The Iranian poet Ferdowsi (940-1020) was born into a family of landowners near the city of Tous, in Khorasan, in northwestern Iran. He married and had two children, a son and a daughter. The death of his son at the age of thirty-seven deeply affected him.

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Ferdowsi's Shahnameh is one of the most important masterpieces of Persian literature. It is a sweeping collection of myths, legends, and history. It begins with the story of creation, spans successive Persian dynasties, and ends with the Arab conquest of Iran. With the fall of King Yazdegerd, the last Sassanian monarch, the caliphate "brings a new religion and replaces the throne with the pulpit."

 

Ferdowsi devoted thirty years to composing the Shahnameh. One of his driving motivations was the preservation of Iran’s heritage: its myths, history, and language. Living in a land repeatedly invaded. (by Alexander the Great in 334 BCE, and later by the Arab forces who overthrew the Sassanian Empire in 651 CE) Ferdowsi felt a deep urgency to safeguard the legacy of his culture. His reflective asides throughout the poem express a longing to pass on ancient knowledge to future generations. 

 

Drawing from centuries-old oral and written traditions, Ferdowsi gathered stories that had shaped the Persian imagination. He incorporated earlier prose accounts and, most notably, one thousand verses by the poet Daghighi, adapting them into his own 50,000 lyrical and masterfully-wrought couplets. Initially supported financially by the Samanid Prince Abu Mansur, Ferdowsi lost his patron with the prince's death in 987. By 999, the Ghaznavids had defeated the Samanids, and Ferdowsi eventually presented his final manuscript to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, who is said to have failed him, offering only a token reward in return.

 

In the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi sought not only to preserve a fading civilization through its myths and legends, but also to explore universal truths about the human condition. He created a narrative tapestry in which each dynasties rise and fall, generations succeed one another, and timeless wisdom is transmitted through story. Underlying this monumental work is a reverence for the power of language itself, for the spoken and written word, and for the enduring value of wisdom passed down.

 

From Ferdowsi’s own words, we sense that he understood the magnitude of his task. He saw it as both a sacred duty and a gift to posterity: a lasting memorial to a rich and ancient culture, and a means of preserving his own name for eternity.