15 Facts About Shahnameh

The Shahnameh is a monument of poetry and historiography, being mainly the poetical recast of what Ferdowsi, his contemporaries, and his predecessors regarded as the account of Iran's ancient history.

Almost two-thirds of the Shahnameh is devoted to the age of heroes, extending from Manuchehr's reign until the conquest of Alexander the Great.

Shahnameh's successors were his son Zal and Zal's son Rostam, the bravest of the brave, and then Faramarz.

Shahnameh'storians note that the theme of regicide and the incompetence of kings embedded in the epic did not sit well with the Iranian monarchy.

Some experts believe the main reason the Modern Persian language today is more or less the same language as that of Ferdowsi's time over 1000 years ago is due to the very existence of works like the Shahnameh, which have had lasting and profound cultural and linguistic influence.

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In other words, the Shahnameh itself has become one of the main pillars of the modern Persian language.

Browne has claimed that Ferdowsi purposefully avoided Arabic vocabulary, this claim has been challenged by modern scholarship, specifically Mohammed Moinfar, who has noted that there are numerous examples of Arabic words in the Shahnameh which are effectively synonyms for Persian words previously used in the text.

Nezami-e Aruzi reports that the final edition of the Shahnameh sent to the court of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni was prepared in seven volumes.

The Turanians of Shahnameh are an Iranian people representing Iranian nomads of the Eurasian Steppes and have no relationship to the culture of the Turks.

Specifically in India, through the Shahnameh, they felt themselves to be the last outpost tied to the civilized world by the thread of Iranianism.

The Shahnameh is considered by many to be the most important piece of work in Persian literature.

The Baysonghori Shahnameh, an illuminated manuscript copy of the work, is included in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register of cultural heritage items.

The "Great Mongol" or Demotte Shahnameh, produced during the reign of the Ilkhanid Sultan Abu Sa'id, is one of the most illustrative and important copies of the Shahnameh.

The 1217 Florence manuscript is one of the earliest known copies of the Shahnameh, predating the Moghul invasion and the following destruction of important libraries and manuscript collections.

Only known Arabic translation of the Shahnameh was done in c 1220 by al-Fath bin Ali al-Bondari, a Persian scholar from Isfahan and at the request of the Ayyubid ruler of Damascus Al-Mu'azzam Isa.