The Book of Kings
Abolqasem Ferdowsi was a landowner in Tus, in Khorasan, three centuries after the Arab conquest of Iran, when Arabic had become the language of learning. He set out to put Iran’s ancient history and legends into Persian verse, and spent around thirty years on the task, finishing the Shahnameh around 1010. It runs to some 50,000 couplets, one of the longest poems ever written by one person.
The Shahnameh tells the story of Iran from the first king, Kayumars, through the age of heroes to the fall of the Sasanian empire. Its most beloved hero is Rostam, raised with the help of the magical bird the Simorgh, who rides his horse Rakhsh through seven trials, and whose tragic fight with his own son Sohrab still makes audiences weep.
I revived Iran
Ferdowsi wrote in a Persian with remarkably few Arabic words, and Iranians credit him with keeping their language alive. Near the end of the poem he wrote:
بسی رنج بردم در این سال سی / عجم زنده کردم بدین پارسی
“I suffered much in these thirty years; I revived the Persians with this Persian.” For centuries naqqals, storytellers in coffee houses, performed his tales from memory. Today the Shahnameh is read aloud in diaspora homes so that children can hear the stories in Persian.
The tomb at Tus
Ferdowsi’s white stone mausoleum in Tus was built in 1934 for the thousandth anniversary of his birth and later rebuilt. Its walls are carved with scenes from the Shahnameh.
