I hesitate to say a popular audience: perhaps no medieval literary artefact, from any culture, can have a truly popular existence now. My aim in translating the Shahnameh was not to produce a text for scholars, but to make it available to a wide non-specialist audience. Most of all, what makes me feel assured that this is the best way to read the Shahnameh is something Davis says in his introduction: Given the praise Davis has received from people who would know, such as The Kite Runner author Khaled Hosseini, it would appear that Davis has achieved an effective compromise. So an edition that provides the essence of the epic, without taking months out of your life, is the only realistic option for the modern English reader. The original Shahnameh is composed of 50,000 22-syllable lines and is usually presented in nine separate volumes. There is a part of me that bristles at the thought of edited or abridged versions of classics, but one must be realistic. It contains some wonderful illustrations, taken from lithographs from popular 19th century editions. This version that I read is a Penguin Deluxe Classics edition of the epic, translated and edited by Dick Davis. It has been described as one of the world’s great works of literature but one least well-known to the English-speaking world. It chronicles Persia’s legendary and historical past, through the lives of its kings, from the creation of the world to the seventh-century Arab conquest that brought Islam to Persia. The Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings, is an epic poem composed by Abolqasem Ferdowsi in the late-tenth century, early-eleventh century.

Abolqasem ferdowsi shahnameh