Abul-Qasem Ferdowsi Tusi, Firdawsi or Ferdowsi, 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.
22 Facts About Ferdowsi
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Ferdowsi is celebrated as one of the most influential figures of Persian literature and one of the greatest in the history of literature.
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Ferdowsi was born into a family of Iranian 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.
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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 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.
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Ferdowsi received generous patronage from the Samanid prince Mansur and completed the first version of the Shahnameh in 994.
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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.
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Ferdowsi was buried in his own garden, burial in the cemetery of Tus having been forbidden by a local cleric.
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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.
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Ferdowsi was in the bath house when he received the reward.
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Ferdowsi fled to Khorasan, having first written a satire on Mahmud, and spent most of the remainder of his life in exile.
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Ferdowsi's Shahnameh is the most popular and influential national epic in Iran and other Persian-speaking nations.
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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.
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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.
21.
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.
22.
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad is a university established in 1949 that takes its name from Ferdowsi.