Notes · Book A0The Prelude

A0.1Exordium

The poet opens in the name of the Lord of wisdom and mind, a Creator beyond name, place and imagining. Reason can confess that He exists, but it cannot describe Him.

In the name of Lord of wisdom and mind: Probably the most famous opening in Persian literature. The Persian, be nām-e khodāvand-e jān o kherad, names God as Lord of soul and of kherad: wisdom, or practical reason. Kherad is the poem’s keyword. Heroes and kings rise and fall in the Shahnameh according to whether they keep it.

Whoever has knowledge, also has the power: Tavānā bovad har ke dānā bovad. The half-line has become a Persian proverb, quoted by people who have never opened the poem. It has served generations of Iranian schoolchildren as a motto.

Thought only knows “He is” - and nothing more: The invocation is a small essay in negative theology. God can be affirmed but not described, because anything the mind can picture is less than God. Ferdowsi keeps this reticence throughout the poem: its God is never given a body, a voice or a face.

A0.2In Praise of Wisdom

A hymn to wisdom as God’s first and best gift. It is the eye of the mind, the guard at the three gates of eye, ear and tongue, and the only guide through joy and grief.

keeps three gates in line: Eye, ear and tongue are the soul’s three sentries. Everything good or harmful enters or leaves by them, and wisdom is the officer who keeps the watch. The image is a small piece of the ethical psychology that runs through Persian advice literature, from the Sasanian ‘books of counsel’ to Sa’di.

A0.3The Making of the World

Creation unfolds in order: the four elements, the turning heavens with their seven planets and twelve signs, then earth, plants and beasts. None of them yet has speech or reason.

At first, the elements were four and plain: Ferdowsi’s cosmology is the learned science of his day: Aristotle’s four elements and the concentric spheres of Ptolemy, as taught in the Islamic world. Fire rises, earth sinks, and the qualities hot, cold, wet and dry arise as the elements separate. The same poem that tells of a king riding the Devil opens with a textbook of natural philosophy, and Ferdowsi sees no contradiction.

No sense had they, nor faculty of mind: The ladder runs from minerals to plants, which grow; to animals, which move and feel; and finally to man, who speaks and reasons. It is the Neoplatonic ‘chain of being’ that later Persian poets, Rumi above all, would turn into a mystical ascent.

A0.4The Nature of Man

Man comes last in creation but first in worth: the key to a world that was a lock until he arrived. He is made from two worlds, and he should do good and watch the turning sphere that deals out fortune.

All things were formed, a lock without a key: The image of creation as a lock waiting for its key is Ferdowsi’s own, and a good one. Man is the last thing made, and the thing that makes sense of all the rest.

From two great worlds your nature has been raised: The two worlds are the material and the spiritual. Man is a ‘little world’, the microcosm that joins both. The idea was common to Greek, Islamic and Zoroastrian thought, which is one reason it sits so easily in this poem.

A0.5The Nature of the Sun

The sun rides the jeweled dome of heaven, lifting its golden shield each dawn and yielding to the night each dusk. Neither ever overtakes the other.

O Sun, what change has turned your light away: The chapter ends by turning suddenly to address the sun: why does it no longer shine on the poet? Many readers hear a double meaning. In Persian court poetry the king is the sun, so the line may be a veiled complaint that Ferdowsi’s royal patron had withdrawn his favor. Given the legend attached to Sultan Mahmud (see A0.7), the reading is hard to resist.

A0.6The Nature of the Moon

The moon lights the dark, vanishes for two nights, returns as a thin bent crescent, grows to full in fourteen days and wanes again. It keeps to the course its Lord has set.

Like one whom grief for love has bent in two: The new crescent as a lover bent double by longing is a stock image of Persian lyric. Ferdowsi uses it here with a scientist’s accuracy: the two moonless nights, the fourteen days of waxing and the drift back towards the sun are all correct.

A0.7Praise to the Prophet and His Companions

The poet praises the Prophet and the four caliphs, and declares his special devotion to Ali and the Prophet’s household. He pictures the world as a stormy sea in which only the ship bearing Muhammad and Ali will bring him safe to shore.

I am the city of all knowledge; know / That Ali is its gate: A saying attributed to the Prophet and especially loved by Shi’a Muslims. Ferdowsi praises all four caliphs, but his warmth for Ali and the Prophet’s household is unmistakable. It is usually taken as evidence that he was a Shi’a.

On it sail seventy great ships in all: The seventy ships echo a well-known hadith that the community would split into seventy-odd sects, only one of them saved. The bride-like ship carrying the Prophet, Ali and the Household draws on another Shi’a tradition, which calls the Household ‘the ship of Noah’: whoever boards it is saved.

