P1 : The Poet Ferdowsi Tusi
P2 : Shah Ismail II manuscript c 1577 CE ,Artist: Ali Asghar ,Khusraw Parviz and Bahram Chubin in combat
P3 : Facade to Ferdowsi's Mausoleum in Tus
P4 : Mongol manuscript folio 1330s Tabriz ,Sindukht Becoming Aware of Rudaba's Actions ,Arthur M. Sackler Gallery ,Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
P5 : Mongol manuscript folio 1330s Tabriz ,Isfandiyar's funeral , Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ,Joseph Pulitzer Bequest 1933
P6 : Bayasanghori (Baysonqori) manuscript folio c 1430 CE Tabriz ,Faramarz son of Rostam mourns the death of his father and of his uncle Zavareh.Gelstan Palace, Tehran
P7 : Tahmaspi or Houghton manuscript folio 308 v 1. Artist Dust Muhammad? Tabriz, c.1530. Auctioned Lot 43 10/15/1997 Sotheby's. Kay Khosrow fetes Rustam under the jewel-tree.
P8 : Tahmaspi or Houghton manuscript. Artist Sultan Muhammad Tabriz, c.1530. Hushang, grandson of Gayumars. Feast of Sadeh
The Shahnameh, Book of Kings, is an epic composed by the Iranian poet Hakim Abul-Qasim Mansur (later known as Ferdowsi Tusi), and completed around 1010 CE.
[Ferdowsi means 'from paradise', and is derived from the name Ferdous (cf. Avestan pairi-daeza, later para-diz then par-des or par-dos, arabized to fer-dos). Tusi means 'from Tus'. In the poet's case, the name Ferdowsi Tusi became a name and a title: The Tusi Poet from Paradise.]
The epic chronicles the legends and histories of Iranian (Aryan) kings from primordial times to the Arab conquest of Iran in the 7th century CE, in three successive stages: the mythical, the heroic or legendary, and the historic.
Ferdowsi began the composition of the Shahnameh's 50,000 couplets (bayts) each consisting of two hemistiches (misra), 62 stories and 990 chapters, a work several times the length of Homer's Iliad, in 977 CE, when eastern Iran was under Samanid rule. The Samanids had Tajik-Aryan affiliation and were sympathetic to preserving Aryan heritage.
It took Ferdowsi thirty three years to complete his epic, by which time the rule of eastern Iran had passed to the Turkoman Ghaznavids (who based themselves in the north-eastern province of Khorasan with Ghazni as their capital).
The Shahnameh was written in classical Persian when the language was emerging from its Middle Persian Pahlavi roots, and at a time when Arabic was the favoured language of literature. As such, Ferdowsi is seen as a national Iranian hero who re-ignited pride in Iranian culture and literature, and who established the Persian language as a language of beauty and sophistication. Ferdowsi wrote: "the Persian language is revived by this work."
The Poet Ferdowsi (c. 935 to 941 - 1020 to 1026 CE)
The earliest and perhaps most reliable account of Ferdowsi's life comes from Nezami-ye Aruzi, a 12th-century poet who visited Tus in 1116 or 1117 to collect information about Ferdowsi's life. According to Nezami-ye Aruzi, Ferdowsi Tusi was born into a family of landowners near the village of Tus in the Khorasan province of north-eastern Iran. Ferdowsi and his family were called Dehqan, also spelt Dehgan or Dehgān. Dehqan /Dehgan is now thought to mean landed, village settlers, urban and even farmer. However, Dehgan is also an name for the Parsiban, a group of Khorasani with Tajik roots (for further information see the section of Parsiban / Farsiwan in our page on Haroyu, Aria and Herat).
Ferdowsi married at the age of 28 and eight years after his marriage - in order to provide a dowry for his daughter - Ferdowsi started writing the Shahnameh, a project on which he spent some thirty three years of his life.
While Ferdowsi was composing the Shahnameh, Khorasan came under the rule of Sultan Mahmoud, a Turkoman Sunni Muslim and consolidator of the Ghaznavid dynasty. Ferdowsi sought the patronage of the sultan and wrote verses in his praise. The sultan, on the advice from his ministers, gave Ferdowsi an amount far smaller than Ferdowsi had requested and one that Ferdowsi considered insulting. He had a falling out with the sultan and fled to Mazandaran seeking the protection and patronage of the court of the Sepahbad Shahreyar, who, it is said, had lineage from rulers during the Zoroastrian-Sassanian era. In Mazandaran, Ferdowsi wrote a hundred satirical verses about Sultan Mahmoud, verses purchased by his new patron and then expunged from the Shahnameh's manuscript (to keep the peace perhaps). Nevertheless, the verses survived. An example:
Long years this Shahnameh I toiled to complete,
That the King might award me some recompense meet,
But naught save a heart wrung with grief and despair
Did I get from those promises empty as air!
Had the sire of the King been some Prince of renown,
My forehead would surely have been graced by a crown!
Were his mother a lady of high pedigree,
In silver and gold I'd have stood to the knee!
But, being by birth not a prince but a boor,
The praise of the noble he could not endure!
