Who wrote Shahnama?

Persian classical literature includes several major long-form works produced across the medieval period, each associated with a single named poet or scholar and a distinct genre - epic narrative, philosophical quatrain, or moral prose-and-verse. Correctly attributing authorship of a Persian work depends on matching the work to the poet's known body of work and era, not merely to the geography or language of the poet.

1. The work Shahnama (Book of Kings) is Persia's national epic, a long verse narrative covering the mythical and historical rulers of Persia from its legendary origins up to the Islamic conquest.

2. It was composed by the poet Firdausi (Abolqasem Ferdowsi) over roughly three decades, completed around 1010 CE under Ghaznavid patronage, and runs to tens of thousands of rhyming couplets.

3. Among the offered options, Firdausi is the poet whose major surviving work matches this description.

• Omar Khayyam is known for the Rubaiyat, a collection of short philosophical quatrains - a different genre and a different work from the Shahnama.

• Sheikh Sadi is known for the Gulistan and the Bustan, prose-and-verse works of moral instruction, not the historical verse epic asked about here.

• Kaundilya (Kautilya/Chanakya) is an ancient Indian scholar credited with the Arthashastra, a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft - a wholly different tradition, language, and period from Persian court poetry.

Therefore, the Shahnama was written by Firdausi.