Sohrab and Rustem: The death of Sohrab (Iranian painting) Where did this story come from? This story is probably an old Indo-European story that Persian people told even before they moved south into Iran [...]
Florence, Italy Who was Boccaccio? Most of the people who knew how to write in the early Middle Ages were monks. So most of them wrote about serious things like God and [...]
Death of Iskandar (Alexander), from the Great Mongol Shahnameh (Iran, 1330s AD) In the 900s AD, Central Asia was the most civilized part of the world. The universities and libraries of [...]
The Devil carries Rostem Like Odysseus or Anansi, Monkey or Br'er Rabbit, the Iranian hero Rustem was a trickster. He uses quick thinking to get out of this fix: Once when he was sleeping alone outside [...]
Rustem kills the treacherous Shaghad When he was an old, old man, Rustem really did die (according to the story in the Shahnameh). Rustem died from treachery and betrayal, by his [...]
Rudaba lets down her hair A story from the Shahnameh Rudaba's name means "The River Water Girl". She was a character in the Persian epic Shahnameh, written by the poet Ferdowsi [...]
Arabic language: Sabataean writing Where did Arabic come from? Arabic is in the Semitic language group. Semitic languages seem to have gotten started before the beginning of writing. That would be before [...]
A page from Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, from Herat, Afghanistan, about 1444 AD. Now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Islamic historians began by translating Greek historians like Herodotus and Thucydides into Arabic. But soon historians wrote in [...]
