The Shahnameh is the national epic of Persia / Iran. It was written down by the poet Ferdowsi at the end of the 10^th and the beginning of the 11^th centuries CE, but it incorporates material from long before this period, as it recounts the mythological and legendary history of the country from the creation of the world up to Persia’s conquest by Arab conquerors, who brought with them the new religion of Islam, in the 7^th century C.E. Its scope is thus immense: the oldest stories are extremely ancient, and may well go back to the stone age (the weapons chiefly associated with the poem’s chief hero, Rostam, are pre-metallic – the lariat and the mace), and the last stories in the poem deal, in a romanticized fashion, with the actual historical events that led up to the Arab conquest.

This great and stirring poem is not only the chief means by which the extraordinary pre-Islamic literary heritage of Persian has been passed on to us, it is also the key work of Persian cultural self-definition, and is therefore arguably the single most important Persian poem.  Certainly it has had immense influence on subsequent Persian culture, and this is so both at the popular and sophisticated levels. It has provided abundant stories and characters incorporated by later writers into their work, as well as feeding a rich tradition of oral folk narrative. It also occupies a central place in Persian art history, again at both the sophisticated and popular levels; the medieval royal manuscripts of the Shahnameh are among the most beautiful ever produced, and folk paintings of heroes and incidents from the Shahnameh constituted a widespread genre of folk art in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The importance and popularity of Persian literary culture beyond Iran’s borders, especially in the sub-continent (Persian was the court language of the Moghul emperors) and in Turkey, has meant that the Shahnameh’s heroes and legends were gradually diffused throughout the Asian Islamic world, and came to occupy an almost equally significant place in these cultures as in Iran itself.

Rostam, the central hero of the poem’s legendary section, figures directly or indirectly in the three pieces recorded here. The Seven Passages refers to his heroic labors while rescuing his king, Kavus, from imprisonment; the Seemorgh is an evocation of the fabulous bird who brings up Rostam’s father, Zal; and Rostam is both a surrogate father for Prince Seyavash, whom he brings up in his own land of Sistan, and is his companion and advisor during his wars against Turan (i.e. Central Asia, north of the Oxus River).

(This excerpt about Shahnameh is taken from the program notes of Persian Trilogy, written by Dick Davis.)

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