Ghazni: Where the Shahnama Was Born | Shabnam Nasimi
Three hours away from Kabul lies a place called Ghazni. Known by many names such as Ghaznain, Ghazna, Ghuznee or Gázaca — it has long stood as a quiet guardian to the rich cultural and intellectual exchange that has defined the spirit of Persian civilisation. The very name "Ghazni" draws from the ancient Pahlavi word ‘ganj’, meaning ‘treasure’, and indeed, this city has always been a treasure trove of history, culture, and untold stories, some of which have remained hidden for over 2,600 years.
The story of Ghazni is inseparable from the rise of the great Persian Empire. In the 6th century BC, Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty, conquered the city, incorporating it into his expanding empire. This was the moment Ghazni first entered recorded history, and from then on, it became an integral part of the Persian world. Then came Alexander the Great, whose march through Ghazni in 329 BC would mark a turning point in the city’s history. Renaming it ‘Alexandria in Opiana’, Alexander’s arrival was as much a cultural invasion as a military one. But today, I will not be focusing on these early chapters of Ghazni’s history. The era that truly defines the city’s legacy, the period that stands as its most significant, is yet to come.
Ghazni’s ancient roots run deep. The city was founded with nothing more than a modest small market town in the 2nd century CE. Yet, from those humble beginnings, the city began to rise as an important node of trade and culture. By the 7th century, Ghazni was already a thriving commercial centre, connecting Central Asia, Persia, and India. The first general description of Ghazni is given by the Arab geographer al-Muqaddasī in his Aḥsan al-taqāsīm in 985 CE, “the walled town – accessible by four gates (abwāb) – includes the citadel (qalʽa), standing at its centre and functioning as seat for the sovereign (sulṭān), and the Great Mosque (al-ǧāmiʻ); the markets (aswāq) are distributed between the madīna and its suburbs (rabaḍ) where most of the dwellings are located.”
Ghazni, once just a simple stop for travellers, had become the “port” of India, standing proudly as the gateway for trade and cultural exchange between East and West.
But if Ghazni were to have a singular chapter of glory, it would be the time of the Ghaznavids. Stretching nearly two centuries, from 977 to 1186 CE, this period marked Ghazni’s most resplendent age. Under the rule of the Ghaznavid dynasty, Ghazni was transformed from being just a commercial city into the heart of an empire that stretched across what is now northeastern Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Eastern Iran, and Rajasthan.
At the centre of this golden age stood Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi (998–1030 CE). Born in Ghazni in 971 CE, Mahmud was the son of Sabuktigin, a Turkic slave military commander of the Samanid army who founded the Ghaznavid dynasty, and a local woman from a landowning aristocrat family, from Persian descent in the region of Zabulistan.
As Sultan Mahmud was highly Persianised, he upheld the bureaucratic, political, and cultural practices of his Samanid predecessors. He laid the foundation for a Persianate state in Punjab, with Lahore becoming a central hub of the Ghaznavid Empire following his conquest of the city. His reign was marked by both military conquest and cultural patronage, an unusual combination that would define Ghazni for generations to come.
Mahmud’s patronage of Persian literature, learning, and the arts transformed Ghazni into a cosmopolitan centre of intellectual scholarship, rivaling even the renowned city of Baghdad.
It became a place where poets, philosophers, and scholars from across the known world converged, exchanging ideas and debating philosophy under the shade of the city’s grand minarets, palaces and the lush gardens that graced the city, including the legendary Bag-i-Piruzi (Garden of Triumph) and the enchanting Garden of a Hundred Nightingales built by Sultan Mahmud.
The city was alive with learning.
Imagine a court filled with the sounds of scholarly debate, where great minds like Farrokhi Sistani, Ansari Balkhi, Avicenna, and Al-Biruni gathered, producing works that would shape Persian literature and intellect for centuries to come.
It was here, in this fertile ground, that Persian literature found one of its most important centres. Among the men of genius whom Sultan Mahmud attracted to his court was Ferdowsi, the Persian poet, writer and historian who completed the Shahnama (Book of Kings and one of the greatest literatures of all time), in Mahmud’s court around 1010 CE.
