Abolqasem Ferdowsi (932 - 1025 AD), the Shahnama (Book of Kings)

Abolqasem Ferdowsi (932 - 1025 AD), the Shahnama (Book of Kings)

Nothing in Western literature quite prepares us for the Shahnama. We call it an epic because it is a long poem – some fifty thousand

couplets – and is filled with heroic tales that are drawn from Iran’s history and mythology. Epic is the only descriptive term we

have that seems to fit such a work. Yet for us "epic" really means Homer and the Homeric tradition – all those poems from Virgil’s

Aeneid to Milton's Paradise Lost that were written in conscious emulation of the Odyssey and the Iliad, or which, like The Song of

Roland or Beowulf, celebrate a particular historic moment or a "heroic" way of life. The Shahnama is a very different poem from any

of these, and it developed independently from the Homeric tradition. It does not begin "in the midst of things" but with the creation

of the world and the appearance of the first shah. It lacks the elaborate celestial machinery of gods and goddesses that one finds

other epic traditions, from the Homer to Gilgamesh in the ancient Near East, to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in India. It is a

monotheistic epic like Paradise Lost, but its focus on the life of the royal court makes it seem closer to the tales of King Arthur and

the knights of the round table than to Milton’s great poem. It contains not one story but many, not a single climactic event, but a

multitude of them, and not one hero but a long sequence of heroes and heroic princes. Rostam, who is the last and greatest of a

family of heroes from the Iranian province of Sistan, and who dominates many of its finest stories, is no more than an off stage

presence in other tales. He also dies when the poem is only two thirds finished. The events in Gilgamesh, Homer and the European

epics are tailored to the limits of a single human life, but the events of the Shahnama stretch across many generations and a single

hero may live for centuries.

Some of the stories that make up the Shahnama can be traced back well before the coming of Islam to at least the time of Cyrus and

Darius some 2500 years ago. Other stories from later times were added to these and all were gathered together into comprehensive

collections from time to time. Late in the reign of the Sasanians (third to seventh centuries AD), the last pre-Islamic Iranian dynasty

to rule in Iran, a chronicle was compiled at the court and called the khuday namag or "Book of Kings". The orignal of this work has

been lost, but Arabic translations of portions of it survive in the work of early Arab historians. During the first two centuries of the

Islamic period, Iran’s rulers were Arab and interested only in Arabic culture. When an Iranian Muslim dynasty, the Samanids (819

- 1005), returned to power in Central Asia, interest in the national epic of Iran revived as well. Once more the court ordered that

the old stories be gathered into a single chronicle, in prose. When it was complete they sought a poet to turn this prose into verse.

The first likely candidate, Daqiqi, was killed by one of his slaves after he had completed only two thousand verse (later

incorporated into the finished work) and so the way was opened for Abolqasem Ferdowsi.

Ferdowsi was consciously trying to make his poetic version a vehicle for preserving Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage. He ends his tale by

saying that he has given new life to stories that had begun to be forgotten. He also assumed that in giving poetic life to these tales

he was assuring the survival of his won name as well.

And when this famous book shall reach its end,

Throughout the land my praises will be heard.

From this day on I shall not die, but live,

For I’ll have sown my words both far and wide.

In this he was successful beyond his wildest dreams. Since Ferdowsi completed the Shahnama it has remained a work of central

importance in the Iranian cultural tradition.

The events narrated in the first two-thirds of the Shahnama consist of heroic and romantic tales that belong to a mythical or

legendary time. In the last third the tales are peopled with figures from historical times. The bridge between the two is a series of

episodes from a fictional biography of Alexander the Great, who conquered all of present day Iran and parts of Central Asia and

North India in the fourth century BC. This is followed by sequence of similarly fictionalized accounts of the rulers of the Parthian

and Sassanian dynasties (247 BC. - 651 A. D.) who ruled in Iran between the time of Alexander’s death and the rise of Islam. The

style of presentation is consistent throughout the whole of the poem in that historical figures and events are presented as the stuff

of myth and legend.