Ferdowsi returned to Tus to spend the closing years of his life forlorn. Notwithstanding the lack of royal patronage, he died proud and confident his work would make him immortal.
Ferdowsi's Sources
Khvatay-Namak
In the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi credits a paladin (see page 1 of the translations), who 'ransacked the earth' to keep alive the information gleaned from Zoroastrian priests (arch-magi or mobeds) and the 'epic cycle (they) spread broadcast' by memorizing and telling 'their legendary store'.
Ferdowsi's biographer Nezami-ye Aruzi tells us that Ferdowsi based his work on the Middle Persian Pahlavi work, the Khvatay-Namak (the book of kings), a history of the kings of Persia complied under orders of Sassanian king Khosrow (Khusrau) I (531-579 CE). The Khvatay-namak was based on information gathered from Zoroastrian priests and the legendary accounts in the Avesta memorized by the priests. The Khvatay-namak could be work to which Ferdowsi refers when he talks about the paladin who gathered the epic cycles memorized by Zoroastrian priests (archmages, mobeds). While the Khvatay-namak was started during the reign of Khosrow (Khusrau) I, it is reputed to have been updated to include the stories of kings up to the fall of the Sassanian dynasty. There are no known copies of the Khvatay-namak in existence. In his prologue, Ferdowsi stated he needed to move quickly so that he could implement his mission to keep past legends and histories alive - before their imminent destruction.
Daqiqi
Abu Mansur Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Daqiqi Balkhi (935 or 942 - 980 CE) was a poet at the Tajik Samanid court in Eastern Iranian lands. The name Balkhi means from Balkh, a central Asian nation that spanned today's Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
Daqiqi (also Dakiki) wrote about a thousand verses on Zoroastrian history and beliefs before he was murdered by his servant. While outwardly a Muslim, Daqiqi was considered a Zoroastrian sympathizer if not a closet Zoroastrian, a dangerous affiliation in those fanatical times. A verse of Daqiqi reads:
Daqiqi chaar kheslat bar-gozida ast
Ba giti dar, ze khoobi-ha wo zeshti
Lab-e bijada rang o nala-e chang
May-e chun zang o kesh-e Zardushti
Translation:
Of all that's good or evil in the world,
Four things suffice to meet Daqiqi's needs.
Ruby-coloured lips, the harp's lament,
Blood-red wine and Zoroaster's creed.
(translation: Iraj Bashiri)
Daqiqi put the ancient Airanian legends to verse and wrote a thousand and eight verses before he was tragically murdered. These thousand lines are similar in scope and subject matter to the Middle Persian Ayadgar i Zareran, though Daqiqi's source is thought to be the Khvatay Namak (Xwadāy-nāmag). Significantly, Daqiqi had started his Shahnameh, not with the dawn of history, but with the Kayanian King Gushtasp's (Vishtasp's) patronage of Zarathushtra's religion.
Ferdowsi sought out and inserted Daqiqi-e Balkhi's one thousand and eight verses, beginning with the rule of King Gushtasp (Vishtasp), Gushtasp's acceptance of Zarathushtra's message, and ending with Arjasp's attack on Airan after Gushtasp imprisons his son Esfandiar. In a preface to the borrowed verses, Ferdowsi writes that in a dream, Daqiqi exhorted Ferdowsi to use these verses and in addition, to complete the tragic poet's unfinished mission to chronicle Zoroastrian and Aryan heritage.
Ferdowsi undertook his venture at a time when every effort was being made by some zealots to extinguish all memory of Zoroastrian and Aryan tradition. However, Ferdowsi was more circumspect in his approach and not as blatantly pro-Zoroastrian as Daqiqi. Some authors state that Daqiqi's most controversial verses were not included in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and have been lost.
The Writing and Language
Ferdowsi wrote the Shahnameh in Persian at a time when modern Persian was emerging from middle Persian Pahlavi admixed with a number of Arabic words. In his writing, Ferdowsi used authentic Persian while minimizing the use of Arabic words. In doing so, he established classical Persian as the language of great beauty and sophistication, a language that would supplant Arabic as the language of court literature in all Islamic regimes in the Indo-Iranian region.
As a result, when later manuscripts were written, the scribes replaced the older words with those that were current. They even resorted to editing the content.
While Ferdowsi pursued in detail the exploits of some of the leading characters of Sistan, he excluded other known epics, epics subsequent poets and authors included in their works. The most substantial of these are the Garshaspnama (also spelt Garshaspnamah / Garshasp Nama / Garshasp Namah / Garshaspnameh / Garshasp Nameh), composed by Asadi Tusi, a Khurasani compatriot of Ferdowsi's, about half a century after the Shahnameh, and the Barzunama. These and shorter epics were incorporated into some later copies of the Shahnameh, either in whole or in part.
Projects are underway to reconstruct Ferdowsi's original composition.
Manuscripts
There are several handwritten Shahnameh manuscripts in existence, some exquisitely illustrated with miniature paintings. However, none of them are Ferdowsi's original manuscript written in his own hand. The manuscripts that exist are those written by scribes, the earliest dating some two hundred years after Ferdowsi completed writing his epic.
