Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is an epic that has captured the imagination of readers for the last millennium. This is a work essentially about the Iranian nation, and it focuses mainly on kings and their exploits. Nevertheless, this nation seems ungrounded in specific geographical realities. In other words, the epic is relatively disengaged with defining or describing cities in which members of a royal family live, traverse, destroy, or construct. When cities are mentioned, however, one may characterize them in relation to the tripartite division the text follows, relating cities to the mythical, heroic, and historical ages. In the Shahnameh, the way a city is posited in relation to a particular member of the royal class suggests evolving ideas about kingly responsibility to subjects. There is a discernable break between the mythical, heroic, and historical ages in terms of rulers or princes as civilizing agents. The mythical kings do not relate to their kingship by establishing cities, but they bring civilization to their subjects by teaching them how to prepare food, make fire, domesticate animals, and so forth. Later, members of royal families in the heroic age destroy and establish cities, which function mainly as pawns in various power struggles. Finally, the historical kings pride themselves on taking over or establishing cities with abundant natural provisions. In these cities, subjects may work, live, and flourish independently of the king, but his generosity is ultimately what allows them to do so. While the epic maintains a certain geographical imprecision, Ferdowsi highlights the changing nature of cities to provide readers with a palpable sense of a developing urban consciousness, giving the Iranian nation a heightened claim to urbanizing and civilizing tendencies. While this paper focuses heavily on the literary aspect of the Shahnameh, I hope to incorporate some visual elements through a discussion of relevant paintings in an effort to address the following questions: does the visual component of Shahnameh studies correlate with the way that cities, towns, and other sites are portrayed in the text? What kinds of liberties do artists take in their depictions that the writer perhaps did not take? These are just a few questions related to the visual aspect of the Shahnameh that I will address in this paper, which will ultimately add a great deal to understanding its literary approach to urban organization.