Ferdowsi
c. 940 to c. 1020, Tus
The Book of Kings. A people’s memory, kept in verse.
About Ferdowsi
Ferdowsi was born in 940 in the village of Paj, near Tus in Khorasan, in what is now Iran. He gave about thirty five years of his life to one book, the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, and finished it on 8 March 1010. It was presented to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni.
The Shahnameh tells the story of Iran from its first king to the end of the Sasanian empire, in Persian, in the rhyming couplets of the epic.
His son is said to have died at thirty seven, when Ferdowsi himself was sixty seven and the book was still unfinished. He kept writing, and the Shahnameh carries the father’s grief alongside the kings’ stories.
The epic is also where several of the year’s Persian festivals come from. Its first fire, found in the reign of the king Hushang, is the origin the poem gives for Sadeh, and its stories sit beside Norooz, Mehregan and Yalda in the Hamdam Roots tab, for readers with a Persian connection.
He died around 1020, in Tus. Arthur and Edmond Warner translated the whole Shahnameh into English verse in nine volumes between 1905 and 1925. Ganjoor holds the Persian, and the app links each verse to it.
توانا بُوَد هر که دانا بُوَد
ز دانش، دل پیر، بُرنا بود
Whoever knows is strong. Through knowing, even an old heart grows young again.