The earliest handwritten manuscript in existence - which is incomplete - dates from 1217 CE and resides in the National Library (Biblioteca Nazionale) in Florence. The earliest known illustrated manuscript dates from c. 1300 CE. The scribes of these manuscripts must have had access to an earlier text that would have eventually have been copied from the original.
As far as we know, the earlier manuscripts had sponsors and all of these early manuscripts are different since their sponsors or scribes introduced changes. The problem of identifying Ferdowsi's original verses and the spurious ones occupies a few research teams. One project is devoted to reconstructing, as best as possible, Ferdowsi's original work.
At one time, it became traditional for Mongol Ilkhan Khans (1255 - 1335 CE), Timurid Sultans (1363 - 1506 CE) and Safavid Shahs (1502 - 1736 CE) to commission the production of a manuscript (and there was a school of art typical of each dynasty). These manuscripts are frequently known by their sponsors' names. The manuscripts are also known, sometimes infamously, by the names of their modern owners. During the times of the three dynasties noted above, there were two principle centres of art, Tabriz and Shiraz.
The following manuscripts have achieved some notoriety and are listed chronologically.
Great Mongol / Demotte Manuscript (Dispersed)
An elaborate and luxurious manuscript, the Great Mongol / Demotte manuscript is now broken up and dispersed as individual pages. It is from the 1330s Ilkhanid period - the dynastic period that followed Mongol rule. Known today as the Great Mongol Shahnameh, it was possibly commissioned by the vizier Ghiyath al-Din ibn (son of) Rashid al-Din of Tabriz (attributed by Oleg Grabar and Sheila Blair 1980; Blair 1989; Blair and Bloom 2001) between November 1335, when he organized the appointment of Arpa (r. 1335–36) as successor of Abu Sacid, and Ghiyath al-Din's death on May 3, 1336. A dating in the 1330s is widely accepted by most scholars (reference: Metropolitan Museum of Art).
The manuscript was prepared using ink, opaque watercolours on handmade paper.
The fate of the manuscript is an example of the avarice and destruction caused by individuals blinded by profit masquerading as art collectors. In the early twentieth century, Paris art dealer Georges Demotte (1877-1923) acquired the manuscript and when he could not get a satisfactory offer from a buyer, he took it apart (between 1910 and 1915), splitting some folios with illustrations on both sides and selling the resulting two leaves individually.
In those cases where both sides of a page featured illustrations, Demotte split the page and mounted each painting onto a new, fabricated folio, which he constructed by pasting with illustrated page segment to an unrelated text-only segment. This process which enabled Demotte to profit from the sale of two separate paintings, resulted in irreparable mutilation, the joining of unrelated pages, and dispersal of pages with incomplete text. When pages were damaged by this reckless quest for a quick profit, the salvaged images was pasted onto a folio commissioned by Demotte.
Today, 57 illustrations (A fifty-eighth illustration was destroyed in 1937 and is known only from a photograph) and several text pages are known to exist scattered among public and private collections including the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard University's Fogg Museum, and Worchester Museum. According to their research, Oleg Grabar and Sheila Blair, surmise the original manuscript probably consisted of two volumes of about 280 large folios and 190 illustrations. The frontispiece and colophon that might have revealed information on the patron, the calligrapher, and the date and place of production are lost, and it is therefore not known with any certainty, where and when the manuscript was produced.
Bayasanghori (Baysonqori) Manuscript (Intact)
The Bayasanghori (or Baysonqori) illuminated manuscript, resides at the Golestan Palace, Tehran, Iran, and is included in UNESCO's Memory of the World, register of cultural heritage items.
The patron of this manuscript was Prince Bayasanghor (Baysonqor) (1399-1433 CE), grandson of the founder of the Timurid dynasty, Timur (1336-1405 CE). The calligrapher of the manuscript was Maulana Jafar Tabrizi Bayasanghori (Baysonqori) and the artists were Mulla Alī and Amir Kalil. The binding was done by Maulana Qiam-al-Din.
The manuscript is in quarto format (38.26 cm), written in a minuscule Nasta'lip script on Chinese (Beijing) fawn-coloured hand-made paper from Khan Baligh. It consists of 700 pages with 31 lines of text per page and 21 illustrations (a far smaller number than the other two royal manuscripts discussed here). The manuscript is dated c.1430 CE. 22 unsigned water-colour illustrations adorn the manuscript. The outside of the covers are made from stamped and gold-plated leather with two lacquer-work borders. The inside of the covers are made from stamped leather.
The preface contains an illustration of Ferdowsi in discussion with the poets of Ghazna.
According to page nine of the manuscript's introduction, the manuscript was copied from several copies of the Shahnameh - copies that we now understand included legends penned by other poets who emulated Ferdowsi's style. As a result, the manuscript contains 58,000 verses making it one of the most voluminous of all the manuscripts. In the process the scribes also edited the language ostensibly to 'modernize' the language. The Bayasanghori (Baysonqori) manuscript served as the basis for subsequent manuscripts.
