Excerpt from The Epic of Kings: Stories Retold From Firdusi It has been my endeavour in this book to popularize the tales told by the Persian poet Firdusi in his immortal epic. Three circumstances have embarrassed my task: the great length of the "Shah Nameh" (far exceeding that of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" together), the English reader's ignorance of Firdusi, and my own Ignorance of Persian. The last difficulty was of less account, as I designed a paraphrase and not a translatioa All I needed, therefore, was at hand in the form of Professor Jules Mohl's French version. This, the only complete rendering of the "Shah Nameh" into a European tongue, is pronounced by all scholars to be a truly perfect piece of work, reproducing so faithfully the very spirit of the original, that to have read Mohl is almost to have read Firdusi. It is little to the credit of the greatest European Power in the East to have suffered France to be the first to provide funds for this magnificent enterprise. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.