Shahnameh (شاهنامه), meaning "Book of Kings", is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi (فردوسی) about 1,000 years ago.

It contains around 60,000 lines of verse and took Ferdowsi approximately 30 years to complete.

Shahnameh is the longest epic poem composed by a single author.

Goethe and Hugo both praised the epic for its cultural and literary significance.

It tells the largely mythical, but partly historical, past of Iran from the creation of the world until the Muslim conquest in the seventh century.

The work holds central importance in Persian culture and the Persian language.

When I started studying Shahnameh — not just reading it, but actually learning from it — I became deeply interested in the complexity of its vast cast of characters and the richness of its intergenerational stories. The detailed family trees of kings, heroes, and villains make the narrative feel alive and interconnected, and I often enjoyed tracing relationships and revisiting references to better understand how everything fits together.

As an Iranian who loves Persian mythology, I like things to be visual and easy. I needed a simple way to look at my favorite characters and their stories without sifting through dense, text-heavy encyclopedia pages.

So, I built a directory where you can easily search for characters and read their background.

Shahnameh is already maxed out on drama, so I’m putting my own spin on it: epic tragedy mixed with dry modern sarcasm and a running commentary on the absurdity of being human.

Shahed Khallaghi