Ferdowsī

Ferdowsī (born c. 935, near Ṭūs, Iran—died c. 1020–26, Ṭūs) was a Persian poet, author of the Shāh-nāmeh (“Book of Kings”), the Persian national epic, to which he gave a final and enduring form, although he based his poem mainly on an earlier prose version.

Ferdowsī was born in a village on the outskirts of the ancient city of Ṭūs. In the course of the centuries, many legends have been woven around the poet’s name, but very little is known about the real facts of his life. The only reliable source is given by Neẓāmī-ye ʿArūẓī, a 12th-century poet who visited Ferdowsī’s tomb in 1116 or 1117 and collected the traditions that were current in his birthplace less than a century after his death.

According to ʿArūẓī, Ferdowsī was a dehqān (“landowner”), deriving a comfortable income from his estates. He had only one child, a daughter, and it was to provide her with a dowry that he set his hand to the task that was to occupy him for 35 years. The Shāh-nāmeh of Ferdowsī, a poem of nearly 60,000 couplets, is based mainly on a prose work of the same name compiled in the poet’s early manhood in his native Ṭūs. This prose Shāh-nāmeh was in turn and for the most part the translation of a Pahlavi (Middle Persian) work, the Khvatāy-nāmak, a history of the kings of Persia from mythical times down to the reign of Khosrow II (590–628), but it also contained additional material continuing the story to the overthrow of the Sāsānians by the Arabs in the middle of the 7th century. The first to undertake the versification of this chronicle of pre-Islamic and legendary Persia was Daqīqī, a poet at the court of the Sāmānids, who came to a violent end after completing only 1,000 verses. These verses, which deal with the rise of the prophet Zoroaster, were afterward incorporated by Ferdowsī, with due acknowledgements, in his own poem.

The Shāh-nāmeh, finally completed in 1010, was presented to the celebrated sultan Maḥmūd of Ghazna, who by that time had made himself master of Ferdowsī’s homeland, Khorāsān. Information on the relations between poet and patron is largely legendary. According to ʿArūẓī, Ferdowsī went to Ghazna in person and through the good offices of the minister Aḥmad ebn Ḥasan Meymandī was able to secure the sultan’s acceptance of the poem. Unfortunately, Maḥmūd then consulted certain enemies of the minister as to the poet’s reward. They suggested that Ferdowsī should be given 50,000 dirhams, and even this, they said, was too much, in view of his heretical Shīʿīte tenets. Maḥmūd, an intolerant Sunni, was influenced by their words, and in the end Ferdowsī received only 20,000 dirhams. Bitterly disappointed, he went to the bath and, on coming out, bought a draft of foqāʿ (a kind of beer) and divided the whole of the money between the bath attendant and the seller of foqāʿ.

Fearing the sultan’s wrath, he fled—first to Herāt, where he was in hiding for six months, and then, by way of his native Ṭūs, to Māzandarān, where he found refuge at the court of the Sepahbād Shahreyār, whose family claimed descent from the last of the Sāsānians. There Ferdowsī composed a satire of 100 verses on Sultan Maḥmūd that he inserted in the preface of the Shāh-nāmeh and read it to Shahreyār, at the same time offering to dedicate the poem to him, as a descendant of the ancient kings of Persia, instead of to Maḥmūd. Shahreyār, however, persuaded him to leave the dedication to Maḥmūd, bought the satire from him for 1,000 dirhams a verse, and had it expunged from the poem. The whole text of this satire, bearing every mark of authenticity, has survived to the present.

It was long supposed that in his old age the poet had spent some time in western Persia or even in Baghdad under the protection of the Būyids, but this assumption was based upon his presumed authorship of Yūsof o-Zalīkhā, an epic poem on the subject of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, which, it later became known, was composed more than 100 years after Ferdowsī’s death. According to the narrative of ʿArūẓī, Ferdowsī died inopportunely just as Sultan Maḥmūd had determined to make amends for his shabby treatment of the poet by sending him 60,000 dinars’ worth of indigo. ʿArūẓī does not mention the date of Ferdowsī’s death. The earliest date given by later authorities is 1020 and the latest 1026; it is certain that he lived to be more than 80.

The Persians regard Ferdowsī as the greatest of their poets. Down through the centuries they have continued to read and to listen to recitations from his masterwork, the Shāh-nāmeh. Though written some 1,000 years ago, this work is as intelligible to the average modern Iranian as the King James Version of the Bible is to a modern English speaker. The language, based as the poem is on a Pahlavi original, is pure Persian with only the slightest admixture of Arabic. European scholars have criticized this enormous poem for what they regarded as its monotonous metre, its constant repetitions, and its stereotyped similes, but to the Iranians it is the history of their country’s glorious past, preserved for all time in sonorous and majestic verse.