Ferdowsi

Abu al-Qasim Mansur bin Hasan Tosi, known by his pen name Ferdowsi, was a Persian poet born in 940 and died in 1025. He is famous for writing the *Shahnameh* ("Book of Kings"), one of the longest epic poems ever written by a single author and the greatest epic in Persian-speaking countries. He is regarded as a key figure in Persian literature and among the greatest in literary history.

Ferdowsi is thought to have started composing the *Shahnameh* at age 30, based on the *Abu-Mansuri Shahnameh*. The only poem clearly attributed to him is the *Shahnameh* itself, his most famous work and a major piece of ancient Persian literature. He finished the first edition in 995, three years before Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni took power, and completed a second edition in 1010. Other poems, like the mathnawi *Yusuf and Zulaikha*, are often linked to him but are mostly baseless. A satire condemning Mahmud is also known to be his.

Ferdowsi came from a family of landed gentry. He spent his early life during the Samanid era, a time of Iranian independence and identity movements. The Samanid kings supported the Persian language, creating a golden age for Persian thought and literature. Ferdowsi owed much to earlier poets who had perfected Persian in the ninth and tenth centuries, using that foundation to craft his own work. He knew Arabic but was not a master of Arabic literature. In the *Baysunghur Shahnameh*, he is given the title "Hakim," which some link to Khosravani wisdom.

In the *Shahnameh*, Ferdowsi connects pre-Islamic Iranian culture with post-Islamic Iran. The poem shows influences from ancient Iranian religions like Zoroastrianism, Zurvanism, and Mithraism, though some scholars say these themes came from the sources he faithfully followed. His peasant origins gave him knowledge of old Iranian customs and rituals, which he later expanded, shaping his poetic worldview. His work was intellectual, not just poetic; he did not write fiction. He saw wisdom as the source of all good, believing it helps people distinguish good from evil and achieve happiness in this world and salvation in the next. He carefully examined his motifs, mostly from the *Abu-Mansuri Shahnameh*, and drew from a vast wealth of knowledge to create a legacy carried by Persians, Turks, and Indians.

**Etymology** Aside from his kunya (Abu al-Qasim, meaning "father of Qasim") and pen name (Ferdowsi, meaning "paradisic"), nothing is certain about his full name. According to Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, the 13th-century author Bundari provides the most reliable information, calling him al-Amir al-Hakim Abu al-Qasim Mansur ibn al-Hasan al-Firdawsi al-Tosi. From early times, he has been given various names and titles, most commonly Hakim ("philosopher"). In Persian sources, his full name is Hakim Abu al-Qasim Firdawsi Tusi. Due to non-standardized romanizations, English works use spellings like Firdawsi, Firdusi, Firdosi, and Firdausi. The *Encyclopaedia of Islam* uses Firdawsī, based on the German Oriental Society's method. The *Encyclopædia Iranica* uses Ferdowsī, a modified version emphasizing modern Iranian Persian intonations. The modern Tajik Cyrillic transliteration is Ҳаким Абулқосим Фирдавсӣ Тӯсӣ (Hakim Abdulqosim Firdavsī Tüsī).

**Life**

**Family** Ferdowsi was born in 940 into a family of Persian landowners (dehqans) in the village of Paj, near Tus, in the Khorasan region of the Samanid Empire (now in Razavi Khorasan province, northeastern Iran). Little is known about his early life. He had a wife, likely literate and from the same dehqan class. The dehqans were landowning Iranian gentry who thrived under the Sasanian dynasty and retained some power after the Islamic conquests of the 7th century. They were tied to pre-Islamic literary heritage, with "dehqan" sometimes used as a synonym for "Iranian" in the *Shahnameh*, and saw it as their duty to preserve pre-Islamic cultural traditions, including tales of legendary kings. He had a son, who died at age 37, and the poet mourned him in an elegy inserted into the *Shahnameh*.

**Background** The Islamic conquests of the 7th century brought gradual linguistic and cultural changes to the Iranian Plateau. By the late 9th century, as the caliphate weakened, local dynasties emerged in Greater Iran. Ferdowsi grew up in Tus, under the Samanids, who claimed descent from the Sasanian general Bahram Chobin (whose story Ferdowsi recounts).