The Shahnameh is one of the central works of the Persian cultural world. For centuries, its stories, characters, images, and ways of imagining the past have circulated far beyond the written text itself—through storytelling, painting, performance, popular culture, political language, and collective memory. To read the Shahnameh, therefore, is not simply to read an old literary work. It is also to encounter one of the texts through which generations of Persian speakers have imagined human beings, society, power, justice, conflict, and their place in the world.

In this course, however, we do not approach the Shahnameh as a sacred text whose values must be defended, nor simply as a masterpiece of poetry to be admired. We also do not reduce it to a collection of myths waiting to be decoded. Our interest is in entering the world that the text constructs and asking what kind of understanding of human life becomes visible within it.

What is a human being in the world of the Shahnameh? What makes a ruler legitimate—or unjust? What holds a society together? What do loyalty, family, honor, wisdom, fate, violence, and responsibility mean within its stories? How does the text imagine the relationship between individuals and political order? And what happens when competing obligations—to family, ruler, community, conscience, or oneself—come into conflict?

These questions allow us to read individual episodes as parts of a much larger world rather than as isolated heroic tales. Kings rise and fall; families are created and destroyed; promises are made and broken; political orders are established and challenged. Again and again, characters must act without possessing complete knowledge of the consequences. The epic therefore presents us not only with heroes and villains, but with human beings making judgments under conditions of uncertainty, limitation, loyalty, ambition, fear, and hope.

The course also pays attention to the larger architecture of the Shahnameh. The sequence of its stories is itself meaningful. The movement from mythical beginnings toward increasingly historical forms of political and social life allows us to ask how the text imagines civilization: where order comes from, how institutions and forms of authority emerge, what threatens them, and what kinds of human beings they produce.

At the same time, our task is not simply to reconstruct what the Shahnameh may have meant in the world in which it was composed. We bring the text into conversation with our own questions. We may understand justice, government, gender, violence, individual freedom, identity, or responsibility very differently from the world represented in the epic. Those differences are not obstacles to reading; they are part of what makes the encounter valuable.

We therefore ask two kinds of questions alongside one another: How does the text see the world? And what do we think about the world it presents to us? Sometimes we may recognize ourselves in its characters and conflicts. At other times, the distance between its assumptions and ours may force us to examine ideas that we normally take for granted.

Reading together is central to this process. Participants may see the same event or character in very different ways, and those differences become part of the inquiry. The aim is not to arrive at a single authoritative interpretation of the Shahnameh, but to learn how to read more carefully, articulate our interpretations, listen to alternative readings, and reconsider our judgments in conversation with others.

The course begins at the beginning of the Shahnameh and proceeds gradually through the text. Rather than rushing toward the most famous stories, we allow the structure of the epic itself to determine our journey. In this way, characters and ideas accumulate over time, and later stories can be understood in relation to the world that has already been built.

Ultimately, Reading the Shahnameh is an encounter between a major work of the Persian cultural tradition and a group of contemporary readers. The purpose is neither to celebrate the past nor to dismiss it, but to use sustained engagement with the text as an opportunity to understand that cultural inheritance more deeply—and, through it, to think more carefully about ourselves and the societies we inhabit.