Shahnameh

The Shahnameh rests on an older tradition of royal history. In late Sasanian times a Pahlavi (Middle Persian) compilation, the Khwadāy-Nāmag or “Book of Kings”, told the history of the kings and heroes of Persia from mythical times down to the reign of Khosrow II (590–628). It held historical information on the later Sasanian period but does not appear to have drawn on historical sources for the earlier one. For the most part it passed into a Persian prose work of the same name, compiled in Ferdowsi's earlier life in his native Tus; many such prose accounts existed, among them the Shahnameh of Abu-Mansur.

Other Pahlavi texts fed the poem, chief among them the Kar-Namag i Ardashir i Pabagan, a late Sasanian account of how Ardashir I came to power, with which, according to Zabihollah Safa, various phrases and words of the poem can be matched. Some claim that Ferdowsi also used Zoroastrian nasks such as the now-lost Chihrdad. The orientalists Josef Markwart and Theodor Nöldeke held that much of the poem's world reshaped Parthian history, itself already altered in Sasanian retellings. Legends of Rostam were known across the Iranian lands by the end of the Sasanian period; Markwart traced him to Parthian origins, and his home, Sakastan, was the ancestral seat of the House of Suren, one of the seven great Parthian families.

The first to put the Pahlavi chronicle into verse was Daqiqi, a poet at the Samanid court, who came to a violent end after completing only 1,000 verses.

After an opening in praise of God and Wisdom, the poem recounts the creation of the world and of man as the Sasanians believed it, then the reigns of Iran's kings in three ages. The mythical age, some 2100 verses or four percent of the whole, runs from Keyumars, the first man and first king, and his grandson Hushang, who discovered fire and founded the Sadeh Feast, through Tahmuras, Jamshid, Zahhak, Kaveh, and Fereydun and his three sons Salm, Tur and Iraj, to Manuchehr.

Almost two-thirds of the work belongs to the heroic age, from Manuchehr to the conquest of Alexander the Great: the kingdom of the Kayanians, in which the heroes of Sistan are the backbone of the empire, Sam, his son Zal, Zal's son Rostam and then Faramarz. Its stories include the romance of Zal and Rudaba, the Seven Stages (or Labours) of Rostam, Rostam and Sohrab, Siyavash and Sudaba, Bijan and Manijeh, the wars with Afrasiab, and Rostam and Esfandyar. Three sections on Alexander, over 2,500 verses, mark the turn from mythic to historical rulers. The historical age mentions the Arsacids briefly, relates Sasanian history with a good deal of accuracy and narrates the fall of the Sasanians and the Arab conquest romantically.

Jalal Khaleghi Mutlaq finds in it moral virtues such as worship of one God, patriotism, love of family and help for the poor; other scholars read in it a contrast of good and evil drawn from Zoroastrian dualism, and Dariush Zolfaghari a war for the survival of Iranian cultural identity.

Ferdowsi began the Shahnameh in 977 and completed it in March 1010, a labour of 33 years. He wrote in Early New Persian, recasting in verse what he, his contemporaries and his predecessors regarded as the account of Iran's ancient history; only a small portion, in passages scattered through the poem, is entirely his own conception. Daqiqi's 1,000 verses on the rise of the prophet Zoroaster were taken into the poem, with acknowledgment. Its style shows characteristics of both written and oral literature.

The poem has 62 stories, 990 chapters and some 50,000 rhyming couplets, more than three times the length of Homer's Iliad: the longest epic poem created by a single author. Ferdowsi himself put the final edition at some sixty thousand distichs, but that is a round figure, and most of the relatively reliable manuscripts preserve a little over fifty thousand. According to Nizami Aruzi, the final edition sent to the court of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni was prepared in seven volumes.

Ferdowsi is held to have purposefully avoided Arabic vocabulary, a view the 19th-century British Iranologist E. G. Browne also put forward. Recent study by Mohammed Moinfar counts approximately 700 words of Arabic origin, around 9% of the vocabulary; the overwhelming majority of the lexicon remains Persian in origin.

