Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute is delighted to support Shahnameh:
The Epic of the Persian Kings, an exhibition of Rahmanian’s innovative illustrations of the Shahnameh on view at the Honolulu Museum of Art. Consisting of some 50,000 verses, the Shahnameh was composed by the poet Ferdowsi in the late 10th to early 11th centuries, but its origins trace back much earlier, and it follows the history of the Persian empire from its mythical origins to the end of the Sassanian period in the 7th century.
In 2013, after thousands of hours of work over more than five years, Rahmanian published
a critically acclaimed newly illustrated edition of the Shahnameh, reviving once again its significance for a contemporary audience. Intended to make the epic accessible to a new generation of readers, the bold, dynamic illustrations seamlessly update the traditional aesthetics of historic Shahnameh imagery. Rahmanian brilliantly took 15th- to 19th-century Iranian, Mughal Indian, and Ottoman miniature paintings as his source material, transforming them through digital editing into an entirely novel way of illustrating the text.
