Nizami Ganjavi
c. 1141 CE–c. 1209 CE · Ganja
Nizami Ganjavi (full name traditionally given as Jamal al-Din Ilyas ibn Yusuf ibn Zaki) was a poet who wrote in Persian and is counted among the supreme masters of the romantic verse-epic. He took his pen-name (takhallus) from his home city, Ganja, in the South Caucasus, then part of the Seljuq world and today in Azerbaijan. Few hard facts about his life survive, because he was not a court poet and does not appear in the chronicles of the dynasties; most of what is reported is inferred from his own poetry or comes from later tradition. He is said to have been orphaned young and raised by a maternal uncle; his mother is described as of Kurdish origin.
His fame rests on five long poems later gathered as the Khamsa ("Quintet") or Panj Ganj ("Five Treasures"): Makhzan al-Asrar (a didactic mystical work), Khusraw and Shirin, Layla and Majnun, Haft Paykar ("The Seven Beauties"), and the Iskandarnama (on Alexander). Though he avoided court life, he dedicated each poem to a regional ruler who offered patronage.
Although Nizami is universally classed by major reference works as a Persian-language poet, his identity has become a subject of modern national debate, with some Azerbaijani sources emphasizing a Turkic heritage; this is a contested modern claim, not a settled historical fact. His birth is usually placed around 1141 (some propose c. 1130), and his death around 1209, though biographers have proposed dates ranging from the 1180s to about 1210.
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Ganja
What they did here
Nizami took his pen-name from Ganja (then in the Seljuq realm; now in Azerbaijan), and the consistent report of the major reference works is that he spent essentially his entire life there. Tradition holds he left the city only once, to meet a ruling prince; that single excursion is not securely documented and the destination is not reliably recorded, so no separate stop is given. His birth is usually placed c. 1141 and his death c. 1209, but both dates are circa and the death date in particular is disputed in the sources.
About Ganja
Ganja, in present-day Azerbaijan in the historic region of Arran/Caucasian Albania, was a major city of the medieval eastern Caucasus. It is the home town of the great Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi (d. c. 1209), author of the Khamsa (Quintet) of narrative poems, who lived and is buried there.
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