Universal Virtues

The king is said to have ordered that the money sent for Ferdowsi be used for repairing an inn near the poet's birthplace in remembrance. The inn is in ruins but still exits. Some think that the lack of interest shown by him earlier was caused by the jealousy of other poets at the royal court.

Ferdowsi was the son of a wealthy land owner, and was born in 940 in Tus, a small village.

His Shahnama is one of the masterpieces of world literature. It is Persia’s national epic, and great source of its myths and legends. It is considered by many to be the most important piece of work in Persian literature.

The epic characters echo some in the Indian and Greco–Roman mythologies.

Ferdowsi decorated the Shahnama with many universal moral concepts. It is a treasury of perennial wisdom and universal values. He asks his readers to think carefully and see the reason for the rise and fall of individuals and nations, and improve the future by learning from the past.

He stresses his belief that as everyone is merely a passerby in the transient world, one is wise to avoid lying, cruelty, avarice, and other evils. He tells his readers to strive for honour, justice, order, truth and other virtues.

Scholars of Ferdowsi have selected some of these universal values from Shahnama:
Chivalry, control over one's self, courtesy, education and knowledge, foresight, forgiveness, gratitude, hard work, helping the poor, honouring covenants, hospitality, justice, love of spouse and family, loyalty, modesty, patriotism, religious uprightness, seeking and acting in moderation, seeking truth and opposing anything that is against it, shame at committing immoral acts, thankfulness, wisdom, worship of one God, and more.

Just as Chaucer did with the English language, Ferdowsi was a popularizer of the Persian vernacular. Iranians consider him the father of modern Persian language. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, they regard Ferdowsi as the greatest of their poets.

Ferdowsi believed in the greatness of Shahnama. In one of his verses, he takes pride in his thirty years of hard work:

... I suffered during these thirty years, but I have revived the Iranians (Ajam) with the Persian language;

I shall not die as I am alive again and have spread the seeds of this language ...


This prediction of Ferdowsi came true. His poetic composition helped establish Persian as the court language in different countries of their empire.

Persian literary figures, historians and biographers have praised him and his Shahnama. It is considered by many to be the most important piece of work in Persian literature. Western writers have also praised the Shahnama. Persian literature was considered by such thinkers as Goethe to be one of the four main bodies of world literature.
Ferdowsi is said to have died around 1020 in poverty at the age of 85, embittered by the royal neglect. However, he was fully confident of his work’s ultimate success and fame, as stated in the last verses of his book:

I've reached the end of this great history

And all the land will talk of me.

I shall not die, the seeds I've sown will save

My name and reputation from the grave,

And men of sense and wisdom will proclaim when

I have gone, my praises and my fame.

Ferdowsi was buried at the yard of his own home, where a mausoleum was built in 1925 under Raza Shah Pahlevi's rule. In Tehran, the present capital of Iran, a monument of Ferdowsi stands on his memorial square.