Asadi’s Shahnameh is a great epic consisting of twenty-four thousand distiches and is attributed to Asadi or another poet of the same nickname. This work was created in the same line of development as Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. The main theme is the old campaign of Soleymān to Iran to confront with Rostam and Keykhosrow and to repeat the pattern of Rostam’s battles with his children in a state of anonymity. The text structure is episodic with numerous central characters. The narratives are for the most part derived from oral literature. Textual evidence demonstrates that the poet is Shiite. The narrative content, chronogram as well as the literary and linguistic style of one of the manuscripts reveal that the text was written in the ninth century (probably 809 A.H.). The article first introduces the text and the origin of its narratives in oral literature; it then proceeds with the study of the narrative structure of the epic using three available manuscripts dating back to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (A.H.). Textology and Textual Criticism have been employed as the research methodology. The literary and linguistic features of the text have also been examined at three levels: lexical, syntactic and rhetorical.
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