obtained a clerkship in the Préfecture de la Seine, which he held for most of his life. He presently began to send poems to the Mercure de France, and these attracted attention. In 1893 he allowed a friend to print his earliest volume of poems, Au Jardin de l'infante, in a very small edition. This led to the sudden recognition of his talent, and to applause from critics of widely different schools. In 1897 this book was reprinted in a more popular form, with the addition of a section entitled L'Urne penchée. Samain's second volume, Aux flancs du vase, appeared in 1898. His health began to fail and he withdrew to the country, where he died, in the neighbourhood of the village of Magny-les-Hameaux, on the 18th of August 1900. A third volume of his poems, Le Chariot d'or, appeared after his death, with a lyrical drama, Polyphème (1901), which was produced at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in 1904. The fame of Samain rapidly advanced when he was dead, and the general public awakened to the fact that this isolated writer was a poet of rare originality. He cultivated a delicate, languid beauty of imagery and an exquisite sense of verbal melody without attempting any revolution in prosody or identifying himself with any theory. Samain had no great range of talent, nor was he ambitious of many effects. Samain's natural life was patiently spent in squalid conditions; he escaped from them into an imaginative world of the most exquisite refinement. He has been compared to Watteau and Schumann; in his own art he bore some resemblance to Charles Baudelaire, and to the English poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy.
See also R. Doumic, “Trois Poètes,” in the Revue des deux mondes (Oct. 1900); L. Bocquet, Albert Samain, sa vie, son œuvre (1905); and E. W. Gosse, French Profiles (1905). (E. G.)
SAMANA RANGE, a mountain ridge in Kohat district of the N.W. Frontier Province of India, commanding the S. boundary of Tirah. The ridge lies between the Khanki Valley on the N. and the Miranzai Valley on the S., and extends for some 30 m. W. from Hangu to the Samana Suk. It is some 6000 to 7000 ft. high. Beyond the Samana Suk lies the pass, known as the Chagru Kotal, across which the Tirah Expedition marched in 1897. On the opposite hill on the other side of this road is the famous position of Dargai (see Tirah Campaign). After the Miranzai Expedition of 1891 this range was occupied by British troops and eleven posts were established along its crest, the two chief posts being Fort Lockhart and Fort Gulistan. In 1897 all the forts on the Samana were attacked by the Orakzais, and this and the Afridi attack on the Khyber Pass were the two chief causes of the Tirah Expedition. When Lord Curzon reorganized the frontier in 1900, British garrisons were withdrawn from the Samana forts, which are now held by a corps of tribal police 450 strong, called the Samana Rifles.
SĀMĀNIDS, the first great native dynasty which sprang up in the 9th century in E. Persia, and, though nominally provincial governors under the suzerainty of the caliphs of Bagdad, succeeded in a very short time in establishing an almost independent rule over Transoxiana and the greater part of Persia. Under the caliphate of Mamun, Sāmān, a Persian noble of Balkh, who was a close friend of the Arab governor of Khorasan, Asad, b. Abdallah, was converted from Zoroastrianism to Islam. His son Asad, named after Asad b. Abdallah, had four sons who rendered distinguished services to Mamun. In return they all received provinces: Nūḥ obtained Samarkand; Aḥmad, Ferghana; Yahyā, Shash; Ilyās, Herat. Of these Aḥmad and his second son Ismā‘īl overthrew the Saffārids (q.v.) and the Zaidites of Tabaristan, and thus the Sāmānids established themselves with the sanction of the caliph Motamid in their capital Bokhara.
