Abstract
TheShahnameh(Shāhnāmih,Book of kings) functioned as a foundational text for Persian readers on the Iranian plateau, in Central Asia, and Southwest Asia since shortly after its appearance at the Samanid court in various prose and verse renditions in the tenth century. Majestically versified by Ferdowsi in 1010, the poem spread with the Persian language, Persianate bureaucratic institutions, and Persian/Near Eastern kingship into South Asia and Anatolia from its matrix in Khorasan (Marv, Bukhara, Samarqand, Balkh, and Tus, in what is now Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Iran) to become not only a regional but a global text by the nineteenth century. Although its international appeal waned somewhat in the early twentieth century because of certain political developments, with new translations it has once again taken its place as a work of world literature with enduring themes, elegantly and concisely expressed, with great psychological depth and insight, that repays reading and rereading.
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