Ferdowsi millennial celebration

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The Ferdowsi millennial celebration in 1934 marked the thousandth birthday of the poet Ferdowsi. It was started by Reza Shah Pahlavi and announced by the Iranian government at the beginning of the year. A five-day Millennial Congress was held in Tehran from October 2 to 6, 1934, with more than eighty scholars from Europe and Iran. The celebrations lasted about a month, and similar events were held in France, Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, and in the United States, Egypt, and Iraq.

The Tehran and Mashhad gatherings brought together about a hundred distinguished scholars and officials, helping advance Iranian studies and research on Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh. Notable participants included Henri Massé, Vladimir Minorsky, Sebastian Beck, Evgenii Bertels, Georges Contenau, Arthur Christensen, and others. The Persian delegation of forty members was led by Mohammad-Ali Foroughi, who gave the opening speech; other members included Mohammad-Taqi Bahar, Ali-Asghar Hekmat, Ahmad Kasravi, Mojtaba Minovi, Said Nafisi, Hassan Pirnia, and Ebrahim Pourdavoud.

The final event was the opening of a new mausoleum building for Ferdowsi in Toos, with Reza Shah in attendance. A major outcome of the celebration was a surge of scholarly work on Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh. Many scholars urged the creation of a critical, reliable edition of the Shahnameh. Tehran’s Borūḵīm Publishing House published the full text of the Shahnameh, based on the Vullers edition, under the supervision of Mojtaba Minovi, Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani, Solayman Haïm, and Said Nafisi. Ernest Bertels began a critical edition, with two volumes published after his death in 1960 and 1962; the nine-volume edition was completed in 1971 under Abdolhossein Noushin and remained the standard edition until the later Khaleghi-Motlagh edition (1990–2008).

German scholar Fritz Wolff published a glossary of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh as a gift from the German ambassador on the first day of the congress. These contributions greatly advanced Iranian scholarship and inspired many major studies on Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh in the following decades.