Alexander the Great in the Shahnameh

The eleventh-century Shahnameh of Ferdowsi (d. 1020) preserves the earliest version of the Alexander Romance in the Persian language, following closely the text in its Syriac translation. The Romance genre functioned to preserve and describe the legends and exploits of Alexander the Great. Although the Shahnameh is a much larger text and contains legends of many other rulers of Greater Iran, three consecutive sections of it cover Alexander (who the text refers to as "Sekandar"), amounting to ~2,500 verses. Furthermore, the sections about Alexander act as a bridge between the narratives of the kings before and after him, representing a transition from a realm of mythological kings and exploits to the historical kings of the Sasanian Empire.

The Shahnameh is much less polemical towards Alexander as compared with representations in the Middle Persian and Zoroastrian pre-Islamic Sasanian Empire. Nevertheless, it has been demonstrated that negative portraitures of Alexander from this period have influenced the Shahnameh.

Synopsis
The first two sections describe the birth of Alexander, his ascent to the throne, and then his wars against Darius in which he emerges victorious and conquers Persia. In the story, Alexander is represented as a legitimate heir to the Persian throne by virtue of his descent from Darab (= Darius III), and so comes from a line of legitimate Persian shahs. In the third section, Alexander conquers the entire world and is in a search in pursuit of the Fountain of Youth. This part describes his war against the domain of the Indian king, a pilgrimage to Mecca, his journeys through Egypt and meeting with Qeydâfe, the queen of Al-Andalus (who represents the equivalent to the Ethiopian Kandake in the original Greek Romance). He also reaches the Land of Amazons and the Land of Darkness. In the latter, he searches for the Fountain of Life. He erects a barrier against Gog and Magog in the east. Over the course of his journeys, he receives repeated and stronger hints of his coming death. Eventually, he dies in Iraq, after having sent a letter to his mother containing instructions about how to proceed with affairs after his enclosing demise.

Sources and influence
It is thought that most of the episodes of Alexander in the Shahnameh rely on an Arabic intermediary of the Syriac Alexander Romance, which itself is now thought to be a translation of the original Alexander Romance into Syriac. The representation of Alexander in the Shahnameh had a profound influence on the subsequent Alexander romance literature in Persian, including on the Iskandarnameh of Nizami, the Ayina-i Iskandari of Amir Khusrau, and others.