Ferdowsi

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…