Rudaki was born in 880 AD in a village near Samarqand. He lived in the era of the Samanid Empire, which was one of the best historical periods of Iran in terms of civilization. The poet died in 941 AD in Panjakent city, Tajikistan.
Samarqand is now a part of Uzbekistan, but at that time it was one of the main cities during the Samanid Empire.
Rudaki is regarded as the first major poet to write in New Persian. He composed more than 180,000 verses, but unfortunately, only a small portion of his work has survived, most notably a small part of his versification of the Kalila-o-Dimna, which is a collection of Indian fables.
Rashidi Samarqandi has said that Rudaki composed more than one million verses, while the number of verses remaining from the prominent poet is less than 1,000 verses.
Rudaki is acknowledged as the founder of New Persian poetry in Iran and as the father of Tajik literature in Tajikistan, according to the Iranologist Richard Foltz.
The great Iranian poet pointed out different topics such as nature in his poems.
Richard Nelson Frye, an American scholar of Iranian and Central Asian studies, was of the opinion that Rudaki played a key role in a shift from the Pahlavi script to the current Persian script.
Various documents and works written by other poets prove that Rudaki had been suffering from blindness; however, he was a master at playing the harp.
Iran issued a commemorative stamp in 1958 to mark Rudaki's 1100th birthday.
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