The Life of Ferdowsi

This is the story of the life and the works of the great Persian poet Ferdowsi.

Ferdowsi (also called Firdausi or Firdusi) is a name meaning Heavenly One. Ferdowsi’s real name was Abul Qasim Mansur.¹ He was a famous Persian poet and author of the Shah-nameh ("Book of Kings"), the Persian national epic. He gave it its final and enduring poetic form, although the poem is based on an earlier prose version. Ferdowsi was born in a village near the ancient city of Toos in Persia. During the centuries many legends have been told around the poet's name, but very little is known about the real facts of his life. The only reliable source is given by a man named Nezami-ye 'Aruzi, who was a 12th-century historian.²

According to Nezami, Ferdowsi was a landowner. He had only one child, a daughter. Even in his own time, Ferdowsi was regarded as a follower of Zoroastrianism who had spent his life in praising ancient Iranian infidels (garbakan) and accordingly did not deserve burial among the Moslems. Other sources, however, agree that the family of Ferdowsi followed Islam, and there are indications that they were of Shiite branch.³

Shahnameh contains 60,000 rhyming couplets, making it more than seven times the length of Homer's Iliad. It is based mainly on a prose work of the same name compiled in the poet's early manhood in his native Toos. This prose Shah-nameh was in turn and for the most part the translation of a work written in the Pahlavi language (Middle Persian) and was called the Khvatay-namak.⁴ The Shah-nameh is a history of the kings of Persia from mythical times, but it also contained additional material continuing the story to the overthrow of the Sasanians by the Arabs in the middle of the 7th century A.D. The poem deals first with the legendary Persian kings: Gayumart; Hoshang; Tahmuras; and the most famous of the group, Jamshid, who reigned for 500 years.⁵ Following this happy period came the evil rule of the Arab Dahhák. The epic also contains an introductory eulogy of Sultan Mahmud of Ghaznî, to whom the work is dedicated.⁶

The first to try and recount the history of pre-Islamic and legendary Persia was Daqiqi, a poet at the court of the Samanids. These verses, which deal with the rise of the prophet Zoroaster, were afterward continued by Ferdowsi. The Shah-nameh was finally completed in the year 1010. After Ferdowsi completed the Shah-nameh, he settled in Baghdâd, where he composed another epic of 9,000 couplets called “Yusuf and Zuleikha”. The work is an Arabic version of the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife.⁷

In his old age Firdawsi retired to his native town, where, according to legend, he received Mahmud's forgiveness just before his death. Nezami does not mention the date of Ferdowsi's death, but it is almost certain that he lived to be more than 80 years old.⁸

The language of the great poem is Persian with only the slightest influence of Arabic. ⁹

The real aims of Ferdowsi are reflected in his Shah-nameh. He hoped:¹⁰

“to revive and strengthen Iranian nationalism and immortalize his own name by preserving in a most moving and melodious style of epic poetry the memory of those who shaped Iranian history and defended the Iranian heritage. He intended to illustrate the charm and appeal of the Persian culture and language in an age when some of the Iranians expressed the belief that the only tongue worthy of scholars and poets was the language of the Arab conquerors of Iran. So he intended to revive Iranian dreams and fulfill his own ideals.”¹¹

In short, “he desired to keep alive in the hearts of his people the faith of their ancestors and the glories of their deeds so that the Persians would not forget their heritage.”¹²

The Persians regard Ferdowsi as the greatest of their poets. For nearly a thousand years they have continued to read and to listen to recitations from his masterwork, the Shah-nameh, in which the Persian national epic found its final and enduring form.¹³