PENQUIN CLASSICS SHAHNAMEH ABOLQASEM FERDOWSI was born in Khorasan in a village near Tus, in 940 CE His great epic the Shahnameh, to which he devoted most of his adult life, was originally composed for the Samanid princes of Khorasan, who were the chief instigators of the revival of Persian cultural traditions after the Arab conquest. During Ferdowsi’s lifetime, the Samanid dynasty was conquered by the Ghaznavid Turks. Legend has it that Ferdowsi’s lifework was not appreciated by King Mahmud of Ghazneh. He is said to have died around 1020 in poverty and embittered by royal neglect, though confident of his poem’s ultimate fame. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, DICK DAVIS is Emeritus Professor of Persian at Ohio State University. His other translations from Persian include Borrowed Ware: Medieval Persian Epigrams , The Legend of Seyavash , Vis and Ramin , Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz , and, with Afkham Darbandi, The Conference of the Birds PENGUIN BOOKS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2006 Published in Penguin Books 2007 This expanded edition published 2016 Copyright © 1997, 2000, 2004, 2016 by Mage Publishers Introduction copyright © 2006 by Azar Nafisi Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Originally published in three volumes entitled The Lion and the Throne, Fathers and Sons, and Sunset of Empire by Mage Publishers, Washington, D.C. Illustrations provided by Dr. Ulrich Marzolph from his archive of Persian lithographed book illustrations in Goettingen, Germany. eBook ISBN 9781101993231 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Firdawsåi, author. | Davis, Dick, 1945– translator. Title: Shahnameh : the Persian book of kings / Abolqasem Ferdowsi ; translated by Dick Davis ; foreword by Azar Nafisi. Other titles: Shåahnåamah. English Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2016. | Series: Penguin classics Identifiers: LCCN 2015045006 | ISBN 9780143108320 (paperback) Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / Epic. | POETRY / Ancient, Classical & Medieval. | POETRY / Middle Eastern. Classification: LCC PK6456.A13 D3813 2016 | DDC 891/.5511—dc23 Cover art: (detail) Siyavush Plays Polo before Afrasiyab , Qasim ibn ‘Ali, c.1520–30. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. / Image source. Art Resource, NY. Version_1 This translation is dedicated to Mohammad and Najmieh Batmanglij, with my gratitude and affection. CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT DEDICATION FOREWORD BY AZAR NAFISI INTRODUCTION A NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS THE FIRST KINGS THE DEMON-KING ZAHHAK THE STORY OF FERAYDUN AND HIS THREE SONS THE STORY OF IRAJ THE VENGEANCE OF MANUCHEHR THE TALE OF SAM AND THE SIMORGH THE TALE OF ZAL AND RUDABEH ROSTAM, THE SON OF ZAL-DASTAN THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR BETWEEN IRAN AND TURAN ROSTAM AND HIS HORSE RAKHSH ROSTAM AND KAY QOBAD KAY KAVUS’S WAR AGAINST THE DEMONS OF MAZANDERAN THE SEVEN TRIALS OF ROSTAM THE KING OF HAMAVERAN AND HIS DAUGHTER SUDABEH THE TALE OF SOHRAB THE LEGEND OF SEYAVASH GIV BRINGS KAY KHOSROW AND FARIGIS TO IRAN FORUD, THE SON OF SEYAVASH THE AKVAN DIV BIZHAN AND MANIZHEH THE DEATH OF PIRAN THE DEATH OF AFRASYAB THE OCCULTATION OF KAY KHOSROW ROSTAM AND ESFANDYAR THE DEATH OF ROSTAM THE STORY OF DARAB AND THE FULLER SEKANDAR’S CONQUEST OF PERSIA THE REIGN OF SEKANDAR THE ASHKANIANS THE REIGN OF ARDESHIR THE REIGN OF SHAPUR, SON OF ARDESHIR THE REIGN OF SHAPUR ZU’L AKTAF THE REIGN OF YAZDEGERD THE UNJUST THE REIGN OF BAHRAM GUR THE STORY OF MAZDAK THE REIGN OF KESRA NUSHIN-RAVAN THE REIGN OF HORMOZD THE REIGN OF KHOSROW PARVIZ THE STORY OF KHOSROW AND SHIRIN THE REIGN OF YAZDEGERD GLOSSARY OF NAMES INDEX OF HEADINGS FOREWORD BY A ZAR N AFISI I have two books in front of me. One is the galley for Dick Davis’s Shahnameh, The Persian Book of Kings; the other is a much thinner book, designed for young readers and on its cover, above a Persian miniature painting of men on horses, is written in Persian: Selections from Shahnameh, by Ahmad Nafisi. In his introduction to this selection, my father mentions that the idea for this book goes back to the time he started telling stories from Persia’s classical literature, beginning with Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, to my brother and me when we were no more than three or four years old and later to our children. My father always insisted that Persians basically did not have a home, except in their literature, especially their poetry. This country, our country, he would say, has been attacked and invaded numerous times, and each time, when Persians had lost their sense of their own history, culture and language, they found their poets as the true guardians of their true home. Citing the poet Ferdowsi and how, after the Arab invasion of Persia, he rescued and redefined his nation’s identity and culture through writing the epic of Persian mythology and history in his Book of Kings, my father would say, We have no other home but this, pointing to the invisible book, this, he would repeat is our home, always, for you and your brother, and your children and your children’s children. Thus it was that like so many other Persian children my brother and I and later our children grew up with the Shahnameh and in the kingdom of imagination our father had created for us. Rostam, Tahmineh, Seyavash, Bizhan and the other fictional characters in Ferdowsi’s stories became our brothers and sisters, cousins and neighbors. Ferdowsi’s devoted readers throughout the centuries rewarded him by creating their own legends around him. When I was a married woman with children of my own, my father, in the same manner he used when I was a small child, would tell my children of the conflict between the noble poet Ferdowsi and the fickle king, Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi. Dick Davis gives us the factual historical account, but we heard the popular one, the one that like the stories in the Shahnameh, while more