Why Iranians still read Ferdowsi | How Iran Stayed Iran Part 3

History Onion · Part 3 The Poet · 2:58

A thousand years ago, a landowner in Tus named Ferdowsi put the whole story of Persia's kings and heroes into nearly fifty thousand couplets of Persian verse: the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings. Iranians call it their national epic, and it is still read from Iran to Afghanistan to Tajikistan. It took him more than thirty years, and it gave Iranians back a past they had nearly lost. Persia's old royal chronicles did not survive the centuries after the conquest, and the prose book he worked from, compiled at Tus in 957, is lost too. He did not write a list of reigns: he wove history and myth into one great story — Kaveh the blacksmith raising his apron as a banner against a tyrant, Siavash riding through fire, the love of Zal and Rudabeh, Rostam killing his own son without knowing him. His lines became proverbs, and his book the model for the Persian epics that followed. Part 3 of How Iran Stayed Iran, the series finale: of the old heartlands the caliphate conquered, only Iran's language came back as a language of government and literature — carried by clerks, a coppersmith-king and a poet. SOURCES • Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, critical edition by Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh (1988–2008); trans. Dick Davis (2006); the English of the Persian lines in the video is our own