Ferdowsi’s story is one of passion, perseverance, and loss. Born in 940 CE in a village near Tus, he was the son of a landowner or ‘dehqan’, and in his youth, wealth and comfort surrounded him. His father’s lands provided him with a life free from want, and Ferdowsi was taught the classics of Persian literature, which was a common practice among educated families of his status.
But as time passed, he lost his fortune, falling into poverty. Even as his material wealth dwindled, his love for knowledge and his passion for storytelling only deepened.
From a young age, Ferdowsi had a special connection to the past. He was captivated by the rich history of ancient Persia and the tales of its great kings and heroes. It was this deep, unwavering connection to his roots that led him to embark on his magnum opus—the Shahnama.
For nearly thirty years, he poured his heart and soul into preserving the epic stories of his ancestors and the historical past of the Persian Empire, from the creation of the world until the Muslim conquest in the 7th century. He often spoke of the long search he undertook to find the original versions of these ancient tales. While many manuscripts were fragmentary, lost, or incomplete, Ferdowsi travelled into the heart of ancient cities to access libraries, scholars, and scribes, such as Nishapur, Herat, or the court of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, to find surviving texts.
Ferdowsi would have travelled across the land and listened to oral storytellers, bards, and poets who carried these tales from one generation to the next.
And when he found them, he knew his life's work had begun.
The project, which began as a personal passion, soon became an act of faith. As the years passed, the work consumed him. He had already written most of the Shahnama when poverty began to take its toll.
Ferdowsi believed that by dedicating his masterpiece to Sultan Mahmud, the newly crowned ruler of Ghazni, he would gain recognition and perhaps some reward.
In a scene depicted in a preface of the Shahnama, before Ferdowsi first presented his monumental work to the Sultan, he encountered the court poets of Ghazni. Dressed in a red coat over a green robe, he arrived in the city seeking the patronage of Sultan Mahmud for his epic poem. But before he could meet the Sultan, he was confronted by Mahmud’s court poets—’Ansari’, ’Asjadi’, and Farrokhi—who, unwilling to have him join their ranks, sought to test his poetic skill.
When they challenged him to compose a verse on the spot, Ferdowsi responded with such brilliance that it left them in awe. The Sultan, witnessing this moment, could no longer ignore his talent, and Ferdowsi earned his audience. Yet, despite the poets’ jealousy and the Sultan’s fleeting favour, this moment marked the turning point in Ferdowsi's life, a moment when his genius was finally acknowledged, and the Shahnama was set on its path to immortality.
Sultan Mahmud had promised sixty thousand dinars for the Shahnama, but when the time came to fulfil his promise, the Sultan sent only a fraction of the amount—sixty thousand dirhams, a mere tenth of what he had vowed.
Ferdowsi’s anger towards the Sultan, who had promised him so much and delivered so little, was raw. In his grief, he wrote:
"O King Mahmud, the conqueror of nations,
If you fear none, fear God...
You call me impious and of bad creed,
But I am the lion, not the sheep you call me…"
This was a man who had given everything for his art, only to be rejected by the very ruler he hoped would honour him.
The Shahnama itself is not merely a literary masterpiece; it is the living, breathing document of Persian history—a celebration of the Persian language and the soul of its ancient civilisation.
Ferdowsi’s words were pure, free from the deceit and flattery that too often stain the pages of history. He was a poet who spoke with unflinching honesty, driven by a fierce love for his homeland and an equally fierce hatred for those who had harmed it—be it the Turanians, the Romans, or the Arabs.
But Sultan Mahmud’s disregard for Ferdowsi's Shahnama wasn’t just a matter of personal indifference. The real reason behind his lack of appreciation was that the Shahnama was a reflection of Persia’s ancient glory, a glorification of the achievements of the Persian kings and heroes—something Sultan Mahmud, a Turk by heritage, could not fully embrace. In fact, the Shahnama criticised the Turks, the very ancestors of Sultan Mahmud. Some poets in Sultan Mahmud’s court, motivated by jealousy, also belittled the Shahnama, dismissing its heroes as unworthy. Mahmud, surrounded by such voices, chose to disregard the masterpiece.
