 His adventurous life had already been treated by Ferdowsi in the Shahnameh, to which fact Nizami alludes a number of times.In general, his method is to omit those episodes that the earlier poet had treated, or to touch on them only very briefly, and to concentrate on new material.The poet starts by giving an account of the birth of Bahram and his upbringing in the court of the Arab king al-Nu'man and his fabled palace Khwarnaq.