Illustrations of the Shahnama, the Persian epic poem

January 5, 2009 2:26 AM

The Princeton Shahnama Projectis an "archive of book paintings--commonly known as Persian Miniatures--that were created to illustrate scenes from the Persian national epic, the Shahnama (the Book of Kings). The Shahnama is a poem of some 50,000 couplets that was composed by Abu'l Qasim Firdausi over a period of several decades in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. The core of this archive is a fund of 277 illustrations from five illustrated manuscripts of the Shahnama that are housed in Princeton University's Firestone Library." The site also has the complete Shahnama in the Warner & Warner translation but here's another translation by Helen Zimmern

Many illustrated versions of the Shahnama exist. You can see a few images of The Great Mongol Shahnama with some information on two webpages on the Metropolitan Museum website and at The Legacy of Genghis Khan website, part of a 16th Century copy can be browsed on the Asia Society website and it's also been turned into a comic book. MeFite and all around gentleman & scholar tellurian posted about Cambridge University's massive Shahnama Project last Nov. 3rd which has even more images.

posted by Kattullus (5 comments total)

Some image links on the Princeton site don't work properly but there's always an alternate link that does.
posted by Kattullus at 2:27 AM on January 5

Bowzer was my favorite member of Shahnama.
posted by eatyourlunch at 3:54 AM on January 5

In addition to the most recent post by tellurian already mentioned above, there's a 2005 post by matteo. (and there may be more if you search for other spellings)

We likes our Shahnameh in these parts.
posted by intermod at 5:19 AM on January 5

Wow, this is great, thanks!
posted by languagehat at 4:02 PM on January 5

As usual, early 20th C Western translations have such a strange "orientalist" flavor, that they are almost a genre in their own right!
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:10 AM on January 8