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Shahnameh
The ''Shahnameh'' or ''Shahnama'' ( fa, شاهنامه, Šāhnāme, lit=The Book of Kings, ) is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Greater Iran. Consisting of some 50,000 " distichs" or couplets (two-line verses), the ''Shahnameh'' is one of the world's longest epic poems. It tells mainly the mythical and to some extent the historical past of the Persian Empire from the creation of the world until the Muslim conquest in the seventh century. Iran, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and the greater region influenced by Persian culture such as Armenia, Dagestan, Georgia, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan celebrate this national epic. The work is of central importance in Persian culture and Persian language, regarded as a literary masterpiece, and definitive of the ethno-national cultural identity of Iran. It is also important to the contemporary adherents of Zoroastrianism, in that it traces ...
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Ferdowsi
Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi ( fa, ; 940 – 1019/1025 CE), also Firdawsi or Ferdowsi (), was a Persians, Persian poet and the author of ''Shahnameh'' ("Book of Kings"), which is one of the world's longest epic poetry, epic poems created by a single poet, and the greatest epic of Persian-speaking people, Persian-speaking countries. Ferdowsi is celebrated as one of the most influential figures of Persian literature and one of the greatest in the history of literature. Name Except for his kunya (Arabic), kunya ( – ) and his laqab ( – ''Ferdowsī'', meaning 'Paradise, paradisic'), nothing is known with any certainty about his full name. From an early period on, he has been referred to by different additional names and titles, the most common one being / ("philosopher"). Based on this, his full name is given in Persian language, Persian sources as / . Due to the non-standardized transliteration from Persian alphabet, Persian into English language, English, different spellings ...
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Sultan Mohammed
Sultan Muhammad was a Persian painter at the Safavid court at Tabriz under Shah Ismail I () and Shah Tahmasp I (). He served as the director of Shah Ismail's artists’ workshop and as the first project director of the ''Shahnameh'' of Shah Tahmasp. He gave painting lessons to Tahmasp when he was the crown prince. Sultan Muhammad’s style was initially based in the Turkman courtly idiom. Sheila R. Canby writes that around 1515, he was perfecting scenes of “man and animal inhabiting a natural world of roaring winds, lush and frenzied vegetation and rocks resembling grotesque faces”, of which his painting “Rustam Sleeping while Rakhsh Fights a Lion” from an unfinished ''Shahnameh'' is an example. In the 1520s however, Sultan Muhammad was influenced by the more sedate and subtle late Timurid mode practiced at Herat; his compositions became more orderly and architectonic. Sultan Muhammad’s painting “The Court of Gayumars” is widely considered the “crowning ach ...
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Shahnameh Of Shah Tahmasp
The ''Shahnameh'' of Shah Tahmasp ( fa, شاهنامه شاه‌طهماسب) or Houghton ''Shahnameh'' is one of the most famous illustrated manuscripts of the ''Shahnameh'', the national epic of Greater Iran, and a high point in the art of the Persian miniature. It is probably the most fully illustrated manuscript of the text ever produced. When created, the manuscript contained 759 pages, 258 of which were miniatures. These miniatures were hand-painted by the artists of the royal workshop in Tabriz under rulers Shah Ismail I and Shah Tahmasp I. Upon its completion, the ''Shahnameh'' was gifted to Ottoman Sultan Selim II in 1568. The page size is about 48 x 32 cm, and the text written in Nastaʿlīq script of the highest quality. The manuscript was broken up in the 1970s and pages are now in a number of different collections around the world. History It was created in Tabriz at the order of Shah Ismail I who had recently taken control of the city. Shah Ismail I was ...
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Keyumars
Keyumars or Kiomars ( fa, کیومرث) was the name of the first king ( shah) of the Pishdadian dynasty of Iran according to the ''Shahnameh''. The name appears in Avestan in the form of ''𐬔𐬀𐬌𐬌𐬊 𐬨𐬆𐬭𐬆𐬙𐬀𐬥 Gaiio Mərətan'', or in medieval Zoroastrian texts as ''Gayōmard'' or ''Gayōmart''. In the Avesta he is the mythological first human being in the world. The corresponding name in Middle Persian is 𐭪𐭣𐭬𐭫𐭲 ''Kayōmart''. In Ferdowsi's ''Shahnameh'' he appears as the first shah of the world. He is also called the ''pišdād'' (), the first to practice justice, the lawgiver. The Avestan form means "the living mortal", from ''gaya'' "life" and ''marətan'' "mortal, human being"; cf. Persian ''mard'' "human" ( fa, مَرد). Keyumars is also a popular first name in Persian speaking countries (Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan). In Zoroastrian literature According to the Zoroastrian creation myth, Gayōmart was the first hum ...
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Persian Literature
Persian literature ( fa, ادبیات فارسی, Adabiyâte fârsi, ) comprises oral compositions and written texts in the Persian language and is one of the world's oldest literatures. It spans over two-and-a-half millennia. Its sources have been within Greater Iran including present-day Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, and Turkey, regions of Central Asia (such as Tajikistan) and South Asia where the Persian language has historically been either the native or official language. For example, Rumi, one of the best-loved Persian poets, born in Balkh (in modern-day Afghanistan) or Wakhsh (in modern-day Tajikistan), wrote in Persian and lived in Konya (in modern-day Turkey), at that time the capital of the Seljuks in Anatolia. The Ghaznavids conquered large territories in Central and South Asia and adopted Persian as their court language. There is thus Persian literature from Iran, Mesopotamia, Azerbaijan, the wider Caucasus, Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Tajikist ...
