Around 1010, at opposite ends of Asia, two summits of world literature appeared almost at once: Ferdowsi's Persian epic, the Shahnameh, and The Tale of Genji by the Japanese court lady Murasaki.

1010

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The events

• Ferdowsi completes the Shahnameh1010 · Tus, Khorasan. The poet Ferdowsi spent over 30 years on the Book of Kings, some 50,000 couplets about Iran's kings and heroes from the creation to the Arab conquest. He deliberately avoided Arabic words, and the poem helped preserve the Persian language. The Shahnameh is regarded as Iran's national epic; the poet finished its final version in 1010.
• The Tale of Genjic. 1010 · Heian-kyō (Kyoto). The court lady Murasaki Shikibu wrote the story of Prince Genji's loves and life at the imperial court. Often called the world's first novel, it is the summit of classical Japanese prose.

11th century

More amazing facts

• 1002 · 1010 The two great women of Japanese classical literature did not get on. Murasaki Shikibu, author of Genji, wrote that Sei Shōnagon of The Pillow Book was 'dreadfully conceited' and littered her writing with Chinese characters.
• 1004 Europe first saw the fork as a sin. When a Byzantine bride married into the Doge’s family around 1004 and ate with a golden fork, Saint Peter Damian denounced her decadence.
• 1005 The first known European born in the Americas, Greenland aside, was the Icelander Snorri, in Vinland around 1005.
• 1010 Legend says Sultan Mahmud promised Ferdowsi a gold coin per couplet of the Shahnameh, then paid in silver.
• 1014 · 1016 While Basil II was finishing off Bulgaria at Kleidion (1014), Rus' was getting its first law code, the Russkaya Pravda (1016).
• 1016 · 1035 King Cnut ordered back the tide not out of arrogance but to expose it. In Henry of Huntingdon's 12th-century tale he sat before the rising sea, got his feet wet and told his courtiers that the power of kings is empty.

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