The cult of Feedowsi The Iranians spoke Farsi anyway.Tha national languages has been Arabized to some extent

But Old Persian remains at its root.The man credited with helping save the languages,and the history,from oblivion is a tenth-century poet named Ferdowsi.Frerdowsi is Iran's Homer.Iranians idolize their poets-among many,Rumi,Said,Omar Khayyam,Hafez whose works are said to be consulted for guidence about love and life as much as,if not more than,the Islamic holy book,the Koran.When the people were oppressed by the latest invader and couldn't safety speak their minds,the poets did it for them,cleverly disguised in verse.Sometimes they were executed.said Youssef the archaeologist,but they did it anyway.So today,although Iran is home to many cultural denominations and languages other than Persian-Turkman,Arab,Azeri,Baluchi,Kurd,and others-everyone can speak Farsi,he said,which is one of the oldest living languages in the world.The people hero-Ferdowsi,a sincere Muslim who resented the Arab influence,spent 30 years writing,in verse with minimal use of Arabic-derived words,an epic history of Iran called the Shahnameh,or Book of kings.This panorama of conflict and adventure chronicles 50 monarchies-their accessions to the throne,their deaths,the frequent abdications and forcible overthrows-and ends with the Arab conquest,depicted as a disaster.The most heralded character is Rostam,a chivalrous figure of courage and integrity,a nation savior and trickster hero,according to Dick Davis,a Persian scholar at Ohio State University who has translated the Shahnameh into English.The stories of Rostam are their myths,he said.This is how the Iranians see themselves.



The tales involve feuding kings and hero champions,in which the latter are almost always represented as ethically superior to the king they serve,facing the dilemmas of good men living under an evil or incompetent government.The work is haunted by the idea that those ethically most fitted to rule are precisely the ones mose relcutant to rule,preferring instead to devote themselves to humankind's chief concerns,the nature of wisdom,the fate of the human soul,and the incomprehensibility of God's purposes.The original Shahnameh is long gone,and all that's left are copies,including one in Tehran's Golestan Palace museum.Its caretaker,a sweet-faced young woman named Behnaz Tabrizi,cleared a large table and covered it with a green felt sheet.She retrieved a black box from a safe in an adjoining bulletproof room equipped with fire and earthquake alarms and climate control and laid a red velet cloth on top of the green felt cloth,because the Iranians like to make little ceremonies out of everything,if they can.I had to wear a sirgical mask to protect the manuscript from stray saliva and the condensation from my breath,and Behnaz put on white cotton gloves.She gently lifted the book,which dates to about 1430,out of its box and gingerly turned the pages with the tips of her fingers while I examined its illustrations with a magnifying glass.They depicted scenes the collective cultural memory is steeped in- someone tied to a tree while awaiting his fate,Rostam unwrittingly killing his own son,Sohrab,in battle,men on horseback with spears fighting invaders on elephants-all precisely drawn and vibrantly colored,using inks that were made from crushed stones mixed with the liquid squeezed from flower petals.




It is said that just about anybody on the street.regardless of education,can recite some Ferdowsi,and there are usually readings going on at colleges or someone's apartment or traditional Persian teahouses,like one in south Teharn called Azari.The walls were covered with scenes from the the Shahnameh,among them the one of Rostam killing Sohrab.A storyteller did a one man dramatic reading, and afterward musicians played traditional music and sang about yearning for the love of a women or for the love of Allah.People sat together at long tables or stretched out on platforms covered with Persian rugs,smoking their tiny Bahman cigarettes and clapping to the music,while waiters brought dates and cookies and tea in delicate little glasses with little spoons,followed by kebabs,yogurt milk,pickles,and beet salad.Children danced on the tabletops as the patrons cheered them on and took pictures with their cell phones.