Ferdowsi

Abolqasem Ferdowsi was born around 940 near Tus, a city in Khorasan, in what is now northeastern Iran. He belonged to the dehqan class, Persian landowners who kept the old stories and traditions of Iran alive after the country changed rulers and religion. That inheritance became his life's work. For roughly thirty years he composed the Shahnameh, the "Book of Kings". It is an epic of some fifty thousand rhyming couplets that tells the story of Iran from its mythical first kings down to the Arab conquest in the seventh century. Its most famous figure is Rostam, a giant of a hero, and its most famous scene is the tragedy in which Rostam unknowingly fights his own son Sohrab. Ferdowsi finished the poem around 1010 and presented it to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, the most powerful ruler of the age. Tradition holds that the reward was insultingly small, so the poet died around 1020 believing his labor unrecognized. He was wrong. Because he wrote in Persian, deliberately avoiding the Arabic that dominated learned writing, the Shahnameh helped keep the Persian language itself alive. Iranians still recite his lines today.