Epic as History: The Effectiveness of Epic Poetry in the Historical Insight of Ḥamdallāh Mustawf

The narration of history in epic poetry and the desire to write Shāhnāmah were features of post-Ilkhanids Iranian history and literature. These features provided frameworks to strengthen Iranian identity and reinforce the foundations of Iranshahri ideology in both sociological and governmental aspects. In the evolution of thought in Iran, we could consider poetry as the philosophical language of Iranian intellectuals, so epic poetry, in this case, the compilation of history in the style and format of Shāhnāmah, as in Mustawfī's Zafarnāmah, is a manifestation of intellectual and cultural transformation in the Ilkhanids era.Through poetry and epic poetry, Mustawfī presented the position and function of the "justice-oriented king" as a lasting concept. He presented it in a way that restores the glory of the past as well as the needs of the time. In Zafarnāmah, Mustawfī, by the philosophical language of poetry and the use of the desirable past, intended to provide an efficient model of the Persian Shāhnāmah concept in the Ilkhanid dynasty. He completed the process of previous historians in designing examples of epics, such as Ferdowsi's Shāhnāmah, and left a collection of poems in which history has been appropriately presented in the form of epics and poems.