Ferdowsi (c. 940 - c. 1020) was a Persian poet, the author of the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, the national epic of Greater Iran. [1] Composed over roughly thirty years and running to some fifty thousand couplets, it narrates the mythical, heroic and historical past of the Iranian world down to the Arab conquest of the seventh century. [2] The poem is credited with helping preserve the Persian language and with shaping Iranian cultural identity for a millennium.
Life
Abu'l-Qasem Ferdowsi was born around 940 near Tus, in the province of Khorasan, then under the Samanid dynasty. [1] He is generally said to have come from the dehqan class, the landowning gentry who preserved much of the pre-Islamic Iranian tradition after the Arab conquest, a background that would have given him access both to education and to the older stories he later versified.
Very little is documented about his life, and much of what is repeated about him derives from later anecdote rather than contemporary record. [3] He appears to have spent most of his years in and around Tus, working on the poem while his family estate declined, and he died there around 1020.
The Shahnameh
Ferdowsi took up a project already begun by the poet Daqiqi, who had been killed after completing about a thousand lines, and worked on it from roughly 977 until its completion in 1010. [2] The result is one of the longest epic poems composed by a single author.
The Shahnameh is organised around the reigns of fifty monarchs and falls into three broad parts. The mythical section begins with the first king, Kayumars, and includes the tyrant Zahhak and his overthrow by Fereydun. The heroic section, the longest and most celebrated, centres on the Sistani warrior Rostam and contains the tragedies of Rostam and Sohrab, of Siyavash and of Esfandiyar. [1] The historical section treats the Sasanian kings, ending with the defeat of Yazdegerd III.
Language and sources
Ferdowsi drew on earlier prose compilations of Iranian legend, including a Book of Kings assembled in Tus, as well as on oral tradition and on the Zoroastrian historical memory preserved among the dehqans. [3] He wrote in a Persian notably sparing in Arabic vocabulary, and the work is traditionally regarded as having secured the standing of New Persian as a literary language at a time when Arabic dominated administration and learning. [2]
According to a long-standing tradition, Ferdowsi presented the completed poem to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni and was disappointed by the reward offered; the story, including a satire said to have been written against the sultan, is of doubtful authenticity but has been attached to the poem since medieval times. [1]
Legacy
The Shahnameh became the foundation of Persian literary culture and was copied and illustrated for centuries; the sixteenth-century manuscript made for Shah Tahmasp is among the most celebrated illuminated books produced anywhere. [3] Its stories are recited by professional storytellers, staged, painted and taught across Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and the wider Persianate world.
A mausoleum was erected over Ferdowsi's grave at Tus in the twentieth century and remains a place of pilgrimage. [1] The poem has been translated into many languages and continues to be studied as literature, as a record of pre-Islamic Iranian tradition, and as a monument of the Persian language. [2]
