1. Abu'l-Qasem Ferdowsi Tusi was a Persian poet and the author of Shahnameh, which is one of the world's longest epic poems created by a single poet, and the greatest epic of Persian-speaking countries.
24 Facts About Ferdowsi
1. 2.
Ferdowsi is celebrated as one of the most influential figures of Persian literature and one of the greatest in the history of literature.
3.
Ferdowsi was born into a family of Persian landowners in 940 in the village of Paj, near the city of Tus, in the Khorasan region of the Samanid Empire, which is located in the present-day Razavi Khorasan province of northeastern Iran.
4.
Ferdowsi had a son, who died at the age of 37, and was mourned by the poet in an elegy which he inserted into the Shahnameh.
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Ferdowsi grew up in Tus, a city under the control of one of these dynasties, the Samanids, who claimed descent from the Sassanid general Bahram Chobin.
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Samanid rulers were patrons of such important Persian poets as Rudaki and Daqiqi, and Ferdowsi followed in the footsteps of these writers.
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Ferdowsi was a Shiite Muslim, although varying views exist on what Shiite sect he belonged to.
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Ferdowsi saw God's creation as the only evidence of His existence and believed everything in life to be the product of God's will.
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Ferdowsi began work on the Shahnameh around 977, intending it as a continuation of the work of his fellow poet Daqiqi, who had been assassinated by his slave.
10.
Ferdowsi received generous patronage from the Samanid prince Mansur and completed the first version of the Shahnameh in 994.
11.
The later sections of the Shahnameh have passages which reveal Ferdowsi's fluctuating moods: in some he complains about old age, poverty, illness and the death of his son; in others, he appears happier.
12.
Ferdowsi was buried in his own garden, burial in the cemetery of Tus having been forbidden by a local cleric who considered him a heretic.
13.
Ferdowsi planned to use it to rebuild the dykes in his native Tus.
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However, the courtier whom Mahmud had entrusted with the money despised Ferdowsi, regarding him as a heretic, and he replaced the gold coins with silver.
15.
Ferdowsi was in the bath house when he received the reward.
16.
Ferdowsi fled to Khorasan, having first written a satire on Mahmud, and spent most of the remainder of his life in exile.
17.
Ferdowsi's Shahnameh is the most popular and influential national epic in Iran and other Persian-speaking countries.
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The Shahnameh is the only surviving work by Ferdowsi regarded as indisputably genuine.
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Ferdowsi is one of the undisputed giants of Persian literature.
20.
Ferdowsi has a unique place in Persian history because of the strides he made in reviving and regenerating the Persian language and cultural traditions.
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Ferdowsi's works are cited as a crucial component in the persistence of the Persian language, as those works allowed much of the tongue to remain codified and intact.
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Ferdowsi in fact was a motivation behind many future Persian figures.
23.
In 1934, Reza Shah set up a ceremony in Mashhad, Khorasan, celebrating a thousand years of Persian literature since the time of Ferdowsi, titled "Ferdowsi Millennial Celebration", inviting notable European as well as Iranian scholars.
24.
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad is a university established in 1949 that takes its name from Ferdowsi.