Firdawsi

Abu al-Qasim Firdawsi (Ferdowsi) was a Persian poet of Khurasan, in the northeast of present-day Iran, remembered as the author of the Shahnameh ("Book of Kings"), the roughly 50,000-couplet verse epic that gathers the legends and history of Iran from its mythical first kings to the Arab conquest. Exact dates are uncertain and traditional: he is generally placed born around 940 CE near Tus and dead around 1020-1025. He came from the dehqan class — the old Iranian landed gentry who preserved pre-Islamic Persian tradition — which helps explain his lifelong project of saving that heritage in his own tongue.

Firdawsi seems to have worked on the Shahnameh for some thirty-five years, building on an earlier prose compilation; a completed version is dated to 1010. He dedicated the finished work to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, by then ruler of Khurasan. The famous stories that he traveled to Ghazna, quarreled with the court, and was cheated of his reward are later legend, not documented history; scholars treat the poet-and-patron relationship as largely traditional.

He is widely described as a Shia Muslim, though which branch — Zaydi, Ismaili, or Twelver — is debated; some scholars read him chiefly as a monotheist with a strong Persian patriotic voice rather than a sectarian one. Later tradition holds he was refused burial in the town cemetery and laid to rest in his own garden in Tus, where his mausoleum stands today.