Tahmaspi / Houghton Manuscript (Dispersed)
The Tahmaspi (sometimes Tahmasbi) manuscript, known in literature as the Houghton manuscript, was perhaps commissioned and started in the reign of Shah Isma'il I, c 1522 CE (at the time when Tahmasp returned to Tabriz from Herat), continued by Shah Tahmasp I (1524-1576 CE), and presented to the Ottoman Sultan Murad III in 1576.
The manuscript was produced at Tabriz in northern Iran over a thirty-year period by a variety of calligraphers and illustrators such as Mir Mosavar, Sultan Mohammad, Aqa Mirak, Dust Mohammad, Mirza Ali, Mir Seyed Ali, Mozafar Ali, Abdolsamad, and their assistants. Of the illustrators, Sultan Mohammad is considered the foremost. His miniatures display an evolution of style from one painting to the next.
The manuscript was housed in the Ottoman Royal Library and possibly the Qajar Royal Library. At some point it was acquired by Edmond de Rothschild who took pains not to expose the manuscript to light, preserving the brightness of the inks and colours. Rothschild sold the manuscript in its entirety to Arthur Houghton, president of Corning Glass Works, in 1959. The Houghton Family is a prominent New England and upstate New York business family.
Soon after Houghton acquired the book, he proceeded to take apart the pages that contained 258 miniature paintings, much to the horror of many, with the intention of selling the illustrated pages individually at a later date.
He placed the individual pages on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, later donating 88 folios containing illustrations to the museum in order to reduce his tax liability (according to an article from Souren Melikian in Art and Auction magazine dated October 1994 quoted by Dr. Habibollah Ayatollahi).
In 1976, Houghton offered to sell the remaining pages to the Shah of Iran for US$20 million, an offer that the Shah refused. On November 16, 1976, Houghton had the folios auctioned at Christie's in London. A subsequent auction in 1988 saw fourteen folios sold with one folio selling for £253,000. In 2006, a page was sold by the auction house Sotheby's for 904,000 Euros (US$1.7 million) reputedly to the Aga Khan museum in Geneva, which acquired six folios.
[The Aga Khan museum also holds additional Shahnameh manuscript pages: 1. It has a folio from the Qavam al-Din manuscript produced in Shiraz by calligrapher Hassan b. Muhammad b. 'Ali Husaini al-Mausili in May 1341 CE. 2. A colophon and five illustrated folios from a 1482 CE manuscript (ex Demotte) produced in Shiraz by calligrapher Murshid b. 'Izz al-Din. 3. An illustrated folio from a manuscript sponsored by Sultan 'Ali Mirza Karkiya and produced by calligrapher Salik b. Sa'd in 1494 CE.]
The 118 folios that had not been sold by Houghton by the time of his death in 1990, were offered for sale by his foundation for Fr. 70 million. When the collection could not find a buyer at that price, Oliver Hoare, a British art dealer arranged an exchange of the folios with a painting, Lady No. 3 by Willem De Kooning (1952-53), owned by the Islamic Government of Iran, but one that the Iranian government considered lewd and had removed from public display (in 1989, one of De Kooning's paintings was sold at $18 million at an auction at Sotheby's).
English Translations
Warner, Arthur and Edmond Warner, The Shahnama of Firdausi, 9 vols. (London: Keegan Paul, 1905-1925). Complete English verse translation. Primary translation used on this web-site.
Zimmern, Helen (1846-1934), The Epic of Kings - Hero Tales of Ancient Persia (1883). Secondary translation used on this web-site.
Atkinson, James, Persian Literature, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan (1832). Secondary translation used on this web-site.
Davis, Dick, Stories from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi
Vol. 1, The Lion and the Throne, (Mage Publishers, 1998)
Vol. 2, Fathers and Sons, (Mage Publishers, 1998)
Vol. 3, Sunset of Empire, (Mage Publishers, 2003)
The Legend of Seyavash, (Penguin, 2001, Mage Publishers 2004) (abridged)
Levy, Reuben. The Epic of the Kings: Shah-Nama, the National Epic of Persia, (University of Chicago Press, 1967 & Mazda Publications, 1996) (abridged prose version of the epic's second half).
B.W. Robinson, The Persian Book of Kings. An epitome of the Shahnama of Firdawsi (London and New York, 2002) (a prose summary, with illustrations).
Spelling of the Names
There are various spellings for the name of the poet, his epic and the names of its characters. These spelling differences arise from the transliteration of the Persian alphabet to English and other European languages or phonetic variations. The names of the characters differ considerably depending on whether ancient or modern forms of the names are used. The number of Google search frequency results on the date of writing are as follows:
Ferdowsi - 221,000 (used here), Firdawsi- 130,000, Firdausi - 106,000, Firdousi - 41,200, Firdusi - 38,700, Firdowsi - 6,230, Ferdausi - 5,420, Ferdawsi - 2,020.
Shahnameh - 221,000 (used here), Shahnama - 103,000, "shah nameh" - 28,800, shahname - 25,600, "shah nama" - 9,650, shahnama - 7,860, "shah name" - 5,500, shanameh - 1,980, shaname - 1,860.
