The play 'Heritage', written by Fatemeh Hassanvand and directed by Mahin Fardnava, will go on air in a radio program at 3 p.m. on the occasion of Ferdowsi Day. The play is about a boy who decides to return his grand father's manuscript 'Shahnameh' to the library.
Ferdowsi is famed for his magnum opus 'Shahnameh' (Book of Kings) which boasts significant status in Persian literature.
'Shahnameh' is an enormous national epic created around 1000 AD. Being the loaded canon of purely Persian lexis, the book is the epic narration of Iranian national identity, derived from the grace of an ancient culture along with the gentility of a poetic language.
Hakim Abolqasem Ferdowsi Tousi — a highly venerated Persian poet — was born in 940 AD in the city of Tous in northeastern Iran. 'Shahnameh' is Ferdowsi's only surviving work and is regarded as indisputably genuine. He may have written poems earlier in his life but they no longer exist. He wrote his great epic work during the Samanid and Ghaznavid eras.
According to Ferdowsi's own poem, he finished his masterpiece after 30 years of continuous work. An important feature of this work is that during the period that Arabic was the main language of science and literature, Ferdowsi used only Persian in his masterpiece. As Ferdowsi himself says "Persian language is revived in this work."
'Shahnameh' mainly narrates the mythical and, to some extent, the historical past of the Persian empire from the creation of the world until the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century.
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