The first ruler (874) was Naṣr I. (Naṣr or Naṣir b. Aḥmad b. Asad. b. Sāmān). He was succeeded by his brother Ismā‘īl b. Aḥmad (892). His descendants and successors, all renowned for the high impulse they gave both to the patriotic feelings and the national poetry of modern Persia (see Persia: Literature), were Aḥmad b. Ismā‘īl (907-913); Naṣr II. b. Aḥmad, the patron and friend of the great poet Rūdagi (913-942); Nūḥ I. b. Naṣr (942-954); Abdalmalik I. b. Nūḥ (954-961); Manṣūr I. b. Nūḥ, whose vizier Bal‘amī translated Tabarī's universal history into Persian (961-976); Nūḥ II. b. Manṣūr, whose court-poet Daqiqi (Daḳiḳi) began the Shāhnāma (976-997); Manṣūr II. b. Nūḥ (997-999); and Abdalmalik II. b. Nūḥ (999), under whom the Sāmānid dynasty was conquered by the Ghaznevids. The rulers of this powerful house, whose silver dirhems had an extensive currency during the 10th century all over the N. of Asia, and were brought, through Russian caravans, even so far as to Pomerania, Sweden and Norway, where Sāmānid coins have been found in great number, were in their turn overthrown by a more youthful and vigorous race, that of Sabuktagīn, which founded the illustrious Ghaznevid dynasty and the Mussulman empire of India. Under Abdalmalik I. a Turkish slave, Alptagīn, had been entrusted with the government of Bokhara, but, showing himself hostile to Manṣūr I., he was compelled to fly and to take refuge in the mountainous regions of Ghazni, where he soon established a semi-independent rule, to which, after his death in 977 (367 A.H.), his son-in-law Sabuktagīn, likewise a former Turkish slave, succeeded. Nūḥ II., in order to retain at least a nominal sway over those Afghan territories, confirmed him in his high position and even invested Sabuktagīn's son Maḥmūd with the governorship of Khorasan, in reward for the powerful help they had given him in his desperate struggles with a confederation of disaffected nobles of Bokhara under the leadership of Fā’iq and the troops of the Dailamites, a dynasty that had arisen on the shores of the Caspian Sea and wrested already from the hands of the Sāmānids all their western provinces. Unfortunately, Sabuktagīn died in the same year as Nūḥ II. (997, 387 A.H.), and Maḥmūd (q.v.), confronted with an internal contest against his own brother Ismā‘īl, had to withdraw his attention for a short time from the affairs in Khorasan and Transoxiana. This interval sufficed for the old rebel leader Fā’iq, supported by a strong Tatar army under the Ilek Khān Abu‘l Ḥosain Naṣr I., to turn Nūḥ's successor Manṣūr II. into a mere puppet, to concentrate all the power in his own hand, and to induce even his nominal master to reject Maḥmūd's application for a continuance of his governorship in Khorasan. Maḥmūd refrained for the moment from vindicating his right; but, as soon as, through court intrigues, Manṣūr II. had been dethroned, he took possession of Khorasan, deposed Manṣūr's successor Abdalmalik II., and assumed as an independent monarch for the first time in Asiatic history the title of “sultān.” The last prince of the house of Sāmān, Montaṣir, a bold warrior and a poet of no mean talent, carried on for some years a kind of guerilla warfare against both Maḥmūd and the Ilek Khān, who had occupied Transoxiana, till he was assassinated in 1005 (395 A.H.). Transoxiana itself was annexed to the Ghaznevid realm eleven years later, 1016 (407 A.H.).
See S. Lane Poole, Mahommedan Dynasties (1894), pp. 131-133; Stockvis, Manuel d'histoire (Leiden, 1888), vol. i. p. 113; also articles Caliphate and Persia: History, section B, and for the later period Maḥmūd, Seljuks, Mongols.
SAMANIEGO, FELIX MARIA DE (1745-1801), Spanish fabulist, was born at Laguardia (Álava) on the 12th of October 1745, and was educated at Valladolid. A government appointment was secured for him by his uncle the count de Peñaflorida. His Fábulas (1781-1784), one hundred and fifty-seven in number, were originally written for the boys educated in the school founded by the Biscayan Society. In the first instalment of his fables he admits that he had taken Iriarte for his model, a statement which proves that he had read Iriarte's fables in manuscript; he appears, however, to have resented their publication in 1782, and this led to a rancorous controversy between the former friends. Samaniego holds his own in the matters of quiet humour and careless grace, and his popularity continues. He died at Laguardia on the 11th of August 1801.
SAMARA, a government of S.E. Russia, on the W. side of the lower Volga, bounded on the N. by the governments of Kazan and Ufa, on the W. by Simbirsk and Saratov, on the E. by Ufa and Orenburg, and on the S. by Astrakhan, the Kirghiz Steppes and the territory of the Ural Cossacks. The area is 58,302 sq. m., and the population, in 1897, 2,763,478. A line drawn E. from the great bend of the Volga—the Samarskaya Luka—would divide the government into two parts, differing in orographical character. In the N. are flat hills and plateaus intersected by deep rivers. In their highest parts these elevations rise about 1000 ft. above the sea, while the level of the Volga at Samara is only 43 ft. S. of the Samarskaya Luka the country assumes the character of a low, flat steppe, recently emerged from the post-Pliocene Aral-Caspian basin. The government is built up chiefly of Carboniferous sandstones, conglomerates, clay slates and limestones, representing mostly deep-sea deposits. The Permian formation appears along the rivers Sok and Samara, and is represented by limestones, sands and marls containing gypsum, all of marine origin, and by continental deposits dating from the same period; sandstones impregnated with petroleum also occur. In the N. these deposits are covered with
