Retelling the Shahnameh: Fourteenth-century Poetic Reconfigurations of Jamshid In Firdawsi’s Shahnameh (completed circa 1010), Jamshid enjoys farr as bestowed by Ahura Mazda, and rules the world for many hundreds of years until he grows proud and loses both divine farr and his kingship. Jamshid is credited with a wide range of inventions and innovations, including the cultivation of the grapevine, the production of wine, and the establishment of the festival of Nawruz. This paper will examine the extent to which allusions to Jamshid in ghazals composed in fourteenth-century Shiraz differ in content from the version of the Jamshid legend recorded by Firdawsi over three and a half centuries earlier. The paper will also explore how allusions to Jamshid in these ghazals differ in function from allusions to the king as incorporated into qasidas from the Ghaznavid and Saljuq periods. In Hafiz’s ghazals, Jamshid is commonly conflated or confused with Solomon; allusions to these models of pre-Islamic kingship reminding the audience of life’s transience, and linking contemporary Shiraz with a glorious, ancient past. This paper will argue that, in the context of the ghazals of Hafiz and his contemporaries, allusions to Jamshid/Solomon carry a real, contemporary subtext since in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries local rulers (namely the Salghurid Atabaks, Injuids, and Muzaffarids) promoted the image of Fars as the Dominion of Solomon (Mulk-i Sulayman), and took a keen interest in ancient sites such as Pasargadae and Persepolis/Istakhr, which, in the popular medieval Islamic imagination, were associated with Solomon and Jamshid respectively. Through their active interaction with these physical memorials to pre-Islamic kingship, local rulers in this period sought to appropriate a measure of the glory associated with them and, in turn, helped to bolster the idea of Firdawsi’s Shahnameh as a history, and Jamshid as a historical, rather than legendary, figure.