A prominent researcher of Persian language and literature says that the Iranian masterpiece, Shahnameh, greatly impacted on other literary works throughout centuries. “Ferdowsi’s works were so great that successive rulers wanted to commission copies of them. Commercially there were also great demands from other countries for the Book of King,” Charles Melville, from the Cambridge University, told IRNA.
Speaking on the occasion of May 15 Ferdowsi Commemoration Day, which is celebrated annually in Iran and other parts of the world, Melville highlighted the masterpiece of this great Iranian poet who lived during 935 and 1020 in the north-eastern city of Tous, Khorasan.
May 15 this year also coincided with the 1,000th anniversary of the compilation of Shahnameh, the Book of King. This event was marked in Oxford University last week. A bust of Ferdowsi was also unveiled in Wadham College’s Ferdowsi Library by the Iranian ambassador to Britain, Rasoul Movahhedian.
Melville, who is the project director of Shahnameh Project, told IRNA the masterpiece “encouraged us to launch a project to collect whatever is related to Shahnameh-- the longest poem ever written by a single author”.
The Shahnameh Project is devoted to the study of Shahnameh as epic poetry, the core text in the history of Persian book production, an important element in court patronage and the vehicle for the development of Persian miniature painting.“Above all, it encapsulates and expresses, as no other work of Persian literature is able to, the Iranians’ view of themselves and their traditional cultural and political values,” he said.
Melville added that the Book of King is interesting from the view of art, history, language and literature all together.
“We have been working on Ferdowsi for more than 10 years. We have collected thousands of paintings and manuscripts of Shahnameh from Iran, Russia and America to make a resource for researchers who can search them on our website without travelling thousands of miles,” he said. Researchers can also get statistical information about the 15,000 manuscripts and paintings dating back to the 10th century.
One of the most important specifications of this project, according to Melville , is that researchers can compare the texts of the poems with the image portrayed by painters afterwards.
The next phase of the Shahnameh Project is to make the website useful for educational purposes. “We also seek to expand this project to other prominent figures of the Persian language and literature such as Nezami Ganjavi. We want to make a complete database of the Persian literature, manuscripts and painting.”
“It has been a wonderful chance to see many amazing manuscripts which were not known at all. We also made a lot of discoveries by studying the manuscripts.” Shahnameh contains approximately 50,000 verses, and is generally divided into mythical, legendary and historical sections, reflecting the rich Iranian culture and traditions.
London, May 13, IRNA
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