Shota Rustaveli

Shota Rustaveli (c. 1172 – after 1216) is the national poet of Georgia. Little is known of his life beyond what his poem and later tradition say: he served at the court of Queen Tamar, who reigned from 1184 to 1213, and is traditionally held to have spent his last years in the Georgian monastery of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, where a fresco portrait of him survives.

His one surviving work is the epic Vepkhistqaosani, 'The Man in the Panther's Skin', composed around 1200 in some 1,600 quatrains of sixteen-syllable lines. It tells of the knights Avt'handil and Tariel and their love for Tinatin and Nestan-Daredjan, and has been cherished in Georgia ever since. It is given here in the prose translation by Marjory Scott Wardrop (1912).