TLS: on Shahname

a review of Abolqasim Ferdowsi. The Persian book of Kings. Translated by Dick Davis.
Many nations have their national epics, poems, or stories which seem to capture the essence of their history or character, but few can boast epics with such a wide canvas or such a long history as Abolqasim Ferdowsi' s Shahnameh, which runs to some 50,000 lines, seven times as long as Homer's Iliad, with which it is sometimes compared. Composed in around the year AD 1000 by Ferdowsi, a Persian landowner steeped in the traditions and lore of his native country, the poem surveys the whole course of Persian history from the creation down to the coming of the Arab-Muslim conquerors after 636.
The first half, up to the coming of Iskander (Alexander), is almost entirely mythical. Ferdowsi, like all his contemporaries, knew nothing of the Achaemenids. The kings of ancient Persia with whom we are familiar from the biblical and Greek traditions, Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes, were unknown to them, and no one could read the cuneiform script in which their titles and deeds were recorded. Instead, a whole alternative tradition of monarchy was developed in north-east Iran with such famous monarchs as Kay Khusraw. By contrast, the last sections of the epic, dealing with the Sasanian Shahs (c200-65 I AD), are quasi-historical, though with romantic and epic episodes elaborated around heroes like the great hunter prince, Bahram Gur. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the influence of this great poem on the national culture of Iran. For a start, it marks the definitive emergence of New Persian as a language of literature and culture. The forging of a new language from a mixture of Middle Persian and Arabic, written in an Arabic script, ensured the survival of a distinctively Persian culture. In other areas conquered by the Arabs, the local literary languages, Greek and Syriac in the Levant, Greek and Coptic in Egypt, retreated to the cloister or completely disappeared as Arabic became the only language of general culture. With the loss of the ancient languages went the loss of the memory of the pre-Islamic history of these areas and the civilization they bore. The Shahnameh anchored New Persian in much the same way as the Authorized Version of the Bible anchored English. The vigorous, simple language of the poem is easily comprehensible to educated Iranians a thousand years after it was written.