akin to myth, revealed an important truth. According to this version, Sultan Mahmud assigns Shahnameh to Ferdowsi, for which he promises to pay the poet a gold coin for every line. The king, as it seems to be the way with many rulers, does not fulfill his promise. Instead, he sends the poet silver coins, which Ferdowsi, despite his dire poverty, refuses. The king, finally realizing the worth of the poet, repents of his behavior and travels to the city of Tus to console the poet. He is too late: as his procession enters the main gate to the city it encounters another procession leaving the same gate with Ferdowsi’s coffin. Implied in this legend, as in Shahnameh itself, is the truth that in the struggle between the poet and the king, the latter might win this world but to the former belongs the glory that comes with the conquest of that most absolute of all tyrants, time. Nearly a thousand years have passed, my father would say, the tone of marvel never missing from his voice, and we remember the king mainly because we remember the poet. It is the poet, he would declare, who is the final victor. After the victory of the Islamic revolution, and especially during the years of the Iran–Iraq war, I took refuge in Persian poetry and literature when we would gather each week with a group of friends to read the classics of Persian literature with the well-known writer Houshang Golshiri. That was when I paid more attention not just to the stories but also to the miraculous language and poetry of Shahnameh, realizing that the poetry seemed so unobtrusive and supportive of the stories not because Ferdowsi was a lesser poet and a better storyteller but because he was so skilled a poet that the poetry became the story. I realized then how right my father had been. For Persians, Shahnameh is like their identity papers, their conclusive evidence that they have lived. Against the brutality of time and politics, against the threat of constant invasions and destructions imposed on them by enemies alien and domestic, against a reality they had little or no control over, they created magnificent monuments in words, they reasserted both their own worth and the best achievements of mankind through a work like Shahnameh, the golden thread that links one Persian to the other, connecting the past to the present. Now we have to be grateful to Dick Davis for weaving this golden thread into the fabric of another language. In his translation of these selections from Shahnameh he conveys the unique poetic texture of Ferdowsi’s great epic. Yet we do not appreciate Shahnameh only for its Persianness, but also because it shapes and articulates those aspects of Persian culture that transcend time and space, defying limitations of history, ethnicity, nationality and even culture. This book, like literary classics, captures and articulates passions, urges, aspirations, betrayals, joys and anguish that are shared by all individuals no matter where they live and what language they speak. Ultimately, the English-speaking reader will be drawn to this book not only because it represents the best of Persian culture, but also because of its essential humanness. Reading Shahnameh will lead them to the amazing and yet inevitable discovery that celebrating our differences would have no meaning or substance if we did not simultaneously recognize our common humanity, our enduring connections and relations. And because of this universal appeal the readers of this marvelous new English rendition of the Shahnameh can now experience with the readers before them from different cultures and nationalities the truth of the poet’s prophecy when he wrote: I’ve reached the end of this great history And all the land will fill with talk of me I shall not die, these seeds I’ve sown will save My name and reputation from the grave, And men of sense and wisdom will proclaim, When I have gone, my praises and my fame. INTRODUCTION The Shahnameh is the national epic of Iran, or Persia as the country used to be called, composed by the poet Ferdowsi in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries C.E. Its subject matter is vast, being nothing less than the history of the country and its people from the creation of the world up to the Arab conquest, which brought the then new religion of Islam to Iran, in the seventh century C.E. A difference from Western epics such as the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid immediately suggests itself: the Western poems deal primarily with one generation, while referring to others, and focus on a few leading characters who are contemporary with one another and so able to interact. The Shahnameh’s great temporal span means that many generations are directly presented to us, and the cast of significant characters is thus far larger than is the case in Western epics. The current standard edition of the poem, which runs to nine volumes, includes over 50,000 lines (and by the criteria of English verse they are very long lines; each line has twenty two syllables, making it slightly longer than a heroic couplet, so that a more accurate computation for an English reader would be to say that it is over 100,000 lines long). In its great length, and in its multiplicity of characters and generations, as well as in other significant ways (e.g., in the existence of an ancient and still living folk tradition that continues both to feed the poem and feed off it, and produce new versions of familiar stories; as well as the relative uncertainty of the textual tradition), the Shahnameh often seems closer to Indian epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana than to say the Iliad . The differences from Western epics should not however obscure the similarities, which are seen to be many when one examines particular episodes of the poem. For example, a staple theme of Western epic, both ancient and medieval, is a conflict between the king and the chief martial hero of the ethnicity at the center of the poem. The Iliad, which starts with such a conflict (between Achilles and Agamemnon), provides a