P2 : Shah Ismail II manuscript c 1577 CE ,Artist: Ali Asghar ,Khusraw Parviz and Bahram Chubin in combat
P3 : Facade to Ferdowsi's Mausoleum in Tus
P4 : Mongol manuscript folio 1330s Tabriz ,Sindukht Becoming Aware of Rudaba's Actions ,Arthur M. Sackler Gallery ,Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
P5 : Mongol manuscript folio 1330s Tabriz ,Isfandiyar's funeral , Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ,Joseph Pulitzer Bequest 1933
P6 : Bayasanghori (Baysonqori) manuscript folio c 1430 CE Tabriz ,Faramarz son of Rostam mourns the death of his father and of his uncle Zavareh.Gelstan Palace, Tehran
P7 : Tahmaspi or Houghton manuscript folio 308 v 1. Artist Dust Muhammad? Tabriz, c.1530. Auctioned Lot 43 10/15/1997 Sotheby's. Kay Khosrow fetes Rustam under the jewel-tree.
P8 : Tahmaspi or Houghton manuscript. Artist Sultan Muhammad Tabriz, c.1530. Hushang, grandson of Gayumars. Feast of Sadeh
The Shahnameh, Book of Kings, is an epic composed by the Iranian poet Hakim Abul-Qasim Mansur (later known as Ferdowsi Tusi), and completed around 1010 CE.
[Ferdowsi means 'from paradise', and is derived from the name Ferdous (cf. Avestan pairi-daeza, later para-diz then par-des or par-dos, arabized to fer-dos). Tusi means 'from Tus'. In the poet's case, the name Ferdowsi Tusi became a name and a title: The Tusi Poet from Paradise.]
The epic chronicles the legends and histories of Iranian (Aryan) kings from primordial times to the Arab conquest of Iran in the 7th century CE, in three successive stages: the mythical, the heroic or legendary, and the historic.
Ferdowsi began the composition of the Shahnameh's 50,000 couplets (bayts) each consisting of two hemistiches (misra), 62 stories and 990 chapters, a work several times the length of Homer's Iliad, in 977 CE, when eastern Iran was under Samanid rule. The Samanids had Tajik-Aryan affiliation and were sympathetic to preserving Aryan heritage.
It took Ferdowsi thirty three years to complete his epic, by which time the rule of eastern Iran had passed to the Turkoman Ghaznavids (who based themselves in the north-eastern province of Khorasan with Ghazni as their capital).
The Shahnameh was written in classical Persian when the language was emerging from its Middle Persian Pahlavi roots, and at a time when Arabic was the favoured language of literature. As such, Ferdowsi is seen as a national Iranian hero who re-ignited pride in Iranian culture and literature, and who established the Persian language as a language of beauty and sophistication. Ferdowsi wrote: "the Persian language is revived by this work."
The Poet Ferdowsi (c. 935 to 941 - 1020 to 1026 CE)
The earliest and perhaps most reliable account of Ferdowsi's life comes from Nezami-ye Aruzi, a 12th-century poet who visited Tus in 1116 or 1117 to collect information about Ferdowsi's life. According to Nezami-ye Aruzi, Ferdowsi Tusi was born into a family of landowners near the village of Tus in the Khorasan province of north-eastern Iran. Ferdowsi and his family were called Dehqan, also spelt Dehgan or Dehgān. Dehqan /Dehgan is now thought to mean landed, village settlers, urban and even farmer. However, Dehgan is also an name for the Parsiban, a group of Khorasani with Tajik roots (for further information see the section of Parsiban / Farsiwan in our page on Haroyu, Aria and Herat).
Ferdowsi married at the age of 28 and eight years after his marriage - in order to provide a dowry for his daughter - Ferdowsi started writing the Shahnameh, a project on which he spent some thirty three years of his life.
While Ferdowsi was composing the Shahnameh, Khorasan came under the rule of Sultan Mahmoud, a Turkoman Sunni Muslim and consolidator of the Ghaznavid dynasty. Ferdowsi sought the patronage of the sultan and wrote verses in his praise. The sultan, on the advice from his ministers, gave Ferdowsi an amount far smaller than Ferdowsi had requested and one that Ferdowsi considered insulting. He had a falling out with the sultan and fled to Mazandaran seeking the protection and patronage of the court of the Sepahbad Shahreyar, who, it is said, had lineage from rulers during the Zoroastrian-Sassanian era. In Mazandaran, Ferdowsi wrote a hundred satirical verses about Sultan Mahmoud, verses purchased by his new patron and then expunged from the Shahnameh's manuscript (to keep the peace perhaps). Nevertheless, the verses survived. An example:
Long years this Shahnameh I toiled to complete,
That the King might award me some recompense meet,
But naught save a heart wrung with grief and despair
Did I get from those promises empty as air!
Had the sire of the King been some Prince of renown,
My forehead would surely have been graced by a crown!
Were his mother a lady of high pedigree,
In silver and gold I'd have stood to the knee!
But, being by birth not a prince but a boor,
The praise of the noble he could not endure!
