Which Persian poet wrote the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings?

Ferdowsi spent about thirty years on the Shahnameh and finished it around 1010, some fifty thousand couplets covering Persia from the creation of the world to the Arab conquest. It is roughly twice the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey put together, and it is the work of one man.

Its importance is not only literary. Ferdowsi wrote in Persian at a moment when Arabic was the language of administration, learning and prestige across the Islamic world, and he used strikingly little Arabic vocabulary in doing it. Persians have credited him ever since with keeping the language alive as a vehicle for serious writing - there is a line often attributed to him about having laboured thirty years to revive the Persians with this Persian.

The best of it is not the kings. It is Rostam, the great hero, and above all the story of Rostam and Sohrab: father and son meet as champions of opposing armies, neither knowing the other, and the father kills the son and learns who he was only as he dies. Matthew Arnold turned it into an English poem; it does not need the help.

The story of its reception is almost too neat. Ferdowsi presented the work to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, who had reportedly promised a gold coin a couplet and paid in silver. The poet is said to have given the money away on the spot and left. When the gold finally arrived, the tale goes, his funeral procession was leaving by the opposite gate.