In the world of the Shahnama, humankind seems to have existed before the first shah, but as an undifferentiated species. The

formation of human society required the shaping presence of a divinely appointed ruler. Other shahs, most notably the wise and

just Jamshid, provided human society with those gifts – fire, tools, agriculture, and the various crafts – that raise men and women

above the level of beasts. In other traditions these gifts that distinguish and sustain human society are gifts from the gods. In the

Shahnama it is Iran’s shahs who provide them, or, rather, it is through them that Yazdan, the sole God of pre-Islamic Iranian

religious belief, gives them to mankind. Indeed, while there are a number of recurrent themes in the Shahnama, such as the

immortality of noble deeds, the malignancy and inevitability of fate, and the persistent hostility and envy of Iran’s neighbors, the

theme that underlies all of these is that God prefers Iran to other nations and sustains it through the institution of the shah. So long

as His chosen shah sits upon the throne, Iran will endure. When Shah Yazdegerd III is slain in 652 AD, the Iran of the Shahnama

comes to an end. Other epics use a single dominant hero, like Odysseus, Aeneas, or Roland, or a single climactic event, such as the

destruction of Troy, the founding of Rome or the defeat of the Saracens, to provide dramatic unity. In the Shahnama it is the

enduring institution of monarchy that stitches all its stories together.

Although the Divinity’s support for Iranian monarchy is a central constant of the Shahnama, its ideology is not a naïve and

enthusiastic monarchism. Ferdowsi was not a panegyrist who presented idealizations of the ruler for the admiration of the royal

sponsors and their followers. He was as realistic about the limitations of individual monarchs as was Shakespeare about England’s

kings. Many of the greatest tales in the epic are as much concerned with the dilemmas of the monarchical state as they are its

inevitability. The Sohráb illustrates this by showing how God favors a foolish shah, Kay Kavus, who repeatedly and recklessly

endangers himself and his people over a noble hero, Rostam, who as repeatedly rescues the nation from the shah’s folly.

The religion of the Shahnama is Zoroastrianism, but a Zoroastrianism that has been stripped of its fire temples, rituals and prayers.

Ferdowsi was a Muslim as were his patron, Soltan Mahmud of Ghazna (d. 1030), and the members of his court. As a consequence

either he or his sources have passed the stories of the Shahnama through a filter, eliminating what would have been most offensive

to Muslim sensibilities. What remains is a vague but persistent dualism in which the powers of good, Ahura Mazda, and evil,

Ahriman, are in perpetual conflict. Rostam and Kay Kavus pray to the supreme god, Izad or Yazdan, (Creator and Keeper of the

World) who Zoroastrians believe presides over the struggle between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. Ultimately Yazdan will give

victory to good, but in the course of the Shahnama it is Ahriman’s power that increases. The shahs who rule become progressively

less worthy and "hunchbacked fate" spreads ruin and destruction where he will. The poem also ends with the conquest of the

Arabs and Islam, a crushing defeat for Zoroastrian Iran.

Persian language

Persian belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and has strong similarities to the major languages of Europe–the words

for father, mother and brother, for instance are pedar, madar, and baradar. Old Persian, one of the court languages of Cyrus and

Darius, was a contemporary of Sanskrit, which it closely resembled. Middle Persian was an Iranian language of Central Asia and

the Iranian plateau that had wide currency from the time of Alexander to the rise of Islam. Modern Persian, which evolved in the

Islamic period, is a further development of Middle Persian grammar and syntax that contains a large vocabulary of Arabic. The

language of the Shahnama is a slightly archaized form of this language. That is, it is largely free of Arabic loan words and retains

some Middle Persian vocabulary. Since the ninth century Modern Persian has been written in a modified form of the Arabic

alphabet.

Persian and its literature first came to the West as a result of the European conquest of India. For centuries Central Asian Muslims

whose literary and administrative language was Persian ruled in India. When European merchants and adventurers first became

interested in India in the seventeenth century they learned Persian in order to trade and rule. Then as now the principal texts for

teaching the language were literary and many of those who learned Persian for practical reasons came to value it as a source of

pleasure and a focus of scholarship. One of the principal fruits of this scholarship was the "discovery" of the Shahnama, or "Book of

Kings" and its translation into the major languages of Europe. In the nineteenth century the English rulers replaced Persian with

English as the language of education and administration, but Persian continued as a major language until well into the twentieth

century.

