[3][4][5] It tells mainly the mythical and to some extent the historical past of the Persian Empire from the creation of the world until the Muslim conquest in the seventh century.

Iran, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and the greater region influenced by Persian culture such as Armenia, Dagestan, Georgia, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan celebrate this national epic.

[8] The Shahnameh is a monument of poetry and historiography, being mainly the poetical recast of what Ferdowsi, his contemporaries, and his predecessors regarded as the account of Iran's ancient history.

The first to undertake the versification of the Pahlavi chronicle was Daqiqi, a contemporary of Ferdowsi, poet at the court of the Samanid Empire, who came to a violent end after completing only 1,000 verses.

A great portion of the historical chronicles given in Shahnameh is based on this epic and there are in fact various phrases and words which can be matched between Ferdowsi's poem and this source, according to Zabihollah Safa.

[11] Traditional historiography in Iran holds that Ferdowsi was grieved by the fall of the Sasanian Empire and its subsequent rule by Arabs and Turks.

The Shahnameh, the argument goes, is largely his effort to preserve the memory of Persia's golden days and transmit it to a new generation, so that, by learning from it, they could acquire the knowledge needed to build a better world.

[12] Although most scholars have contended that Ferdowsi's main concern was the preservation of the pre-Islamic legacy of myth and history, a number of authors have formally challenged this view.

[13] This portion of the Shahnameh is relatively short, amounting to some 2100 verses or four percent of the entire book, and it narrates events with the simplicity, predictability, and swiftness of a historical work.

Stories of Tahmuras, Jamshid, Zahhak, Kawa or Kaveh, Fereydun and his three sons Salm, Tur, and Iraj, and his grandson Manuchehr are related in this section.

According to Jalal Khaleghi Mutlaq, the Shahnameh teaches a wide variety of moral virtues, like worship of one God; religious uprightness; patriotism; love of wife, family and children; and helping the poor.

[19] According to the Turkish historian Mehmet Fuat Köprülü: Indeed, despite all claims to the contrary, there is no question that Persian influence was paramount among the Seljuks of Anatolia.

[21] After defeating Muhammad Shaybani's Uzbeks, Ismail asked Hatefi, a famous poet from Jam (Khorasan), to write a Shahnameh-like epic about his victories and his newly established dynasty.

...The Šāh-nāma was translated, not only to satisfy the literary and aesthetic needs of readers and listeners, but also to inspire the young with the spirit of heroism and Georgian patriotism.

Ferdowsi, together with Nezāmi, may have left the most enduring imprint on Georgian literature (...)[25]Despite a belief held by some, the Turanian of Shahnameh (whose sources are based on Avesta and Pahlavi texts) have no relationship with Turks.

[26] Turan, which is the Persian name for the areas of Central Asia beyond the Oxus up to the 7th century (where the story of the Shahnameh ends), was generally an Iranian-speaking land.

The Turks were so much influenced by this cycle of stories that in the eleventh century AD we find the Qarakhanid dynasty in Central Asia calling itself the 'family of Afrasiyab' and so it is known in the Islamic history.

[29] According to Ibn Bibi, 1221[clarification needed] the Seljuk sultan of Rum Ala' al-Din Kay-kubad decorated the walls of Konya and Sivas with verses from the Shahnameh.

[31] Ferdowsi concludes the Shahnameh by writing: I've reached the end of this great history And all the land will talk of me: I shall not die, these seeds I've sown will save My name and reputation from the grave, And men of sense and wisdom will proclaim

Goethe wrote: When we turn our attention to a peaceful, civilized people, the Persians, we must—since it was actually their poetry that inspired this work—go back to the earliest period to be able to understand more recent times.

It will always seem strange to the historians that no matter how many times a country has been conquered, subjugated and even destroyed by enemies, there is always a certain national core preserved in its character, and before you know it, there re-emerges a long-familiar native phenomenon.

[50] The Baysonghori Shahnameh, an illuminated manuscript copy of the work (Golestan Palace, Iran), is included in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register of cultural heritage items.

[61] Many of the extant illustrated copies, with more than seventy or more paintings, are attributable to Tabriz, Shiraz, and Baghdad beginning in about the 1450s–60s and continuing to the end of the century.

[66] The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC also hosted an exhibition of folios from the 14th through the 16th centuries, called "Shahnama: 1000 Years of the Persian Book of Kings", from October 2010 to April 2011.

Between 1877 and 1884, the German scholar Johann August Vullers prepared a synthesized text of the Macan and Mohl editions under the title Firdusii liber regum, but only three of its expected nine volumes were published.

The Vullers edition was later completed in Tehran by the Iranian scholars S. Nafisi, Iqbal, and M. Minowi for the millennial jubilee of Ferdowsi, held between 1934 and 1936.

According to Dick Davis, professor of Persian at Ohio State University, it is "by far the best edition of the Shahnameh available, and it is surely likely to remain such for a very long time".

[72] The only known Arabic translation of the Shahnameh was done in c. 1220 by al-Fath bin Ali al-Bundari, a Persian scholar from Isfahan and at the request of the Ayyubid ruler of Damascus Al-Mu'azzam Isa.

This modern edition was based on incomplete and largely imprecise fragmented copies found in Cambridge, Paris, Astana, Cairo and Berlin.

[citation needed] A Spanish translation was published in two volumes by the Islamic Research Institute of the Tehran Branch of McGill University.