Ferdowsi completes the Shahnameh
After some thirty years of work, the poet Ferdowsi finishes the "Book of Kings", an epic of roughly 50,000 couplets that preserves Iran's myths and history in Persian.
Abolqasem Ferdowsi, a landowner from Tus in Khorasan, began his epic around 977 and finished it around 1010. Drawing on older prose collections of Iranian legend and history, he told the story of the Iranian kings from the first man, Kayumars, to the fall of the last Sasanian king to the Arabs, in roughly 50,000 rhyming couplets.
Its most famous stories are about grief and the cost of power: the hero Rostam unknowingly killing his own son Sohrab; the innocent prince Siyavash murdered in exile; the blacksmith Kaveh raising his leather apron as a banner against the serpent-shouldered tyrant Zahhak.
- Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (trans. Dick Davis) — Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Viking (2006)
- Ferdowsi — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind — Michael Axworthy, Basic Books (2008)
Legend says the sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, to whom it was presented, paid him poorly. Centuries later, his mausoleum at Tus, rebuilt in 1934, became a shrine of Iranian nationalism.
- Ferdowsi — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Why it matters today
The Shahnameh is the Iranian national epic and, for many, the reason Persian survived. Its heroes, Rostam, Sohrab, Siyavash, Kaveh the blacksmith, are household names, and its lines are quoted at weddings, in protests and in coffee-house storytelling. Iranians across the political spectrum claim it.