10 Rials Tomb of Ferdousi

Ferdowsi's tomb in Tus, Khorasan, was reconstructed in the 1930s under Reza Shah as part of a deliberate nationalization of pre-Islamic Persian identity — an ideological project that sat awkwardly with the revolutionary government that came to power in 1979. That the Islamic Republic nonetheless chose to keep Ferdowsi on circulating coinage reflects the practical weight of Persian nationalism, which proved too deeply embedded to discard even after the revolution reordered nearly everything else.