Persian poet, author of the Shah-nameh ("Book of Kings"), the Persian national epic, to which he gave its final and enduring form, although he based his poem mainly on an earlier prose version.

Ferdowsi was born in a village on the outskirts of the ancient city of Toos In the course of the centuries many legends have been woven around the poet's name but very little is known about the real facts of his life. The only reliable source is given by Nezami-ye 'Aruzi, a 12th-century poet who visited Ferdowsi's tomb in 1116 or 1117 and collected the traditions that were current in his birthplace less than a century after his death.

According to Nezami, Ferdowsi was a dehqan ("landowner"), deriving a comfortable income from his estates. He had only one child, a daughter, and it was to provide her with a dowry that he set his hand to the task that was to occupy him for 35 years. The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, a poem of nearly 60,000 couplets, is based mainly on a prose work of the same name compiled in the poet's early manhood in his native Toos. This prose Shahnameh was in turn and for the most part the translation of a Pahlavi (Middle Persian) work, the Khvatay-namak, a history of the kings of Persia from mythical times down to the reign of Khosrow II (590-628), but it also contained additional material continuing the story to the overthrow of the Sasanians by the Arabs in the middle of the 7th century. The first to undertake the versification of this chronicle of pre-Islamic and legendary Persia was Daqiqi, a poet at the court of the Samanids, who came to a violent end after completing only 1,000 verses. These verses, which deal with the rise of the prophet Zoroaster, were afterward incorporated by Ferdowsi, with due acknowledgments, in his own poem.

The Shahnameh, finally completed in 1010. Nezami does not mention the date of Ferdowsi's death. The earliest date given by later authorities is 1020 and The latest 1026; it is certain that he lived to be more than 80.

The Persians regard Ferdowsi as the greatest of their poets. For nearly a thousand years they have continued to read and to listen to recitations from his masterwork, the Shahnameh, in which the Persian national epic found its final and enduring form. Though written about 1,000 years ago, this work is as intelligible to the average, modern Iranian as the King James version of the Bible is to a modern English-speaker.

The language, based as the poem is on a Pahlavi original, is pure Persian with only the slightest admixture of Arabic. European scholars have criticized this enormous poem for what they have regarded as its monotonous metre, its constant repetitions, and its stereotyped similes; but to the Iranian it is the history of his country's glorious past, preserved for all time in sonorous and majestic verse.