Ferdowsi returned to Tus to spend the closing years of his life forlorn. Notwithstanding the lack of royal patronage, he died proud and confident his work would make him immortal.
Ferdowsi's Sources
Khvatay-Namak
In the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi credits a paladin (see page 1 of the translations), who 'ransacked the earth' to keep alive the information gleaned from Zoroastrian priests (arch-magi or mobeds) and the 'epic cycle (they) spread broadcast' by memorizing and telling 'their legendary store'.
Ferdowsi's biographer Nezami-ye Aruzi tells us that Ferdowsi based his work on the Middle Persian Pahlavi work, the Khvatay-Namak (the book of kings), a history of the kings of Persia complied under orders of Sassanian king Khosrow (Khusrau) I (531-579 CE). The Khvatay-namak was based on information gathered from Zoroastrian priests and the legendary accounts in the Avesta memorized by the priests. The Khvatay-namak could be work to which Ferdowsi refers when he talks about the paladin who gathered the epic cycles memorized by Zoroastrian priests (archmages, mobeds). While the Khvatay-namak was started during the reign of Khosrow (Khusrau) I, it is reputed to have been updated to include the stories of kings up to the fall of the Sassanian dynasty. There are no known copies of the Khvatay-namak in existence. In his prologue, Ferdowsi stated he needed to move quickly so that he could implement his mission to keep past legends and histories alive - before their imminent destruction.
Daqiqi
Abu Mansur Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Daqiqi Balkhi (935 or 942 - 980 CE) was a poet at the Tajik Samanid court in Eastern Iranian lands. The name Balkhi means from Balkh, a central Asian nation that spanned today's Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
Daqiqi (also Dakiki) wrote about a thousand verses on Zoroastrian history and beliefs before he was murdered by his servant. While outwardly a Muslim, Daqiqi was considered a Zoroastrian sympathizer if not a closet Zoroastrian, a dangerous affiliation in those fanatical times. A verse of Daqiqi reads:
Daqiqi chaar kheslat bar-gozida ast
Ba giti dar, ze khoobi-ha wo zeshti
Lab-e bijada rang o nala-e chang
May-e chun zang o kesh-e Zardushti
Translation:
Of all that's good or evil in the world,
Four things suffice to meet Daqiqi's needs.
Ruby-coloured lips, the harp's lament,
Blood-red wine and Zoroaster's creed.
(translation: Iraj Bashiri)
Daqiqi put the ancient Airanian legends to verse and wrote a thousand and eight verses before he was tragically murdered. These thousand lines are similar in scope and subject matter to the Middle Persian Ayadgar i Zareran, though Daqiqi's source is thought to be the Khvatay Namak (Xwadāy-nāmag). Significantly, Daqiqi had started his Shahnameh, not with the dawn of history, but with the Kayanian King Gushtasp's (Vishtasp's) patronage of Zarathushtra's religion.
Ferdowsi sought out and inserted Daqiqi-e Balkhi's one thousand and eight verses, beginning with the rule of King Gushtasp (Vishtasp), Gushtasp's acceptance of Zarathushtra's message, and ending with Arjasp's attack on Airan after Gushtasp imprisons his son Esfandiar. In a preface to the borrowed verses, Ferdowsi writes that in a dream, Daqiqi exhorted Ferdowsi to use these verses and in addition, to complete the tragic poet's unfinished mission to chronicle Zoroastrian and Aryan heritage.
Ferdowsi undertook his venture at a time when every effort was being made by some zealots to extinguish all memory of Zoroastrian and Aryan tradition. However, Ferdowsi was more circumspect in his approach and not as blatantly pro-Zoroastrian as Daqiqi. Some authors state that Daqiqi's most controversial verses were not included in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and have been lost.
The Writing and Language
Ferdowsi wrote the Shahnameh in Persian at a time when modern Persian was emerging from middle Persian Pahlavi admixed with a number of Arabic words. In his writing, Ferdowsi used authentic Persian while minimizing the use of Arabic words. In doing so, he established classical Persian as the language of great beauty and sophistication, a language that would supplant Arabic as the language of court literature in all Islamic regimes in the Indo-Iranian region.
As a result, when later manuscripts were written, the scribes replaced the older words with those that were current. They even resorted to editing the content.
While Ferdowsi pursued in detail the exploits of some of the leading characters of Sistan, he excluded other known epics, epics subsequent poets and authors included in their works. The most substantial of these are the Garshaspnama (also spelt Garshaspnamah / Garshasp Nama / Garshasp Namah / Garshaspnameh / Garshasp Nameh), composed by Asadi Tusi, a Khurasani compatriot of Ferdowsi's, about half a century after the Shahnameh, and the Barzunama. These and shorter epics were incorporated into some later copies of the Shahnameh, either in whole or in part.
Projects are underway to reconstruct Ferdowsi's original composition.
Manuscripts
There are several handwritten Shahnameh manuscripts in existence, some exquisitely illustrated with miniature paintings. However, none of them are Ferdowsi's original manuscript written in his own hand. The manuscripts that exist are those written by scribes, the earliest dating some two hundred years after Ferdowsi completed writing his epic.
