The Verses Ferdowsi Did Not Write Himself

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Ferdowsi was not the first poet to attempt Iran's national epic. A predecessor named Daqiqi had already begun versifying the old Pahlavi prose chronicle, the Khwaday-Namag, when he was killed, reportedly by his own slave, having completed only about a thousand verses. Those verses covered one specific episode: the reign of the legendary king Gushtasp and the arrival of the prophet Zoroaster, who converts the king and, in the poem's telling, sets off a war between Iran and its neighbor Turan over the new faith. Rather than compose his own version of that episode, Ferdowsi took Daqiqi's thousand verses whole and wove them into the Shahnameh with explicit acknowledgment of their authorship, an unusual act of credit in a genre not known for it. The result is that the Shahnameh's account of Zoroaster's own mission, arguably the poem's most directly religious episode, was not written by Ferdowsi at all. It is preserved because Ferdowsi chose preservation over authorship, telling later readers, in his own preface to the borrowed lines, that he had done so in tribute to a poet whose work deserved to survive him. The episode is now inseparable from the Shahnameh as we have it, but its actual author died before the epic that carries his verses was ever finished.