Ferdowsi — Defender of the Persian Tongue

Hakim Abu’l-Qasim Ferdowsi Tusi was born around 940 CE in the village of Paj, near the city of Tus in Khorasan. A landowner by birth, he had the leisure and education to devote his life to poetry — and he chose to dedicate it to a single work: the Shahnameh.

Ferdowsi completed the Shahnameh during the Samanid and early Ghaznavid dynasties. The epic consists of approximately 50,000 couplets, divided into three ages: the mythical age (from creation to the first kings), the heroic age (dominated by the hero Rostam), and the historical age (from the Achaemenids to the Arab conquest).

One of the Shahnameh's most significant contributions is its preservation of pre-Islamic Persian culture, mythology, and — above all — the Persian language itself. Ferdowsi is said to have used only a handful of Arabic words in 50,000 couplets. As he wrote in the epilogue: "I have toiled much in these thirty years — and with this Dari tongue, revived the Persian tongue."