Ferdowsi

A little over a thousand years ago the Persian poet Ferdowsi of Tous collected and put into heroic verse the millennium-old mythological and epic traditions of Iran. It took him thirty years to write the sixty thousand verses that comprise theShahnamehor The Book of Kings . This monumental work begins with legends of the birth of the Persian nationhood and ends with the Arab conquest of Iran. Written in the aftermath of that national trauma, Shahnamehwas meant to harbor the Persian collective memory, language, and culture in a turbulent sea of many historical storms.