The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in Persian and numbering about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer. A rubai is a two-line stanza with two parts (or hemistichs) per line, hence the word rubaiyat (derived from the Arabic language root for "four"), meaning "quatrains".