Firdawsi

Abu'l-Qasim Firdawsi of Tus (c. 940–c. 1020) was a Persian poet, the author of the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, the national epic of Iran. A landowner of the old gentry of Khorasan, he spent some thirty years composing its roughly fifty thousand couplets, which tell the history of Iran from the creation of the world and the first kings through the age of heroes such as Rustam to the Arab conquest. He completed it around 1010 and presented it to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, who, according to legend, rewarded him so poorly that Firdawsi answered with a satire. His poem helped preserve the Persian language.