New NaqqaliThe storyteller’s curtain
A naqqal, the coffeehouse storyteller who performed the Shahnameh, often stood before a great painted curtain. Its scenes let an audience follow a long tale at a glance, see where they were in it, and find their way back when the story resumed the next night. The curtain did not replace the telling; it held the whole story in view while the voice told it line by line.
An emoji sequence does the same work for a reader who has grown up on a phone. It is a picture-language almost everyone can read, compact enough to hold a whole episode on one line, and exact enough to send you back to the verse. New Naqqali’s emojiture is the curtain, redrawn for a new audience.
Two tiers
Every one of the poem’s 951 sections is told twice. The emblem is three to five symbols, the section at a glance: it stands beside each section heading across this site. The telling is longer, the episode in order, from a handful of symbols for a short prelude to 156 for Bozorgmehr’s Seven Feasts (D13.20).
Together the tellings run to 18,215 emoji for a poem of 831,807 words: about one symbol for every 46 words. That is less than two percent of the text, small enough to scroll through, and large enough to be a real reading of the whole.
How it was made
Each telling was written from the verse of the translation, section by section, and checked against the manuscript. The vocabulary is kept consistent so that a symbol means the same thing everywhere, and a few rules keep it faithful to the poem rather than to modern habit:
- 👑 is royal authority: the king, the crown and the throne.
- 💪 is the Pahlevan, the champion. There are no elves or fantasy knights here.
- 🐉 appears only for a literal dragon or a dragon banner, never as a figure of speech.
- 🦅✨ together are the Simorgh, the great bird who raises Zal and heals Rostam.
The key on The Shahnameh in Emoji lists all 484 symbols with their meanings. Where the poem names a symbol outright, tapping it shows the couplet. Emoji are drawn differently on every phone and computer, so this site shows them all in one open emoji typeface, so that every reader sees the same pictures.
What it shows
Reduced to symbols, the poem’s large patterns stand out. The most used symbol by far is 👑, 1,497 times: this is, after all, the Book of Kings. Then come 👥 people / assembly (635), 👦 youth / son (482), 🏇 riding out / campaign (481), ⚔️ battle / combat (475), 👴 elder / old counsellor (469), 🐎 horse / steed (462).
Compare the heroic age, from Kay Qobad to the death of Rostam, with the Sasanian reigns at the end of the poem. Per thousand emoji, the symbols of horse, combat and the champion fall away, and those of the court, the letter, counsel and justice take their place:
Formulas appear too. The same short runs of symbols recur wherever the poem repeats a scene:
- 👑✍️📜📨, in 6 sections: C4.17, C4.25, D5.12, D10.39, D13.9, E10.7
- 👦👑🪑👥, in 4 sections: B10.31, E7.11, E8.1, E10.1
- 👑😢✍️📜, in 4 sections: D4.7, D4.10, D13.18, E10.6
- 👑✍️📜🙏, in 4 sections: C3.18, C4.12, D13.3, E6.54
Most of these are the poem’s letters: the king takes up the pen, the scroll is written and the messenger rides. The Shahnameh conducts its wars as much by correspondence as by the sword, and the emoji make that visible at a glance.
Others before us
Retelling literature in pictures is not new. Emoji Dick, a crowd-sourced version of Moby-Dick made around 2010, was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2013, and the artist Xu Bing wrote a whole novel in pictograms, Book from the Ground. Emojiture differs in being complete, in following one consistent vocabulary through an entire work, and in staying tied, section by section, to the verse it distils.
A living edition
The emoji Shahnameh is an editorial work in progress, revised as each book receives a final close reading against the verse. If a symbol seems wrong to you, or you have a better one, write to the editor.