Ferdowsi

Ferdowsi (c. 940 - c. 1020) was the most celebrated Persian poet and the author of the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, the national epic of Persia, today Iran. He lived at a time when local dynasties were reviving Persian as a language of culture, and his work is central to the identity of the Iranian world and one of the great achievements of world literature.

He was born around 940 in Paj, a village near Tus in Khorasan, a region of the Samanid Empire. He came from the dehqans, a class of Iranian landowners who had prospered under the Sasanians and who kept alive traditions that predated Islam. Little is known of his youth. He probably had a wife from the same class, and a son who died at the age of 37; the grief he felt for this loss appears in an elegy included in the poem.

His work grew out of a period of change. After the Islamic conquests of the seventh century, New Persian had spread as the language of Islam and of administration, and the Samanids commissioned translations of Pahlavi texts. A prose Shahnameh, compiled at the request of a governor of Tus, served Ferdowsi as one of his sources. He also built on the work of Daqiqi, a fellow poet who was murdered before finishing his own project, and whose verses Ferdowsi absorbed into his epic.

According to the most widely accepted account, he began the poem around 977 and completed a first version in 994, under the patronage of the Samanid prince Mansur. When the Turkic Ghaznavids overthrew the Samanids in the late 990s, he kept working and rewrote some passages to praise the sultan Mahmud. He finished the poem on 8 March 1010. His relationship with the sultan was strained, and scholars still debate how much Mahmud cared for Iranian history. The famous story of a payment in silver instead of gold, after which the poet gave the money away, belongs to legend and cannot be confirmed. A satire against Mahmud is reliably attributed to him, whereas other poems credited to him are almost certainly not his.

The epic, which runs to about 60,000 couplets, traces the legendary history of Iran's kings from mythic beginnings to the Sasanian rulers, with heroes such as Rostam. In it Ferdowsi links pre-Islamic culture with the culture of Islamic Iran. His outlook values wisdom above all, since the wise can tell good from evil and reach happiness in this world. Most historians regard him as a Shia Muslim, though scholars have argued over which branch he followed. He respected the traditions of his ancestors and rejected astrology as an explanation of human actions.

The Shahnameh became the central text of Persian identity and language, and for centuries it has been copied, passed on and illustrated. Ferdowsi is known as the Lord of the Word, and his lasting contribution is to have preserved a cultural memory that might otherwise have been lost.