If this displeases you, the fault is mine: A defiant line to put before a poem dedicated to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, a champion of Sunni orthodoxy. About a century after Ferdowsi’s death, Nezami Aruzi told the story that Mahmud’s courtiers turned him against the poet as a heretic. In that story Mahmud paid in silver instead of the promised gold, and Ferdowsi gave the silver away to a bath-keeper and a sherbet-seller. When the Sultan repented and sent the gold, it reached Tus as the poet’s coffin was carried out through another gate. The tale cannot be verified, but no reader of the Shahnameh ever forgets it.

A0.8Compiling the Shahnameh

The ancient stories of the kings lay scattered among the Mobadan until a Pahlevan of dehqan family gathered the old sages, heard their accounts and had them set down in one book.

Do not suppose these tales are empty lies: Ferdowsi’s defense of myth: what seems fable should be read for its meaning, as a symbol (ramz). It is worth remembering when Divs ride through the sky and kings live seven hundred years.

At last a Pahlevan of dehqan line: This is Abu Mansur Mohammad ibn Abd al-Razzaq, governor of Tus, who in 957 had the old histories gathered into a Persian prose ‘Book of Kings’. Its preface still survives, and it gives the names of the four men who compiled the work. That prose book, now lost, is generally held to be Ferdowsi’s main source.

And summoned aged Mobadan from each plain: The dehqans and Mobadan were the old landed gentry and the priests of pre-Islamic Iran. Three centuries after the Arab conquest they still kept the family memory of the Sasanian past. Ferdowsi’s poem is in a real sense their archive.

A0.9The Poet Dakiki

A gifted young poet set out to put the tales into verse, but his evil temper undid him, and a servant killed him before the work was done. The poet prays for his forgiveness.

Then by a servant’s hand his life was done: Daqiqi, a court poet of the Samanid kings, was murdered by one of his slaves while still young. He left about a thousand couplets on the reign of Goshtasb and the coming of Zoroaster. Ferdowsi later set them into his own poem, with due credit and some sharp criticism of their quality. Readers will meet them in Volume II (II, C6.2–C6.25).

A0.10The Inception of This Book

After Dakiki’s death the poet resolved to take up the work himself. He hesitated for lack of means and of a source, until a friend brought him the ancient book and urged him on.

As though one skin enclosed both him and me: The friend who brought the book is never named. The image of two friends sharing ‘one skin’ is Ferdowsi’s picture of perfect intimacy.

I have the Pahlavi book, written, stored: ‘Pahlavi’ here probably means ‘ancient, of the old Iranians’ rather than a book actually written in Middle Persian script. The book the friend brought is usually taken to be a copy of Abu Mansur’s prose compilation (A0.8).

A0.11Praise for Abu Mansur, Son of Mohammad

The poet remembers a young noble patron who supported him generously and then vanished, killed as if by nahangs. His last counsel was to offer the finished book to kings.

By man-killing nahangs his life was claimed: The patron’s disappearance is told in veiled language, which suggests a political killing. He is usually identified with Mansur, son of the Abu Mansur of A0.8, whose family fell victim to the rivalries of Samanid Khorasan. The nahang, a monster of the rivers and seas, stands in for enemies Ferdowsi preferred not to name.

As from a garden cypress leaves no trace: In Persian poetry the cypress stands for upright youth and beauty, and a cypress torn from the garden is a young man lost. The image will return many times in the poem, most painfully for Sohrab and Siavash.

A0.12Praise for Sultan Mahmud

The poet sees a dream-vision of a moon-like king on a turquoise throne whose rule runs from Rum to Hind. He praises Sultan Mahmud, his brother and the lord of Tus, and turns at last to his tale.

Abul-Qasim! this all-victorious king: Abul-Qasim was Mahmud’s honorific name, and by coincidence it was also Ferdowsi’s own. Mahmud of Ghazni (reigned 998–1030), the most powerful ruler of his day and famous for his raids into India, is the king to whom the finished poem was dedicated. Ferdowsi finished the Shahnameh in 1010, after some thirty years’ work.

Seven hundred elephants formed the leftward train: Mahmud’s war elephants, brought from his Indian campaigns, were a famous sight of his reign. The dream-vision flatters the Sultan with his most celebrated military asset.

His father bore the Nasir al-Din name: Nasir al-Din (‘Helper of the Faith’) was the title of Sebuktigin, Mahmud’s father and founder of the Ghaznavid dynasty. The brother praised just before him is usually identified as Nasr, Mahmud’s commander in Khorasan. The ‘lord of Tus’ who follows was the governor of the poet’s own city.

At one same water wolf and lamb may share: The wolf and the lamb drinking from one stream is the classic image of perfect justice under a strong king. It is common to Persian and biblical tradition alike.