Shāhnāmah-yi Firdawsī: Tasḥīḥ-i Intiqādī va Sharḥ-i Yikāyik Abīyāt (Daftar-i Yikkum) Persiska (Farsi) 2024

The book Shahnameh of Ferdowsi: A Critical Edition and Verse-by-Verse Commentary presents the complete text of the Shahnameh alongside a detailed, line-by-line exegesis. The text has been critically established on the basis of the most important and earliest surviving manuscripts—including those held in the British Library, Florence, Saint Joseph University of Beirut, the Vatican, and other معتبر collections—as well as through careful examination of previous printed editions. Notably, the recension attributed to Hamdallah Mostowfi has, for the first time, been subjected to sustained scholarly analysis in this study. The commentary section analyzes each verse from multiple perspectives: the meanings of words and compounds; idiomatic and metaphorical expressions; etymological discussions; thematic concerns; narrative events and characters; and comparative evaluation with both contemporaneous and later texts. A clear paraphrase of each verse is provided at the end, enabling readers to engage with the text both literarily and analytically. Among the book’s additional significant features are references to the early seventh-century Arabic translation of the Shahnameh by Fath ibn ‘Ali Bandari Isfahani; mention of the English verse translation by the Warner brothers; extensive lexical indices (including Old Iranian, Avestan, Parthian and Sasanian Pahlavi, Arabic, and other languages); indexes of names and places; a verse concordance; and a comprehensive bibliography. This work constitutes a comprehensive scholarly resource for students, researchers, and serious readers of the Shahnameh. It approaches the epic not merely as a literary masterpiece, but as a linguistic, mythological, and historical document, reexamined with rigorous academic precision.
Volume One of this series, prepared by Mehri Behfar, offers a critical edition and comprehensive verse-by-verse commentary on this monumental work. Based on the most authoritative and widely recognized manuscripts and existing editions, this volume seeks to present a precise and well-documented text of the Shahnameh, accompanied by detailed explanations of vocabulary, compounds, idiomatic expressions, and thematic analyses. This volume covers the opening narratives of the Shahnameh, from the reign of Keyumars to that of Fereydun—including the accounts of Hushang, Tahmuras, Jamshid, and Zahhak—each examined through critical textual scholarship and extensive commentary. With admirable care and precision, Mehri Behfar provides linguistic, etymological, and semantic insights for every verse, presenting them in a structured and scholarly format. In addition to the edited text and commentary, the volume includes tables of abbreviations, transliteration guidelines, glossaries of analyzed and etymologized terms, lists of Arabic, non-Iranian, and non-Arabic words, indexes of personal names and places, a verse concordance, and references to both the Arabic translation of the Shahnameh by Fath ibn Ali Bandari Isfahani and the English verse translation by Arthur George Warner and Edmond Warner.