New NaqqaliTHE SHAHNAMEH, SEEN THROUGH ITS WORDS
A world changes.
The poem remembers.
Follow the language of battle, grief, wisdom and wonder through the whole epic. Find a pattern. Return to the words that made it.
01 / THE NARRATIVE LANDSCAPE
What rises. What recedes.
Select a band to inspect its passages. Drag across the small timeline to zoom; or use the period menu.
RETURN TO THE TEXT
Select a part of the landscape
Every band is built from actual word matches. Select a band to read the evidence.
02 / TWO WORLDS WITHIN ONE POEM
The heroic age and the Sasanians
Same word lists. Comparable rates. Different stretches of the narrative.
03 / HOW TO READ THIS GRAPH
Evidence first. Interpretation follows.
A vocabulary lens
These are counts of specified English words, not measurements of emotion, importance or literary quality. “Justice” may be spoken sincerely, denied, or invoked by an unjust king. Read the passages before drawing conclusions.
Time means reading order
The horizontal axis follows couplets, not historical years. Equal widths represent equal amounts of verse. Windows do not overlap; the last window may be shorter. Rates use each window’s actual size. The graph is not smoothed and adds no in-between values.
Simple counts
Counts include every line, narration and speech alike. The graph does not tell apart different senses of a word, know who is speaking, or work out which character a pronoun or another name refers to. The figures on the Numbers page were checked by hand and use a different method.
What comes next
Who speaks to whom, who killed whom, and how the families connect are followed in the other Insight Graphs.
How the Numbers page counts ↗