Firdawsi
c. 940 CE–c. 1025 CE · Tus
Abu al-Qasim Firdawsi (Ferdowsi) was a Persian poet of Khurasan, in the northeast of present-day Iran, remembered as the author of the Shahnameh ("Book of Kings"), the roughly 50,000-couplet verse epic that gathers the legends and history of Iran from its mythical first kings to the Arab conquest. Exact dates are uncertain and traditional: he is generally placed born around 940 CE near Tus and dead around 1020-1025. He came from the dehqan class — the old Iranian landed gentry who preserved pre-Islamic Persian tradition — which helps explain his lifelong project of saving that heritage in his own tongue.
Firdawsi seems to have worked on the Shahnameh for some thirty-five years, building on an earlier prose compilation; a completed version is dated to 1010. He dedicated the finished work to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, by then ruler of Khurasan. The famous stories that he traveled to Ghazna, quarreled with the court, and was cheated of his reward are later legend, not documented history; scholars treat the poet-and-patron relationship as largely traditional.
He is widely described as a Shia Muslim, though which branch — Zaydi, Ismaili, or Twelver — is debated; some scholars read him chiefly as a monotheist with a strong Persian patriotic voice rather than a sectarian one. Later tradition holds he was refused burial in the town cemetery and laid to rest in his own garden in Tus, where his mausoleum stands today.
Did you know?
More than thirty years on a single poem
The Persian poet Firdawsi (c. 940–1020) spent more than three decades — from about 977 to its completion in 1010 — composing the Shahnameh ("Book of Kings"), an epic of roughly 50,000 rhymed couplets and one of the longest poems ever written by a single author.
How we know
Firdawsi (Ferdowsi) c. 940–1020 CE; composed the Shahnameh c. 977–1010 (completed 8 March 1010), ~33 years; ~50,000 couplets, longest poem by a single author (Britannica; Encyclopaedia Iranica; Wikipedia).
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Tus
What they did here
Firdawsi was born around 940 CE in a village near Tus in Khurasan — sources name the village as Pazh/Baz/Paj. The date is a traditional estimate inferred from the Shahnameh's own self-references; some scholars place his birth earlier (c.931-932 or c.925-926). He belonged to the dehqan (landed-gentry) class.
About Tus
Tus is an ancient city of Khurasan in northeastern Iran, near modern Mashhad. The Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid died there in 809, and the imam Ali al-Rida was buried in 818 beside him at nearby Sanabad; the shrine that grew around his tomb gave Mashhad its name. The poet Ferdowsi, born in a village near Tus, died and was buried there, and the theologian al-Ghazali was born in its district and died there in 1111. Other figures associated with the city include Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Shaykh Tusi and Jabir ibn Hayyan. The Mongols sacked Tus in 1220.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Firdawsi’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
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