Who they were
Ferdowsi was born c. 940 in Tus, in Khorasan, and died c. 1020. He came from the dehqan class of landed gentry, which kept pre-Islamic Iranian traditions alive.
What they did
He spent some three decades composing the Shahnameh, completing it c. 1010. The poem tells Iran’s mythical and historical past from creation to the Arab conquest in roughly 50,000 couplets, drawing on earlier prose Shahnamehs and the Sasanian royal-book tradition. Ferdowsi deliberately favored Persian vocabulary, and the poem became the cornerstone of the New Persian language. Among its most famous episodes are the tragedy of Rostam and Sohrab and the revolt of Kaveh the blacksmith against the tyrant Zahhak.
Legacy
The Shahnameh remains central to Iranian identity across borders and eras. The story that Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni underpaid the poet and repented too late is a beloved legend. Ferdowsi’s millennium was internationally commemorated, and his tomb at Tus was rebuilt as a national monument in 1934.