Further Reading: The only complete translation of the Book of Kings into English verse is that of Arthur George and Edmond

Warner, The Sháhnáma of Firdausi. 9 vols. (London, 1905-25) Unfortunately, it is available only in large research libraries. There is

also a one volume prose translation by Reuben Levy that summarizes many passages very briefly and skips others altogether

(Chicago, 1967). Besides the present translation of Sohrab, there are modern poetic versions of two other stories from the Shahnama

Dick Davis’s, The Legend of Seyavash (Penguin Classics. New York 1992), and Jerome W. Clinton's, In the Dragon's Claws:The Story of

Rostam and Esfandiyar(Mage Books. August 1999). Davis has also written the best study of the Shahnama in English, Epic and

Sedition: the Case of the Shahnama. (University of Arkansas Press, 1992). There is an extended discussion of Sohrab in "The Tragedy

of Sohrab," by Jerome W. Clinton, (Logos Islamikos/Studia Islamica, edited by Roger M. Savory and Dionisius A. Agius. Pontifical

Institute of Medieval Studies: 1984, pages 63-71) Every literary history of Iran contains a chapter or so on Ferdowsi and the

Shahnama, most recently, Persian Literature, edited by Ehsan Yarshater (Columbia Lectures on Iranian studies: no. 3. Persian

Heritage Foundation, New York: 1988).

Princeton Islamic MSS.,

Third Series, no. 310.

folio 1, side 2

Enthronement of

Sulaiman

folio 2, side 1

Enthronement of Bilqis

folio 22, side 1

Zahhak brought

before Faridun

folio 38, side 1

Zal meets Rudabah

folio 54, side 1

Rustam catches

Rakhsh

folio 62, side 2

Rustam seventh feat:

Cuts Hand and Leg

from White Div

folio 77, side 2

Rustam Stabs Suhrab

folio 95, side 1

Piran visits

Siyavashgird

folio 110, side 2

Afrasiyab, in pursuit of

Kay Khusraw, meets

Piran

folio 127, side 2

Piran meets Bahram

folio 132, side 2

Rustam subdues

Bazur Turanian wizard

folio 142, side 2

Rustam captures

Kamus, kills him

folio 149, side 2

Rustam pulls Khaqan

of China from

elephant by lasso

folio 154, side 2

Puladvand lifts Giv,

Tus from their saddles

folio 167, side 1

Rustam dressed as

merchant before Piran

folio 175, side 1

Human challenges

Iranian Champions

folio 179, side 1

Bizhan slays Nastihan

folio 185, side 1

Giv battles Piran

folio 193, side 2

Kay Khusraw has

Guruy Killed

folio 202, side 1

Kay Khusraw

encounters Ustugila,

Ila, Burzu'ila

folio 212, side 2

Kay Khusraw sees

marvels of sea

folio 222, side 2

Kay Khusraw makes

appointments, gives

up throne

folio 223, side 1

Luhrasp enthroned

folio 229, side 1

Gushtasp plays polo

before Caesar

folio 238, side 2

Isfandiyar kills

Bidirafsh

folio 246, side 1

Isfandiyar lassoes

Turanian Gurgsar

folio 252, side 1

Isfandiyar disguised

as merchant before

Arjasp

folio 263, side 1

Rustam debates

Isfandiyar

folio 268, side 1

Rustam shoots

double-pointed arrow

in Isfandiyar eyes

folio 273, side 1

Rustam slays Shaghad

then dies

folio 278, side 2

Darab receives crown

folio 291, side 1

Sikandar goes on

pilgrimage to Ka'bah

folio 296, side 2

Sikandar kills dragon

folio 305, side 1

Ardishir arrives at the

court of Ardavan

folio 312, side 1

Ardishir recognizes

Shapur during polo

game

folio 321, side 2

Ta'ir beheaded before

Shapur

folio 329, side 2

Bahram Gur hunts in

company of Azadah

folio 336, side 2

Bahram Gur hunts

lions

folio 344, side 2

Bahram Gur hunts

onager

folio 352, side 2

Bahram Gur wrestles

before Shangul

folio 361, side 1

Qubad on the throne

set up for him by his

brother

folio 368, side 2

Nushirvan receives

Gilan

folio 392, side 1

Talkhand Despairs

and Dies

folio 400, side 2

Nushirvan besieging

the Byzantine fortress

of Saqila

folio 411, side 2

Bahram Chubinah

defeats, kills Savah

folio 416, side 2

Khusraw Parviz visits

Shirin in her castle

folio 422, side 2

Khusraw Parviz,

Bahram Chubinah

dispute kingship

folio 437, side 1

Bahram Chubinah

slays Kut Ruman

folio 452, side 2

Khusraw Parviz visits

Shirin in her castle

folio 473, side 2

Royal Hunt

folio 474, side 1

Royal Hunt