The earliest handwritten manuscript in existence - which is incomplete - dates from 1217 CE and resides in the National Library (Biblioteca Nazionale) in Florence. The earliest known illustrated manuscript dates from c. 1300 CE. The scribes of these manuscripts must have had access to an earlier text that would have eventually have been copied from the original.
As far as we know, the earlier manuscripts had sponsors and all of these early manuscripts are different since their sponsors or scribes introduced changes. The problem of identifying Ferdowsi's original verses and the spurious ones occupies a few research teams. One project is devoted to reconstructing, as best as possible, Ferdowsi's original work.
At one time, it became traditional for Mongol Ilkhan Khans (1255 - 1335 CE), Timurid Sultans (1363 - 1506 CE) and Safavid Shahs (1502 - 1736 CE) to commission the production of a manuscript (and there was a school of art typical of each dynasty). These manuscripts are frequently known by their sponsors' names. The manuscripts are also known, sometimes infamously, by the names of their modern owners. During the times of the three dynasties noted above, there were two principle centres of art, Tabriz and Shiraz.
The following manuscripts have achieved some notoriety and are listed chronologically.
Great Mongol / Demotte Manuscript (Dispersed)
An elaborate and luxurious manuscript, the Great Mongol / Demotte manuscript is now broken up and dispersed as individual pages. It is from the 1330s Ilkhanid period - the dynastic period that followed Mongol rule. Known today as the Great Mongol Shahnameh, it was possibly commissioned by the vizier Ghiyath al-Din ibn (son of) Rashid al-Din of Tabriz (attributed by Oleg Grabar and Sheila Blair 1980; Blair 1989; Blair and Bloom 2001) between November 1335, when he organized the appointment of Arpa (r. 1335–36) as successor of Abu Sacid, and Ghiyath al-Din's death on May 3, 1336. A dating in the 1330s is widely accepted by most scholars (reference: Metropolitan Museum of Art).
The manuscript was prepared using ink, opaque watercolours on handmade paper.
The fate of the manuscript is an example of the avarice and destruction caused by individuals blinded by profit masquerading as art collectors. In the early twentieth century, Paris art dealer Georges Demotte (1877-1923) acquired the manuscript and when he could not get a satisfactory offer from a buyer, he took it apart (between 1910 and 1915), splitting some folios with illustrations on both sides and selling the resulting two leaves individually.
In those cases where both sides of a page featured illustrations, Demotte split the page and mounted each painting onto a new, fabricated folio, which he constructed by pasting with illustrated page segment to an unrelated text-only segment. This process which enabled Demotte to profit from the sale of two separate paintings, resulted in irreparable mutilation, the joining of unrelated pages, and dispersal of pages with incomplete text. When pages were damaged by this reckless quest for a quick profit, the salvaged images was pasted onto a folio commissioned by Demotte.
Today, 57 illustrations (A fifty-eighth illustration was destroyed in 1937 and is known only from a photograph) and several text pages are known to exist scattered among public and private collections including the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard University's Fogg Museum, and Worchester Museum. According to their research, Oleg Grabar and Sheila Blair, surmise the original manuscript probably consisted of two volumes of about 280 large folios and 190 illustrations. The frontispiece and colophon that might have revealed information on the patron, the calligrapher, and the date and place of production are lost, and it is therefore not known with any certainty, where and when the manuscript was produced.
Bayasanghori (Baysonqori) Manuscript (Intact)
The Bayasanghori (or Baysonqori) illuminated manuscript, resides at the Golestan Palace, Tehran, Iran, and is included in UNESCO's Memory of the World, register of cultural heritage items.
The patron of this manuscript was Prince Bayasanghor (Baysonqor) (1399-1433 CE), grandson of the founder of the Timurid dynasty, Timur (1336-1405 CE). The calligrapher of the manuscript was Maulana Jafar Tabrizi Bayasanghori (Baysonqori) and the artists were Mulla Alī and Amir Kalil. The binding was done by Maulana Qiam-al-Din.
The manuscript is in quarto format (38.26 cm), written in a minuscule Nasta'lip script on Chinese (Beijing) fawn-coloured hand-made paper from Khan Baligh. It consists of 700 pages with 31 lines of text per page and 21 illustrations (a far smaller number than the other two royal manuscripts discussed here). The manuscript is dated c.1430 CE. 22 unsigned water-colour illustrations adorn the manuscript. The outside of the covers are made from stamped and gold-plated leather with two lacquer-work borders. The inside of the covers are made from stamped leather.
The preface contains an illustration of Ferdowsi in discussion with the poets of Ghazna.
According to page nine of the manuscript's introduction, the manuscript was copied from several copies of the Shahnameh - copies that we now understand included legends penned by other poets who emulated Ferdowsi's style. As a result, the manuscript contains 58,000 verses making it one of the most voluminous of all the manuscripts. In the process the scribes also edited the language ostensibly to 'modernize' the language. The Bayasanghori (Baysonqori) manuscript served as the basis for subsequent manuscripts.
