Almost since its creation in the 10th century by Ferdowsi, a wealthy patriotic landowner in the North-West of modern Iran, this poem has been perceived as a symbol of Iranian national and cultural identity. Being the longest poem ever written by a single author in the whole history of humankind, it contains ancient stories about such universal human phenomena as love and betrayal, death, and the search for the meaning of life.
Several tales in the Shahnameh correlate with many popular stories, native to other cultural traditions: from Ancient Egypt to Europe, and Asia.
The narrative starts from the creation of the world and ends with the Arab invasion in the 7th century. This is why the Shahnameh is often identified as the most comprehensive compendium of Iranian cosmological and anthropological myths, or the Encyclopaedia of Persian culture, or even the Persian Bible.
During more than a millennium of its existence its most popular stories have been used to teach younger generations what is good and what is evil, constantly modernising the ancient legends and their protagonists, making them always alive and contemporary, whenever they have been created - either in the 15th or in the 21st century.
This has been happening less to the text and more to its visual interpretations, which is the secret of the eternal life of the great epic. From the last century illustrating the Shahnameh has been spreading unstoppably throughout all well-known and new media: from traditional book illustration to monumental painting, murals. sculpture, cinema, photography, drama, puppet theatre, symphonic and pop music, opera, ballet, digital art, video games and AI.