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Ferdowsi

Persian Poet, Author of the National Epic the Shahnameh

Those Who Set the World Down in Writing · Scholars & Explorers

The ShahnamehThe Revival of Persian LiteratureThe Construction of Persian National Identity

Who they are

Ferdowsi (c. 940–1020) was a Persian poet who spent about thirty years composing the epic masterwork the Shahnameh (Book of Kings), recounting in a grand span of nearly sixty thousand couplets the history and legend of Persia from the first king of the mythical age to the Arab conquest of the last Sasanian monarch, fusing myth, epic, and historical narrative in one. This work was composed against the historical background of the Arab conquest of Persia, when the Arabic language and Islamic culture held dominant sway, yet Ferdowsi insisted on writing in pure Persian (avoiding Arabic loanwords as far as possible), objectively playing a crucial part in the survival and revival of the Persian language and national cultural identity; for the thousand years since, the Shahnameh has remained the most representative classic of national literature in the Persian-speaking world, and is still an important spiritual wellspring of cultural identity in Iran and the Persian-speaking regions of Central Asia.

Primary sourcesThe Persian original of the Shahnameh

Key stories

Thirty Years of Toil to Compose the Shahnameh

To complete this grand epic masterwork Ferdowsi spent nearly thirty long years, and by tradition all but exhausted his fortune in devoting himself to the writing; in his later years he presented the work to Sultan Mahmud of the Ghaznavid dynasty then ruling Persia, hoping for a rich reward to supplement his old age, but the sultan’s reward fell far below his expectation (the reason variously recorded in the sources), and this affair of grievance between sovereign and subject thereafter became a widely told case in the history of Persian literature.

The Insistence on Pure Persian

When Ferdowsi wrote the Shahnameh, it was precisely the historical period when Arabic held dominant sway as the religious and administrative language in the Persian region, yet he deliberately avoided Arabic loanwords, composing as far as possible in pure Persian vocabulary; this insistence in the choice of language objectively played an extremely crucial part in the survival and revival of Persian language and culture amid the wave of Arabization, and Ferdowsi was thereby honored as "the reviver of the Persian language."

Version differences

On the details and true reason of the anecdote that Sultan Mahmud’s reward to Ferdowsi fell far below his expectation, the sources vary, and modern scholars take a cautious attitude toward its accuracy, but this story of "grievance between a man of letters and the powerful" is widely told in the Persian literary tradition.

Relationships

Ally

📗Ibn Khaldun　The two respectively recorded, through poetry and historical writing, the historical and cultural traditions of different regions of the Islamic world

Echoes today

Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.

The "reviver of the Persian language"The Shahnameh’s insistence on composing in pure Persian objectively played a key part in the survival of Persian language and culture amid the wave of Arabization, and Ferdowsi is thereby honored in Iran and the Persian-speaking regions of Central Asia as an important spiritual wellspring of national linguistic and cultural identity, still an important text in Iranian primary and secondary education.

Appears in

The Middle Ages of Faith, Conquest, and KnowledgeThe Epic of Persia and the Map of Sicily

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