Of course storytelling and story writing existed in old times always, but because of little number of educated people and also publishing devices and facilities in compare with recent centuries, storytelling was current more than story writing but nonetheless I think there are some old Iranian writers and poets that have written interesting long and short stories, in addition to the interesting stories that was written in shape of poems.
Molavi ( Rumi) and Saddi were two famous and able Iranian poets that were story writers as well(about 700 years ago). Saddi has two famous book that one of them is the collection of lasting poems and the other is collection of short stories that have been written in a wonderful style of literary case.
Molavi has several books that all are poems, but one of them is collection of wonderful poems and contained a series of theosophy context and short stories. There are some western and eastern readers and writers that are fascinated with Rumi poems. They even love him as a great poet-philosopher and teacher.
There is another famous Iranian poet that has a long fictional-heroic story in case of a large poem book. His name is Ferdowsi (I think he lived about 500 years ago). His wonderful poetic novel is not only an everlasting art, it also is contained the old Persian words. Some experts believe, nowadays Farsi language beholden to Ferdowsi.
There are the other old Iranian poets and writers that have written a lot of stories. For example, Obeid Zakani (600 years ago) that wrote a fictional-poem named " The story of mouse and cat".
As I told before, Iranian poems are very regular and rhythmic and the story of Zakani is too. I sometimes think the amazing cartoons of Walt Disney ( cat and mouse) are inspired by Zakani's story.
However, writing novel existed from old times but may with different name.
