Critical review of some researches and statements on Saba’s Shahanshahnameh

Shahanshahnameh is an epic poem written by Fath-Ali Khan Saba who has made use of the history of Iran during the reign of Fath-Ali Shah of Qajar dynasty as the basis for creating a literary work. The historical narration of the work covers the fall of Isfahan to the end of the first period of the Iran-Russia wars. Despite its significance, this epic poem has not yet been properly studied. Critiques written on Shahanshahnameh are not thorough works and it seems most of their authors did not read the entire text of the poem. These critiques are mostly written based on excerpts from the Poem and as a result, they have glaring flaws in terms of content and as far as history is concerned. This article seeks to analyze over twenty researches done on Shahanshahnameh in the last century and tries to criticize their approaches by examining the flaws and errors of their texts. The result of this research indicates that most of the critics, regardless of the whole work and the historical points related to it, have made mistakes and these errors have found their way through the critiques of each era to the next period.