Shahnameh Festival 2012 at UCI & Irvine Barclay Theatre

Shahnameh or the Book of Kings is the single most important work ever written on Iranian identity and history in the Persian language. The epic was composed in verse in the tenth century CE by a landed gentry from  Khurasan by the name of Abolghasem Ferdowsi. Ferdowsi spent thirty years of his life putting this epic to verse, sometimes relying on his own wealth, in order to preserve the history of the Iranian people for the posterity . The Shahnameh tells the traditional narrative of Iran’s history, from a time immemorial to the Muslim conquest in the seventh century CE. The book was inspired by, and received its historical information through, intermediary sources such as the Sasanian royal history, known as the Khwaday-namag (Book of lords). Indeed the Shahnameh is a very Iranian view of the world and its ancient history.