Ferdowsī

or Firdusī or Firdousī orig. Abū al-Qāsim Manṣūr

born с 935, near Ṭūs, Iran

died сc1020, Ṭūs

Persian poet.

Though many legends surround his name, few facts are known about his life. He gave the final and enduring form to the Persian national epic, the Shāh-nāmeh (completed с 1010; "Book of Kings"), a poem based mainly on an earlier prose history. His language is still readily intelligible to modern Iranians, who regard the poem's nearly 60,000 couplets as a sonorous, majestic evocation of a glorious past. He reportedly worked on the poem for 35 years to earn a dowry for his only daughter.

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▪ Persian poet

also spelled  Firdawsī ,  Firdusi , or  Firdousi , pseudonym of  Abū Ol-qasem Manṣūr 

born c. 935, , near Ṭūs, Iran

died c. 1020, –26, Ṭūs

 Persian poet, author of the Shāh-nāmeh (“Book of Kings”), the Persian national epic, to which he gave its final and enduring form, although he based his poem mainly on an earlier prose version.

      Ferdowsī was born in a village on the outskirts of the ancient city of Ṭūs. In the course of the centuries many legends have been woven around the poet's name but very little is known about the real facts of his life. The only reliable source is given by Neẓāmī-ye ʿArūẓī, a 12th-century poet who visited Ferdowsī's tomb in 1116 or 1117 and collected the traditions that were current in his birthplace less than a century after his death.

      According to Neẓāmī, Ferdowsī was a dehqān (“landowner”), deriving a comfortable income from his estates. He had only one child, a daughter, and it was to provide her with a dowry that he set his hand to the task that was to occupy him for 35 years. The Shāh-nāmeh of Ferdowsī, a poem of nearly 60,000 couplets, is based mainly on a prose work of the same name compiled in the poet's early manhood in his native Ṭūs. This prose Shāh-nāmeh was in turn and for the most part the translation of a Pahlavi (Middle Persian) work, the Khvatāy-nāmak, a history of the kings of Persia from mythical times down to the reign of Khosrow II (590–628), but it also contained additional material continuing the story to the overthrow of the Sāsānians by the Arabs in the middle of the 7th century. The first to undertake the versification of this chronicle of pre-Islāmic and legendary Persia was Daqīqī, a poet at the court of the Sāmānids, who came to a violent end after completing only 1,000 verses. These verses, which deal with the rise of the prophet Zoroaster, were afterward incorporated by Ferdowsī, with due acknowledgements, in his own poem.

      The Shāh-nāmeh, finally completed in 1010, was presented to the celebrated sultan Maḥmūd of Ghazna, who by that time had made himself master of Ferdowsī's homeland, Khūrāsān. Information on the relations between poet and patron is largely legendary. According to Neẓāmī-ye ʿArūẓī, Ferdowsī came to Ghazna in person and through the good offices of the minister Aḥmad ebn Ḥasan Meymandī was able to secure the Sultan's acceptance of the poem. Unfortunately, Maḥmūd then consulted certain enemies of the minister as to the poet's reward. They suggested that Ferdowsī should be given 50,000 dirhams, and even this, they said, was too much, in view of his heretical Shīʿīte tenets. Maḥmūd, a bigoted Sunnite, was influenced by their words, and in the end Ferdowsī received only 20,000 dirhams. Bitterly disappointed, he went to the bath and, on coming out, bought a draft of foqāʿ (a kind of beer) and divided the whole of the money between the bath attendant and the seller of foqāʿ.

      Fearing the Sultan's wrath, he fled first to Herāt, where he was in hiding for six months, and then, by way of his native Ṭūs, to Mazanderan, where he found refuge at the court of the Sepahbād Shahreyār, whose family claimed descent from the last of the Sāsānians. There Ferdowsī composed a satire of 100 verses on Sultan Maḥmūd that he inserted in the preface of the Shāh-nāmeh and read it to Shahreyār, at the same time offering to dedicate the poem to him, as a descendant of the ancient kings of Persia, instead of to Maḥmūd. Shahreyār, however, persuaded him to leave the dedication to Maḥmūd, bought the satire from him for 1,000 dirhams a verse, and had it expunged from the poem. The whole text of this satire, bearing every mark of authenticity, has survived to the present.

      It was long supposed that in his old age the poet had spent some time in western Persia or even in Baghdad under the protection of the Būyids, but this assumption was based upon his presumed authorship of Yūsof o-Zalīkhā, an epic poem on the subject of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, which, it later became known, was composed more than 100 years after Ferdowsī's death. According to the narrative of Neẓāmī-ye ʿArūẓī, Ferdowsī died inopportunely just as Sultan Maḥmūd had determined to make amends for his shabby treatment of the poet by sending him 60,000 dinars' worth of indigo. Neẓāmī does not mention the date of Ferdowsī's death. The earliest date given by later authorities is 1020 and the latest 1026; it is certain that he lived to be more than 80.

      The Persians regard Ferdowsī as the greatest of their poets. For nearly a thousand years they have continued to read and to listen to recitations from his masterwork, the Shāh-nāmeh, in which the Persian national epic found its final and enduring form. Though written about 1,000 years ago, this work is as intelligible to the average, modern Iranian as the King James version of the Bible is to a modern English-speaker. The language, based as the poem is on a Pahlavi original, is pure Persian with only the slightest admixture of Arabic. European scholars have criticized this enormous poem for what they have regarded as its monotonous metre, its constant repetitions, and its stereotyped similes; but to the Iranian it is the history of his country's glorious past, preserved for all time in sonorous and majestic verse.

John Andrew Boyle

Additional Reading

The only complete translation of the Shāh-nāmeh (“The Book of Kings”) is the French version by J. Mohl, facing the text of his edition of the original (1838–78) and also published separately (1876–78). The best and most recent English translation is The Epic of the Kings by Reuben Levy (1967), which embraces the whole work but summarizes many of the linking passages. T. Noeldeke's splendid monograph, Das iranische Nationalepos, 2nd ed. (1920), remains unsuperseded; and E.G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, 2 vol. (1902–06), may still be consulted with profit; but for a digest of research of the past 50 years, see J. Rypka et al., History of Iranian Literature (1968).

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