شاهنامه

What it means / Where it is

شاهنامه (shâh-nâme) means “the Book of Kings.” It is the long epic poem written by فردوسی (ferdowsi) around the year 1000 CE, finished after roughly thirty years of work. The poem runs to about 50,000 couplets and covers the kings, heroes, and wars of the Iranian world from the first mythological king down to the fall of the Sasanian empire to the Arab conquest in the seventh century.

Cultural-historical context

The Shahnameh is the cultural pillar of Iranian identity in a way that has no clean Western equivalent. It is older than most of the buildings still standing in Iran, and it shaped the way Iranians, Tajiks, Afghans, and large parts of Central Asia talk about kingship, justice, betrayal, fathers and sons, foreigners, and the land itself. Children grow up with stories from it the way English-speaking children grow up with fairy tales, except the stories are in poetry and the poetry is from a single author.

Its central hero is رستم (rostam), the giant warrior of Zabol, whose adventures fill more pages than any other figure. The episode of رستم و سهراب (rostam-o sohrâb), in which Rostam unknowingly kills his own son in single combat, is so well known that Iranians use “the story of Rostam and Sohrab” as shorthand for any tragic father-son misunderstanding.

For centuries the Shahnameh lived as a spoken text as much as a written one. The tradition of نقالی (naqqâli), in which a performer recites and acts out episodes in coffeehouses with stylized gestures and a long stick used as a prop, kept the poem alive among people who could not read. UNESCO recognized naqqâli as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2011, by which point the practice had nearly died out and was being deliberately revived.

How to use it

• شاهنامه فردوسی (shâh-nâme-ye ferdowsi) “Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh”
• شاهنامه می‌خواندم (shâh-nâme mikhândam) “I was reading the Shahnameh”
• قهرمان شاهنامه رستمه (qahremân-e shâh-nâme rostame) “The hero of the Shahnameh is Rostam”

The poem also gave Persian some of its most quotable lines. توانا بود هر که دانا بود (tavânâ bovad har ke dânâ bovad), “powerful is the one who is wise,” is the kind of line you see on classroom walls. Whatever a reader’s politics or religion, the Shahnameh is treated as common property. Disagreeing about it is allowed; ignoring it is not.

The Shahnameh has also produced one of the great traditions of Persian manuscript painting. Royal copies commissioned by the Timurid, Safavid, and Mughal courts contain some of the most prized miniatures in world art, including the so-called Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh, painted in Tabriz in the sixteenth century. Pages from those manuscripts now sit in major museums from Tehran to New York to Geneva, often as the most-visited Persian object in the building. The poem became, over time, both a literary text and a visual canon.

References

• Dehkhoda
• Vajehyab
• Encyclopaedia Iranica