Ferdowsi

Born around 940 CE in the village of Paj, near the ancient city of Tus in the Khorasan region of northeastern Persia, present-day Razavi Khorasan province, Iran, Abolqasem Ferdowsi was a dehqan, a member of the class of Iranian landowners who preserved the old Zoroastrian traditions and pre-Islamic legends even under Arab and Turkish rule. It was to provide his only daughter with a dowry, according to tradition, that he first set his hand to the task that would consume thirty-five years of his life. The Shahnameh (Book of Kings), completed on March 8, 1010, is an epic poem of nearly sixty thousand couplets tracing the mythical and historical kings of Persia from the creation of the world to the Arab conquest in the seventh century. It is the longest epic poem ever composed by a single author, and Ferdowsi wrote it almost entirely in pure Persian, deliberately avoiding Arabic loanwords at a time when Arabic dominated literary culture, an act of linguistic preservation that helped define the modern Persian language. He presented the completed work to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, who had conquered Khorasan and was the most powerful ruler in the eastern Islamic world. According to enduring legend, Mahmud had promised a gold dinar for every couplet but instead sent silver dirhams, a fraction of the promised sum. Ferdowsi, furious, wrote a bitter satire against the sultan and fled. One tradition holds that Mahmud eventually repented and dispatched sixty thousand gold dinars to Tus, but as the caravan bearing the treasure entered the city by one gate, Ferdowsi’s funeral procession was passing out through another. He died around 1020 CE and was buried in his own garden, a local cleric having refused him a place in the town cemetery. His tomb, rebuilt in the 1930s, is now a national shrine.