Abolqasem Ferdowsi (c. 940–1020) was a Persian poet born near Tus, in the Khorasan region of present-day Iran. Over roughly three decades he composed the Shahnameh (Book of Kings), an epic running to nearly 60,000 couplets that ranks among the longest poems by a single author in world literature. Ferdowsi wrote at a time when Arabic dominated literary culture, and he composed the work in Persian with minimal Arabic admixture. He was credited with preserving the Persian language, and the Shahnameh remained foundational to Persian cultural identity across Iran and Central Asia.
