Ferdowsi

The Shahnameh, or "Book of Kings", is the national epic of Iran and the wider Persian-speaking world, and it is the work of one man: the poet known by the pen name Ferdowsi, who lived in Khorasan, in north-eastern Iran, in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. Over more than three decades he turned the legends and history of Iran before Islam into tens of thousands of verses in Persian, and in doing so helped to fix the form of the language that Iranians still read today.

Ferdowsi was born in 940 in the village of Paj, near the city of Tus, in what was then the Samanid Empire. The year is worked out from passages in which the poet gives his own age; a few scholars have argued for an earlier date. Even his personal name is uncertain: early sources call him Mansur, Hasan or Ahmad, while the name by which he is known, Ferdowsi, means "of paradise". He came from the dehqans, the Iranian landed gentry who had survived the Arab conquest and saw themselves as keepers of old Iranian traditions. He married, and had a son who died at the age of thirty-seven, a loss he mourned in the poem, and a daughter.

Ferdowsi grew up as the power of the Abbasid Caliphate weakened and local dynasties ruled the Iranian lands. The Samanids, based in Bukhara, used New Persian in government and paid poets such as Rudaki to write in it. In Tus a prose Book of Kings had been compiled for the local governor, Abu Mansur, from older Middle Persian material. The poet Daqiqi had begun to put this history into verse but was murdered by one of his slaves, leaving the work unfinished. Ferdowsi took up the task, probably around 977 to 980, working at home in Tus with a copy of the prose source supplied by a friend.

The Shahnameh runs from the creation of the world and the first mythical kings, through the age of heroes such as Rostam, to the historical Sasanian dynasty and the Arab conquest of the seventh century. It is traditionally said to contain some 60,000 couplets. Ferdowsi finished a first version in 994 or 995 under Samanid patronage. When the Turkic Ghaznavids took over Khorasan, he revised and enlarged the poem, adding praise for the new ruler, Mahmud of Ghazni. The second version was completed on 8 March 1010, when the poet gave his age as seventy-one. Passages added in his later years complain of poverty, old age and illness.

Later writers built a famous story around Ferdowsi and Mahmud. In it the sultan promised a gold coin for every couplet but sent silver instead; the angry poet gave the money away and wrote a biting satire before fleeing. When Mahmud relented and sent the gold, it reached Tus as Ferdowsi's coffin was being carried out. Much of this is legend. How generously Mahmud really treated the poet has long been disputed; some scholars think part of the satire is genuine, but most of the story cannot be confirmed.

Ferdowsi died in Tus in about 1020 or 1025; sources disagree on the year. A local cleric, who thought him a heretic, refused him burial in the town cemetery, so he was laid to rest in his own garden. His tomb was rebuilt between 1928 and 1934 under Reza Shah, who in 1934 held a millennial celebration in his honour. The Shahnameh shaped nearly all later Persian epic and its scenes filled lavishly illustrated royal manuscripts, and many Iranians see in him the founder of modern literary Persian.

Our 900 map shows the Samanid realm in which Ferdowsi was born, and our 1000 map shows the Ghaznavid Empire that replaced it in Khorasan, in the north-east of present-day Iran.