Ferdowsi

Abolqasem Ferdowsi spent thirty years composing the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings — nearly fifty thousand couplets that carry Iran’s mythology, history, and moral imagination across a thousand years. He wrote it in almost pure Persian at a moment when the language itself was in danger of being lost.

When Ferdowsi wrote “I revived the Persians with this Persian tongue,” he performed the same act this calendar performs: refusing an erasure and restoring a nation’s memory.