Almost all towns have a book that tells their story in the key of an epic. The Aeneid , commissioned by Augustus to Virgil to narrate a glorious origin of Rome, is perhaps the quintessential example, but there are others and we have seen some here, such as the Secret history of the Mongols .
In Spain we have, among others, the Chronicon mundi of Lucas de Tuy or the Estoria de España of Alfonso X. Well, in Iran that role is played by the Shāhnāmé , where the evolution of Persia from the creation of the world to the arrival of Islam is explained.
Also known as Book of Kings It is a work written in verse that constitutes the fundamental pillar of the Iranian historical-cultural identity, being one of the masterpieces of its literature apart from being also of great importance for the study of the ancient Persian religion, Zoroastrianism. An epic poem composed of some fifty thousand distiches (couplets) that make it the longest in the world by a single author, the poet Ferdousí (the Mahabharata Indian is older but of multiple authorship).
Hakim Abol-Qasem Ferdousí-e Tusí, nicknamed the Lord of the Word , it was a dehqn or landed aristocrat born between 935 and 940 AD. in Tus, in the Khorasan region (the eastern part of present-day Iran). As was common in those of his status, although he professed the Islamic faith, he preserved many of the ancient Persian customs and their language, something that was very useful for him to write his book and meet previous rhapsodists, in the case of the court bard Abu Mansur Daqiqi, who took a thousand lines from an unfinished work as the basis for his own.
The Shāhnāmé It would be his life's work, since it took him about thirty years to finish it, compiling stories, legends, chronicles... When he finally had it ready, there had been a dynastic change on the throne, with the reigning Samanids displaced by the Gazans.
These were of Turkic origin and, therefore, of customs foreign to the ancestral Iranians, hence Ferdowí was postponed; That, together with the carelessness that he had made in the management of his properties, brought him some economic difficulties that he had to solve by selling a good part of his land.
Keep in mind that the poem is an exaltation of the Persian in which the Turanians, that is, the Turks of Central Asia, do not appear very well off. That is why Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, first of the dynasty, did not pay him the promised gold dinar for each verse but a dirham, a much less valuable coin, thus offending the poet, who left the court and, if we pay attention According to legend, he gave the money to the first person he met on the street, a humble peddler.
Then he wanted to take revenge by writing some satirical verses about the sultan, making fun of his modest origins (his father had been a slave) and prudence advised him to put land in between, since, in addition, he was a Shiite while Mahmud belonged to the Shiite branch. Sunni.
Ferdowsi passed through Herat and Tus, ending up in Mazandaran (a province located on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea). There he was welcomed by the local ruler under his protection because he was also Persian and he stayed with him for the rest of his life, which ended approximately between the years 1020 and 1025.
But what interests us here is his book. He started it around 977 and would not finish it until 1010. Actually, it is a rewriting in Pahlavi (medieval Persian) of a multitude of sources that he previously compiled, such as the Khwaday-Namag (Book of Kings), an anthology of the late Sassanid period up to the reign of Khosroes II (590–628) and to which Ferdowsi added material to complete the early stage, continuing afterwards to its end in the 7th century.
The aforementioned Daqiqi was narrating this when he was killed by a slave and Ferdowsi, who was an admirer of his, decided to continue where he left off, in the rise of the prophet Zoroaster, for which he would have also used a work entitled Chihrdad , a history of Humanity today lost that was part of the Avesta (a collection of sacred books of Zoroastrianism).
In fact, more sources are attributed to him, in the case of the Kārnāmag-ī Ardaxšīr-ī Pābagān (a light-toned Zoroastrian prose tale about the founder of the Sassanian dynasty, Ardacher I) and the Khoday Nameh (Another prose book that tells of the ascent to the throne of the monarch of the same name and that Daqiqi was commissioned to complete when he was killed).
The Shāhnāmé It is not a work that unfolds chronologically but is divided into three successive parts or ages:the mythical, the heroic and the historical. The first is the shortest (about two thousand one hundred distiches ) and, as we said before, it begins with the creation of the world and the first man, Kayumars, who would also be the first sha; he had a grandson, Hushang, who was the one who discovered fire by chance, allowing the development of civilization through cooking, metallurgy and the appearance of laws.
The second is the longest, occupying two thirds of the total. It is characterized by focusing its attention on human nature, mediated by the devil and embodied in feelings such as greed, envy, revenge, courage... Among its protagonists, Alexander the Great is highlighted, but the focus is mainly on the Saka heroes. (Scythians). The most important character is the mythical Rostam, a kind of Gilgamesh with a supernatural tone whose wanderings cover a thousand verses.
The third illustrates the leaders whose weakness caused the fall of the Sassanid Empire and its supplanting by the "army of darkness" formed by the Arabs in the seventh century. The influence of Zorastrianism, which underlined the importance of free will, is evident as a method to overcome all this negativity, in the same way that Ferdowsi's romantic style softens and embellishes a bit the tragic tone of that story that covers six thousand years. .
This, combined with the treatment of the characters, in which there are fantastic elements such as the multicentennial longevity of several of them, although alongside others that are more real, plus the image of some rulers shown under a positive prism compared to others who a less friendly vision is given, it means that interpretations of the text are not lacking in the sense that the author was nostalgic for the Sassanid Empire who tried to extol and preserve the pre-Islamic legacy. Of course, not all scholars agree. Others think that his goal is moralizing and wants to extol monotheism, patriotism, family love and traditional moral virtues.
What is beyond doubt is the enormous importance that the Shāhnāmé it had for peoples such as the Pashtun, the Kurdish and, in general, those of the area occupied by what is now Iran, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Armenia and Dagestan, that is, the countries that are heirs to the Persian culture. Furthermore, philologists believe that this work has been crucial in preserving the Persian language as it was spoken a millennium ago, thanks to the influence it had on later ones that imitated it.
The poet himself stated in specific verses that he had tried to avoid Arabic neologisms, although words in that language are not lacking in the Shāhnāmé , something surely inevitable if we take into account that it consists of sixty-two stories, nine hundred and ninety chapters and the aforementioned fifty thousand verses (which, apparently, were originally ten thousand more, only the copies that have come down to us are the reduced ones) . That is, about three times more than The Iliad . It is not surprising that the Seljuks also had it as a reference reading and even Goethe considered it to be at the top of world literature.
And that was not always seen with good eyes. This is the case of Iran itself, where in the times of Shah Reza Pahlavi that book was relegated to the background in favor of more conceptually modern titles, surely due to the inconvenience of the allusions to regicides. Paradoxically, there were also ayatollahs who were reticent because of Ferdowsi's criticism of the invading Muslims and, therefore, of Islam. But Ferdousí had hit the mark with these verses that he left as an epitaph:
Fonts
Shahnameh De Firdousi:The Book of the Kings of Persia, 10th century AD. Spanish Translation (Abolqasem Ferdowsi)/Persian Myths (Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis)/The Garden of the End. A journey through the Iran of yesterday and today (Ángela Rodicio)/The Shahnameh. The Persian Epic as World Literature (Hamid Dabashi)/Shahnama Project/Wikipedia.