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Classical Persian
Persian (), also known by its endonym Farsi (, ', ), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and used officially within Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan in three mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Iranian Persian (officially known as ''Persian''), Dari Persian (officially known as ''Dari'' since 1964) and Tajiki Persian (officially known as ''Tajik'' since 1999).Siddikzoda, S. "Tajik Language: Farsi or not Farsi?" in ''Media Insight Central Asia #27'', August 2002. It is also spoken natively in the Tajik variety by a significant population within Uzbekistan, as well as within other regions with a Persianate history in the cultural sphere of Greater Iran. It is written officially within Iran and Afghanistan in the Persian alphabet, a derivation of the Arabic script, and within Tajikistan in the Tajik alphabet, a derivat ...
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Iran
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmenistan to the north, by Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east, and by the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf to the south. It covers an area of , making it the 17th-largest country. Iran has a population of 86 million, making it the 17th-most populous country in the world, and the second-largest in the Middle East. Its largest cities, in descending order, are the capital Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, Karaj, Shiraz, and Tabriz. The country is home to one of the world's oldest civilizations, beginning with the formation of the Elamite kingdoms in the fourth millennium BC. It was first unified by the Medes, an ancient Iranian people, in the seventh century BC, and reached its territorial height in the sixth century BC, when Cyrus the Great fou ...
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Muslim Conquest Of Persia
The Muslim conquest of Persia, also known as the Arab conquest of Iran, was carried out by the Rashidun Caliphate from 633 to 654 AD and led to the fall of the Sasanian Empire as well as the eventual decline of the Zoroastrian religion. The rise of the Muslims in Arabia coincided with an unprecedented political, social, economic, and military weakness in Persia. Once a major world power, the Sasanian Empire had exhausted its human and material resources after decades of warfare against the Byzantine Empire. The Sasanian state's internal political situation quickly deteriorated after the execution of King Khosrow II in 628. Subsequently, ten new claimants were enthroned within the next four years.The Muslim Conquest of Persia By A.I. Akram. Ch: 1 Following the Sasanian civil war of 628–632, the empire was no longer centralized. Arab Muslims first attacked Sasanian territory in 633, when Khalid ibn al-Walid invaded Mesopotamia (then known as the Sasanian province of '' As ...
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Epic Poem
An epic poem, or simply an epic, is a lengthy narrative poem typically about the extraordinary deeds of extraordinary characters who, in dealings with gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants. Etymology The English word ''epic'' comes from Latin ''epicus'', which itself comes from the Ancient Greek adjective (''epikos''), from (''epos''), "word, story, poem." In ancient Greek, 'epic' could refer to all poetry in dactylic hexameter (''epea''), which included not only Homer but also the wisdom poetry of Hesiod, the utterances of the Delphic oracle, and the strange theological verses attributed to Orpheus. Later tradition, however, has restricted the term 'epic' to ''heroic epic'', as described in this article. Overview Originating before the invention of writing, primary epics, such as those of Homer, were composed by bards who used complex rhetorical and metrical schemes by which they could memorize the epic as received ...
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Persian Mythology
Persian mythology or Iranian mythology (Persian:اساطیرشناسی ایرانی) is the body of the myths originally told by ancient Persians and other Iranian peoples, and a genre of Ancient Persian folklore. These stories concern the origin and nature of the world, the lives and activities of deities, heroes, and mythological creatures, and the origins and significance of the ancient Persians' own cult and ritual practices. Modern scholars study the myths to shed light on the religious and political institutions of not only modern-day Iran but the Greater Iran, which includes regions of West Asia, Central Asia, South Asia and Transcaucasia where Iranian culture has had significant influence. Historically, these were regions long ruled by dynasties of various Iranian empires, that incorporated considerable aspects of Persian culture through extensive contact with them, or where sufficient Iranian peoples settled to still maintain communities who patronize their respective c ...
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History Of Iran
The history of Iran is intertwined with the history of a larger region known as Greater Iran, comprising the area from Anatolia in the west to the borders of Ancient India and the Syr Darya in the east, and from the Caucasus and the Eurasian Steppe in the north to the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman in the south. Central to this area is Iran, commonly known until the mid-20th century as Persia in the Western world. Iran is home to one of the world's oldest continuous major civilizations, with historical and urban settlements dating back to 7000 BC.People, "New evidence: modern civilization began in Iran", 10 Aug 2007
, retrieved 1 October 2007
The south-western and western part of the

Khwaday-Namag
''Khwadāy-Nāmag'' ( pal, 𐭧𐭥𐭲𐭠𐭩 𐭭𐭠𐭬𐭪; New Persian: ; ) was a Middle Persian history from the Sasanian era. Now lost, it was imagined by Theodor Nöldeke to be the common ancestor of all later Persian-language histories of the Sasanian Empire, a view which has recently been disproven. It was supposed to have been first translated into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa' (d. 757), who had access to Sasanian court documents. According to Nöldeke's theory, the book itself was composed first under the reign of Khosrow I Anushirvan (), and redacted in the reign of the last Sasanian monarch, Yazdegerd III (). ''Khwaday-Namag'' was the primary source of the 10th-century Persian epic ''Shahnameh'' ('Book of Kings') written by Ferdowsi. ''Khwaday-Namag'' was also translated to New Persian, and was expanded using other sources, by Samanid The Samanid Empire ( fa, سامانیان, Sāmāniyān) also known as the Samanian Empire, Samanid dynasty, Samanid amirate, or sim ...
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