chose this pseudonym because he was a perfumer and pharmacist by profession.
Apart from his renowned poem The Conference of the Birds, which he likely composed around 1187 and which numbers close to five thousand verses, he also wrote: The Book of the Divine, The Book of Secrets, and The Book of Sorrow; a collection of lyrical poems, a collection of quatrains; and a prose work titled Lives of Saints (not exclusively Sufi saints).