The poem's impact on Persian historiography was immediate. Historians decorated their books with its verses, from the unknown author of the Tarikh Sistan, written around 1053, to Khwand Mir, who gave Ferdowsi an extensive biography around 1523; the Arab historian Ibn Athir wrote that it might be called “the Quran of 'Ajam”. Masud Sa'ad Salman recited its poems at the Ghaznavid court of India only 80 years after its composition, and poets from Asadi Tusi, whose Garshaspnama it inspired, to Nizami Ganjavi drew on its stories.

Rulers adopted it. The sultans of the Seljuks of Anatolia took titles from ancient Persian mythology such as Kai Khosrow and Kay Kāvus, and according to Ibn Bibi, in 1221 Ala' al-Din Kay-kubad decorated the walls of Konya and Sivas with its verses. The Qarakhanid dynasty called itself the “family of Afrasiyab”, the Shirvanshahs took many of their names from it, and Shah Ismail I, founder of the Safavid dynasty, named all his sons after its characters and used it as a reassertion of Persian royal authority. Mongol, Timurid, Turkman and Safavid patrons commissioned illustrated copies; the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp held a series of 250 miniatures.

Not every regime welcomed it. Under Mohammad Reza Shah its themes of regicide and the incompetence of kings sat badly with the monarchy, and Ali Shariati opposed it for verses critical of Islam.

Among the earliest known copies is a manuscript of 1217, which predates the Mongol invasion and the destruction of libraries that followed it; it was rediscovered in Florence in 1977. The Moscow critical edition relied heavily on a 1276 manuscript in the British Museum and a 1333 Leningrad manuscript, the latter now considered secondary.

Illustrated copies are among the most sumptuous examples of Persian miniature painting. The “Great Mongol” or Demotte Shahnameh was produced under the Ilkhanid sultan Abu Sa'id; three of Timur's grandsons, Baysunghur, Ibrahim Sultan and Mohammad Juki, each commissioned a copy, and the Baysonghori Shahnameh of 1430 is preserved intact at Golestan Palace in Iran, inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2007. Others fared worse: the Houghton Shahnameh and the Great Mongol Shahnameh were broken up in the 20th century so that their sheets could be sold separately, and a single sheet of the former was sold for £904,000 in 2006.

Printed editions began with the first volume of Mathew Lumsden's, published in Kolkata in 1811. Turner Macan published the first complete edition in 1829 from 17 manuscripts, and Julius von Mohl another from 30 between 1838 and 1878, both based on late manuscripts. A Russian team led by E. E. Bertels published the first modern critical edition in Moscow in nine volumes (1960–1971), and Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, taking the Florence manuscript as his chief text, completed a new eight-volume critical edition in 2008.

Some experts hold that Modern Persian has stayed more or less the language of Ferdowsi's time, over 1000 years ago, largely because of works like the Shahnameh, and later poets studied it to master the language. Later epics in Persian followed its style and method without reaching its fame. It introduced the Alexander Romance into Persian, turning Alexander from the negative figure of Zoroastrian writings into a positive one; the Iskandarnameh of Nizami and the Ayina-i Iskandari of Amir Khusrau owe much to it.

Its stories spread beyond Persian. Names of its heroes appear in 11th- and 12th-century Georgian literature, indirect evidence of a lost Old Georgian translation, and the tales of Rostam and Sohrab and of Bijan and Manijeh became part of Georgian folklore. English versions run from James Atkinson's of 1832 and the complete translation of Arthur and Edmond Warner (1905–1925) to the abridged ones of Dick Davis (2006) and Ahmad Sadri (2013); Dastur Faramroz Kutar and his brother put it into Gujarati, and Moniruddin Yusuf into Bengali.

Shahnameh-khani, the public recitation of the poem, has been practised for centuries in the cities and villages of Iran. Its stories became an opera, Kova the Blacksmith (1940), Indian films such as Rustom Sohrab (1963), a Tajikfilm trilogy and the animated film The Last Fiction (2017), and its millennial anniversary was marked in 2010 with exhibitions in Cambridge and Washington.