Tahmaspi / Houghton Manuscript (Dispersed)
The Tahmaspi (sometimes Tahmasbi) manuscript, known in literature as the Houghton manuscript, was perhaps commissioned and started in the reign of Shah Isma'il I, c 1522 CE (at the time when Tahmasp returned to Tabriz from Herat), continued by Shah Tahmasp I (1524-1576 CE), and presented to the Ottoman Sultan Murad III in 1576.
The manuscript was produced at Tabriz in northern Iran over a thirty-year period by a variety of calligraphers and illustrators such as Mir Mosavar, Sultan Mohammad, Aqa Mirak, Dust Mohammad, Mirza Ali, Mir Seyed Ali, Mozafar Ali, Abdolsamad, and their assistants. Of the illustrators, Sultan Mohammad is considered the foremost. His miniatures display an evolution of style from one painting to the next.
The manuscript was housed in the Ottoman Royal Library and possibly the Qajar Royal Library. At some point it was acquired by Edmond de Rothschild who took pains not to expose the manuscript to light, preserving the brightness of the inks and colours. Rothschild sold the manuscript in its entirety to Arthur Houghton, president of Corning Glass Works, in 1959. The Houghton Family is a prominent New England and upstate New York business family.
Soon after Houghton acquired the book, he proceeded to take apart the pages that contained 258 miniature paintings, much to the horror of many, with the intention of selling the illustrated pages individually at a later date.
He placed the individual pages on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, later donating 88 folios containing illustrations to the museum in order to reduce his tax liability (according to an article from Souren Melikian in Art and Auction magazine dated October 1994 quoted by Dr. Habibollah Ayatollahi).
In 1976, Houghton offered to sell the remaining pages to the Shah of Iran for US$20 million, an offer that the Shah refused. On November 16, 1976, Houghton had the folios auctioned at Christie's in London. A subsequent auction in 1988 saw fourteen folios sold with one folio selling for £253,000. In 2006, a page was sold by the auction house Sotheby's for 904,000 Euros (US$1.7 million) reputedly to the Aga Khan museum in Geneva, which acquired six folios.
[The Aga Khan museum also holds additional Shahnameh manuscript pages: 1. It has a folio from the Qavam al-Din manuscript produced in Shiraz by calligrapher Hassan b. Muhammad b. 'Ali Husaini al-Mausili in May 1341 CE. 2. A colophon and five illustrated folios from a 1482 CE manuscript (ex Demotte) produced in Shiraz by calligrapher Murshid b. 'Izz al-Din. 3. An illustrated folio from a manuscript sponsored by Sultan 'Ali Mirza Karkiya and produced by calligrapher Salik b. Sa'd in 1494 CE.]
The 118 folios that had not been sold by Houghton by the time of his death in 1990, were offered for sale by his foundation for Fr. 70 million. When the collection could not find a buyer at that price, Oliver Hoare, a British art dealer arranged an exchange of the folios with a painting, Lady No. 3 by Willem De Kooning (1952-53), owned by the Islamic Government of Iran, but one that the Iranian government considered lewd and had removed from public display (in 1989, one of De Kooning's paintings was sold at $18 million at an auction at Sotheby's).
English Translations
Warner, Arthur and Edmond Warner, The Shahnama of Firdausi, 9 vols. (London: Keegan Paul, 1905-1925). Complete English verse translation. Primary translation used on this web-site.
Zimmern, Helen (1846-1934), The Epic of Kings - Hero Tales of Ancient Persia (1883). Secondary translation used on this web-site.
Atkinson, James, Persian Literature, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan (1832). Secondary translation used on this web-site.
Davis, Dick, Stories from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi
Vol. 1, The Lion and the Throne, (Mage Publishers, 1998)
Vol. 2, Fathers and Sons, (Mage Publishers, 1998)
Vol. 3, Sunset of Empire, (Mage Publishers, 2003)
The Legend of Seyavash, (Penguin, 2001, Mage Publishers 2004) (abridged)
Levy, Reuben. The Epic of the Kings: Shah-Nama, the National Epic of Persia, (University of Chicago Press, 1967 & Mazda Publications, 1996) (abridged prose version of the epic's second half).
B.W. Robinson, The Persian Book of Kings. An epitome of the Shahnama of Firdawsi (London and New York, 2002) (a prose summary, with illustrations).
Spelling of the Names
There are various spellings for the name of the poet, his epic and the names of its characters. These spelling differences arise from the transliteration of the Persian alphabet to English and other European languages or phonetic variations. The names of the characters differ considerably depending on whether ancient or modern forms of the names are used. The number of Google search frequency results on the date of writing are as follows:
Ferdowsi - 221,000 (used here), Firdawsi- 130,000, Firdausi - 106,000, Firdousi - 41,200, Firdusi - 38,700, Firdowsi - 6,230, Ferdausi - 5,420, Ferdawsi - 2,020.
Shahnameh - 221,000 (used here), Shahnama - 103,000, "shah nameh" - 28,800, shahname - 25,600, "shah nama" - 9,650, shahnama - 7,860, "shah name" - 5,500, shanameh - 1,980, shaname - 1,860.
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