Iran: Battle scene from Firdausi's 'Shah Nama', c. 1450

Miniature from a copy of Firdawsi's Shah-nama. 'The Battle Between Kay Khusraw and the King of Makran'. The Shahnameh or Shah-nama (Persian: 'The Book of Kings') is an enormous poetic opus written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi around 1000 AD and is the national epic of the cultural sphere of Greater Persia. Consisting of some 60,000 verses, the Shahnameh tells the mythical and historical past of Iran from the creation of the world until the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century. The work is of central importance in Persian culture, regarded as a literary masterpiece, and definitive of ethno-national cultural identity of Iran. It is also important to the contemporary adherents of Zoroastrianism, in that it traces the historical links between the beginnings of the religion with the death of the last Zoroastrian ruler of Persia during the Muslim conquest.