Ferdowsi - Shahnameh

The poem that you are about to read is by Ferdowsi. He is one of the most famous patriotic poets.

He not only protected the stories that were passed down through the generations. His greatest achievement was protecting the Persian language after Iran was attacked and colonised by the Arabs. It is well known that he used the least amount of Arabic words in his book "Shahnameh", which took him 30 years to write. Those Arabic words were probably missed because there was no dictionary in the 10th century.

The Shahnameh is a book about Iranian mythology and this is how it begins: