Ferdowsi millennial celebration


The Ferdowsi millennial celebration was a series of celebrations and scholarly events in the year 1934 to commemorate the thousandth anniversary of Ferdowsi's birth. The Ferdowsi millennial was held at the initiative of Reza Shah Pahlavi and was announced at the beginning of the year by the government of Iran. The Millennial Congress convened for five days, from 2 to 6 October 1934, in Tehran, and more than eighty notable European and Iranian scholars attended the congress. The celebrations lasted for nearly a month.
Various official ceremonies were held simultaneously in a number of European countries including France, Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, in universities, clubs, and embassies. Also, a number of other countries, including the United States, Egypt and Iraq, held festivities.

Participants in the Millennial Congress

The gathering in Tehran and Mashad of about a hundred distinguished scholars as well as many dignitaries of various nationalities was a most beneficial event for Iranian studies in general and for research on Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh in particular.
Distinguished participants included: Henri Massé, Vladimir Minorsky, Sebastian Beck, Evgeniĭ Berthels, Georges Contenau, Arthur Christensen, Friedrich Sarre, Denison Ross, A.A. Bolotnikof, Jan Rypka, Franklin Gunther, Alexsandr Freiman, Yuri N. Marr, Aleksandr A. Romaskevich, Iosef Orbeli, Jamshedji Unvala, Bahramgor Anklesaria, Antonio Pagliaro, Ernst Kühnel, L. A. Mayer, John Drinkwater, Syed Abdul Kareem Hussaini.
The Persian delegation, with forty members, was led by Mohammad-Ali Foroughi and included, among others: Mohammad-Taqi Bahar, Ali-Asgar Hekmat, Ahmad Bahmanyar, Abbas Eqbal, Badiozzaman Forouzanfar, Ahmad Kasravi, Mojtaba Minovi, Said Nafisi, Hassan Pirnia, and Ebrahim Pourdavoud.
The final event of the celebrations was the inauguration of the new building for the mausoleum of Ferdowsi in Tous, by the congress participants, with the presence of Reza Shah Pahlavi.

Scholarly publications related to the millennial

An important outcome of the Ferdowsi millennial was the publication of a large number of scholarly works dedicated to the study of Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh, notably:

Impact of the Ferdowsi millennial on Iranian Studies

Several participants of the congress expressed the opinion that the greatest service that the scholarly world could render to the Persian-speaking people would be the publication of a critical and reliable edition of the Shahnameh. The Borūḵīm Publishing House in Tehran tried to address this issue and published the complete text of the Šāh-nāma, based on the Vullers edition under the supervision of Mojtaba Minovi, Abbas Eqbal, Solayman Haïm and Said Nafisi.
Fritz Wolff made a lasting contribution with the publication of his glossary of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, which was presented as a gift to the Persian people by the German ambassador on the first day of the congress.
These contributions greatly advanced Iranian scholarship, and led to the appearance of a number of monumental scholarly works on Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh in subsequent decades.