Ferdowsi's birth anniversary being celebrated today

TEHRAN: To mark the birthday anniversary Iranians to commemorate Abolqassem Ferdowsi paying tribute to great epic poet as May 14 is celebrated as Ferdowsi Day.

According to a report published in Iran Daily today several organizations are conducting elaborate programs to across the country to remember the poet who written the history of Persia.

Ferdowsi was born in Tus, a town in North Eastern Iran, in the province of Khorasan and with the passage of time become a renowned poet. He was given the job by the King to write the history of Persia. He wrote ‘Shahnameh’ (Book of Kings) wish boosts significant status in Persian literature.

'Shahnameh' is an enormous national epic created around 1000 AD. Being the loaded canon of purely Persian lexis, the book is the epic narration of Iranian national identity, derived from the grace of an ancient culture along with the gentility of a poetic language.

'Shahnameh' is Ferdowsi's only surviving work and is regarded as indisputably genuine. He may have written poems earlier in his life but they no longer exist. He wrote his great epic work during the Samanid and Ghaznavid eras.

According to Ferdowsi's own poem, he finished his masterpiece after 30 years of continuous work. An important feature of this work is that during the period that Arabic was the main language of science and literature, Ferdowsi used only Persian in his masterpiece.

As Ferdowsi himself says "Persian language is revived in this work."

'Shahnameh' mainly narrates the mythical and, to some extent, the historical past of the Persian Empire from the creation of the world until the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century.