Ferdowsi

Guest Post

Ecumenism and Globalism in the Reception of Ferdowsi and his Book of Kings: Evidence from the Bāysonghori Preface

2020.03.02 | By Olga M. Davidson The focus here is on two Persianate texts. The first is the monumental poem of a poet retrospectively named Ferdowsi, or ‘man of paradise’, who lived in the late 10th and early 11th century CE. The second text is in prose: it is a comparably monumental preface to a lavish new edition of the Shahnama that was commissioned in 1426 CE and published in… Read more

By Gregory Nagy

Disintegration and Reintegration

2017.01.26 | By Gregory Nagy, Keith Stone, and Lanah Koelle Notes from a conversation at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki on January 20, 2017 Read more

Literature

The rhetoric of national literature in the shaping of the lives of poets

2015.12.18 | By Gregory Nagy The combined research of Nagy and Davidson on ancient “Life of Homer” and medieval “Life of Ferdowsi” narratives respectively has shown that the traditional “biographies” about these two poets, as transmitted by a vast variety of communities, can be studied as sources of historical information about the reception of Homer and Ferdowsi. Read more

Guest Post

Life of Ferdowsi myths as evidence for the reception of Ferdowsi

2015.12.17 | By Olga Davidson In a previous study, I argued that the historicized narrative of the so-called Older Preface to the Shahnama of Ferdowsi is strikingly parallel to Ferdowsi’s own poeticized narrative concerning the genesis of the Book of Kings. In the present study, I make a parallel argument with regard to the Bâysonghori Preface. This text is the preface to the Bâysonghori Shahnama, a fifteenth century manuscript commissioned… Read more