Ferdowsi

Persian poet, author of Shahnameh (940–1020)

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Writers rank#225

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Fame74.1
Momentum2.1
Writers rank#225
Wikipedia24.5K

Lived 940–1020, aged 80

WritersWriter / Author

Wikipedia
104 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
940–1020
Aged 80

Summary

Updated 2026-06-08

He spent three decades writing the longest epic poem ever composed by a single author — 60,000 couplets bridging pre-Islamic myth and post-Islamic memory, carrying Persian identity through conquest and language shift.

Biography

About

Abolqasem Mansour bin Hassan Tusi was born in 940 to a family of landed gentry, came of age under the Samanid kings who championed Persian language and thought, and began composing the Shahnameh at thirty, working from an earlier prose chronicle called the Abu-Mansuri Shahnameh. He completed the first edition in 995, then a second in 1010, weaving Zoroastrian cosmology, ancient ritual, and kingly lore into verse that linked Iran before and after Islam. He knew Arabic but drew his material from older Persian sources and the peasant culture he grew up in, treating wisdom as the root of all virtu…

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