This volume explores different aspects of the reception of Firdausi’s Shahnama or ‘Book of Kings’, both within Iran and in neighbouring lands. Later poets and writers not only looked to Firdausi’s work for a model, but supplemented its stories with other narratives or absorbed the characters and the moral values of the poem into their own works. Several chapters focus on the literary traditions fed by the Shahnama, including reports of the continuing oral performances of its more popular stories. Others discuss Firdausi’s impact on the creative imagination of the miniature painters who illustrated manuscript copies of the Shahnama in the courts of the Ottoman Empire, Moghul India, and the Central Asia Khanates up till the seventeenth century.
Author(s): Charles Melville, Gabrielle van den Berg
Series: Studies in Persian Cultural History 2
Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers
Year: 2012
Language: English
Pages: xxii+CP26+316
Introduction
Part I: The reception of the Shahnama: later epics
Julia Rubanovich: Tracking the Shahnama Tradition in Medieval Persian Folk Prose
Gabrielle van den Berg: Demons in the Persian Epic Cycle: The Div Shabrang in the Leiden Shabrangnama and in Shahnama Manuscripts
Marjolijn van Zutphen: Faramarz’s Expedition to Qannuj and Khargah: Mutual Influences of the Shahnama and the Longer Faramarznama
Olga Yastrebova: The Influence of the Shahnama in the Extended Version of Arday Virafnama by Zartusht Bahram
Francesca Leoni: Picturing Evil: Images of Divs and the Reception of the Shahnama
Part II: The Shahnama in neighbouring lands
Jan Schmidt: The Reception of Firdausi’s Shahnama Among the Ottomans
Zeren Tanındı: The Illustration of the Shahnama and the Art of the Book in Ottoman Turkey
Lâle Uluç: The Shahnama of Firdausi in the Lands of Rum
Adeela Qureshi: Bahram’s Feat of Hunting Dexterity as Illustrated in Firdausi’s Shahnama, Nizami’s Haft Paikar and Amir Khusrau’s Hasht Bihisht
Karin Ruehrdanz: The Samarqand Shahnamas in the Context of Dynastic Change
Part III: Manuscript studies
Farhad Mehran: Mapping Illustrated Folios of Shahnama Manuscripts: The Concept and Its Uses
Bilha Moor: Shahnama Kings and Heroes in ‘Aja’ib al-Makhluqat Illustrated Manuscripts
Part IV: Oral tradit ions: field reports
Ivan Steblin-Kamensky: Sistani Legends about Rustam and his Descendants
Ravshan Rahmoni: The Oral Variant of the Story of Barzu Amongst the Tajiks of Boysun
Evangelos Venetis: The Shahnama Oral Tradition in Contemporary Iran: The Cases of Firuzkuh and Khurasan
