For example, only one story in the Shahnameh about Prince Siyavush brings so many layers of cultural diversity and multinational interaction. The name of Siyavush, or Siyah-ash means someone who possesses a black horse, was originally of Sogdian origin. Ancient Sogdiana had its capital around Samarkand, which is now in modern Uzbekistan. In those days this was - as the Greeks called it - Transoxiana, or the Arabs - Ma wara an-nahr - which means the land behind the river, and the river was the Oxus, Amu-Darya. That was the region which was a true melting pot of various cultures and civilisations, where long before the arrival of Islam the Hellenistic traditions were influenced by Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and other local beliefs. In Sogdian culture, which was an artery of the famous Silk Road, Siyavush had the same role as for example Osiris in Ancient Egypt - who personified the idea of eternal nature, dying annually in autumn and reviving in spring.
The proof for this is that in the Shahnameh he is the only character out of hundreds who is executed in the most unique way. As a result of a treacherous plot he is beheaded - of course there is nothing special about that in those days - but he is the only one who in the medieval manuscripts is depicted during his execution with a gold basin under his neck so that his blood would not touch the ground, and he would never have a chance to resurrect.
In the Shahnameh he is already a protagonist of another legend - when his stepmother Queen Sudabeh unsuccessfully tried to seduce him. This story, which exists in most literary cultures in the world, is about a mature noble lady, or even a goddess who falls in love with a younger man of a lower status. Christians are familiar with it from the Bible - it is the famous legend about Joseph and the wife of Potiphar. Muslims know it from the Qur’an as it is mentioned in Sura 12 Yusuf. In the Islamic tradition the lady already has a name - Zulaykha. In Classical literature we have a myth about Phaedra and Hippolytus in Greece, or Venus and Adonis in Rome. The earliest known version is mentioned in a papyrus from Ancient Egypt, and among the latest - I can mention the novels by Thomas Mann, Marina Tsvetaeva, or the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
This story was even more popular among artists, who have been illustrating these episodes in Persian literature or the Bible - from Behzad to Rembrandt.
There are quite a few such wandering stories in the Shahnameh that are universal for all mankind, linking past and present, East and West. Their modernised visual interpretations that are being created by our contemporaries prove that Shahnameh and its ideas having survived the first millennium will certainly live forever.