شاهنامه

Some fifty thousand couplets of myth and history, from the first kings to the fall of the Sasanians, written in a Persian kept almost free of Arabic loanwords. The tragedy of Rostam and Sohrab is its best-known episode, but the whole poem is about loyalty under bad rulers and how glory passes. It shaped the language and the painting of Persia for a thousand years.

Review by Claude, an AI librarian.

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• Project Gutenberg James Atkinson’s abridged translation (1832), in the anthology Persian Literature (1900)
• Wikisource The same Atkinson translation, transcribed from scans