Firdawsi’s Shahnama in its Ghaznavid context
View/ Open
Date
2018Author
Keywords
Metadata
Show full item recordAltmetrics Handle Statistics
Altmetrics DOI Statistics
Abstract
Firdawsi’s Shahnama, the completion of which is traditionally to around 400/1010, is generally thought to have been a failure at first. It is said by both traditional accounts and much modern scholarship to have been rejected by its dedicatee Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, and its contents of ancient Iranian legends, transmitted from earlier sources, are widely considered to have been out of step with the literary tastes of the Ghaznavid period. This article reassesses the reception of the Shahnama in the Ghaznavid period, arguing that evidence suggests neither its style nor contents were outdated, and that its tales of ancient Iranian heroes had a great contemporary relevance in the context of the Ghaznavid court’s identification of the dynasty as the heir to ancient Iran. The extent to which Firdawsi can be shown to have relied on pre-Islamic sources is also reevaluated
Citation
Peacock , A C S 2018 , ' Firdawsi’s Shahnama in its Ghaznavid context ' , Iran: Journal of British Institute of Persian Studies , vol. 56 , no. 1 , pp. 2-12 . https://doi.org/10.1080/05786967.2018.1426195
Publication
Iran: Journal of British Institute of Persian Studies
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0578-6967Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2018 British Institute of Persian Studies. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created accepted version manuscript following peer review and as such may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1080/05786967.2018.1426195
Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.