The Sultan, in his dismissiveness, even went so far as to mock the Shahnama, saying:
"The Shahnama is nothing but the story of Rostam, and in my army, there are thousands of men like Rostam."
Ferdowsi, stung by this, wrote several verses mocking the Sultan and then, fearing for his safety, fled Ghazni. He wandered for a time in the cities of Herat, Rey, and Tabaristan, moving from place to place until he eventually returned to his birthplace, Tus.
Ferdowsi was buried in the city of Tus, in a garden that belonged to him, far from the recognition he had sought.
Though Sultan Mahmud had disregarded Ferdowsi, years later, after Mahmud’s campaign in India, something remarkable happened. While besieging a fort in India, Mahmud heard a verse from the Shahnama read aloud, a verse that captured his attention:
"When the sun rises tomorrow,
I and my mace will meet Afrasiab in the field."
Intrigued, Sultan Mahmud asked, "Who is this poem from, which has such a spirit of manhood in it?" When he learned it was from Ferdowsi, a wave of regret washed over him. "I wronged him," Mahmud said, and vowed to make amends when he returned to Ghazni.
But by the time the Sultan’s gift—a caravan carrying sixty thousand dinars—arrived in Tus, Ferdowsi had passed away. His body was carried out of the city through one gate, known as “Razan,” while the Sultan’s gift entered through another, “Rudbar gate.”
Ferdowsi’s daughter, her heart heavy with the weight of grief and disillusionment, refused to accept the Sultan’s offering, sending it back as a gesture of loss and unmet hopes for the recognition her father had so long deserved.
It is a tragic, but fitting end to a story of a man whose love for his land and culture was so great that it cost him everything.
Ferdowsi’s life was not shaped by wealth or accolades, but by the Shahnama—a work that would survive the ages and regarded as a literary masterpiece. In a sense, the Persian language we speak today remains unchanged from Ferdowsi’s era, over a thousand years ago, due in no small part to the preservation of his masterpiece. E. G. Browne, a 19th-century British Iranologist, suggested that Ferdowsi intentionally resisted the use of Arabic vocabulary, thereby ensuring the purity of the Persian tongue.
The Shahnama, with its 62 stories, 990 chapters, and approximately 50,000 rhyming couplets, dwarfs many other epic works. It is more than three times the length of Greek Homer’s Iliad and over twelve times the length of the German Nibelungenlied. Ferdowsi himself claimed that the final edition of the Shahnama contained around 60,000 distichs, though most surviving manuscripts preserve just over 50,000. But according to Nizami Aruzi, the completed work, which was born when it was given to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, was prepared in seven volumes.
But the intellectual importance of Ghazni extended far beyond Ferdowsi.
One of the most influential scholars to emerge from this period was Abu Rayhan al-Biruni. Born in 973 CE in Khwarizm (modern-day Uzbekistan) to a father who was from Balkh, Al-Biruni was taken to Ghazni in 1017 by Sultan Mahmud following his conquest of Khwarizm.
Al-Biruni’s groundbreaking contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and anthropology made him a polymath whose works captured the intellectual spirit of Ghazni. Al-Biruni had accompanied Mahmud to India, and his studies of Indian astronomy and culture helped shape scientific discourse for centuries to come. Today, his tomb lies in Ghazni, though in a state of ruin, a silent witness to the city’s once-great intellectual life.
The golden age of Ghazni eventually came to an end.
By the late 12th century, the Ghurids and Mongols launched invasions that disrupted the political and cultural stability of the Ghaznavid Empire. These invasions marked the decline of Ghazni as a central power, but not the end of its story.
While the city may no longer hold the political or cultural prominence it once did in today's Afghanistan, and its rich history and ancient sites have largely been overlooked, the legacy of Ghazni's contributions to literature, philosophy, and scholarship continues to resonate, quietly shaping the region's history and culture despite being forgotten by the world.
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Shabnam Nasimi is the co-founder of FAWN (Friends of Afghan Women Network). She served as a senior policy advisor to the UK Minister for Refugees and Minister for Afghan Resettlement. She is a writer, commentator and a human rights advocate.