prime example. This is also a major theme of the Shahnameh, one repeated over a number of generations and involving a number of feuding kings and heroes. The Poem’s Structure How does Ferdowsi structure this huge panorama of conflict and epic adventure, which teems with so many characters and generations, and with so much narrative detail, that a hasty first impression of the poem must almost inevitably be that Ferdowsi has done what the British eighth century writer Nennius claimed to have done at the opening of his history when he wrote, “I have made a heap of all I could find”? As is traditional for long medieval Persian poems, Ferdowsi precedes his narrative with an introduction that praises God and then passes to various other concerns before embarking on the stories themselves. The Shahnameh begins by exalting God, as the Lord of wisdom and the soul, and as being above all human comprehension. These three concerns, the nature of wisdom, the fate of the human soul, and the incomprehensibility of God’s purposes, are to play major roles in the poem’s unfolding: Now in the name of God whose power controls Wisdom, and has created human souls, Exalted beyond all that thought or speech Is able to encompass or to reach, The lord of Saturn and the stars at night, Who gives the sun and moon and Venus light, Above all name and thought, exceeding all Of his creation, and unknowable . . . The exordium continues with a brief account of the creation of the four elements (earth, fire, air, and water) from which the world was fashioned, the creation of man (again wisdom is emphasized as being man’s chief concern) and of the sun and moon. This is followed by a passage in praise of Mohammad, the prophet of Islam, and a passage on the poem’s sources, which appears to be fairly circumstantial but is largely conventional in nature. The fact that Ferdowsi has utilized a passage (on the advent of Zoroastrianism) from the work of a previous poet (Daqiqi) is mentioned, and the introductory material concludes with praise of the Ghaznavid Sultan Mahmoud, from whom Ferdowsi clearly hoped for patronage (although legend has it that, as it happens, Mahmoud treated him very shabbily). Once we get beyond this introductory material (which is omitted from the present translation), the fundamental structure of the poem is that of a royal chronicle, as its title, which means “The Book of Kings,” suggests. Fifty kings (or, more accurately, fifty monarchs; three of them are queens) are named; their accessions to the throne, and their deaths (or abdications, or forcible removal from power) are meticulously recorded. The poem proceeds reign by reign, with increasingly frequent evocations of past kings and heroes, as well as occasional predictions of future reigns and events. However, the kings are by no means treated equally; some kings merit no more than a few lines, others many thousands. The reign of one king, Kavus, within whose reign many of the most famous legendary tales of the poem occur, occupies over three volumes of the standard nine-volume edition. Ferdowsi then shows more interest in some kings than in others; this must be partly because of the stories that were available to him (which gave him more to say about some kings than others), but it also suggests that certain themes, clearly exemplified in some reigns, were of particular interest to him. It is significant for example that the king we have just mentioned, Kavus, who bulks so large in the narrative as a whole, is one of the poem’s worst kings, and in presenting the stories of his reign Ferdowsi constantly explores the dilemmas of a good man living under an evil or incompetent government. The nature of the good man, the good hero, is a central focus of Ferdowsi’s concern, and this suggests another recurrent characteristic of the poem, which is its strong ethical bias. The characters we seem most strongly invited to admire, especially in the poem’s legendary tales, constantly ask themselves not, “How do I win?” but “How do I act well?” The ethical preoccupations of much of the poem dovetail with another of its concerns, in that, as with much medieval history and quasi-history, as well as being a chronicle it is a kind of “Mirror for Princes”; that is, a book that provides both positive and negative moral exempla for rulers (and others). To describe the poem as primarily “a chronicle with ethical biases” suggests a certain aesthetic detachment from the material, which might be assumed to be presented largely as a moralized “historical” record. This however is far from true to the experience of reading the poem, which is almost everywhere imbued with a sense of emotional urgency, and even crisis, nowhere more so than in the closing pages when the work turns fairly unequivocally into a tragedy, the record of the passing of a deeply mourned civilization whose loss is seen as a disaster (here then is another difference from ancient Western epics, which do not end tragically). The Historical Background As is the case with major epics from other traditions the appearance of the Shahnameh marks a transitional moment. It is on the one hand a compilation and summing up of what is believed to have gone before, and in that sense it self- consciously marks the ending of an era, so that the poet writes with a sense of belatedness, of living irretrievably after the golden age he records. But it is also a beginning, in that a new tradition derives from it; the self-image of the people whose putative ancestors are celebrated in the work is cast, by the work itself, into a new mold. The author of the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi, lived at a time when such a recasting of the Persian tradition was almost uniquely possible—a little earlier or later and one cannot imagine his poem coming into existence in just such an emphatic and culturally redefining form. To understand the Shahnameh therefore it is necessary to know something of the time in which it was produced. The great watershed of Persian history is the seventh-century Arab/Islamic conquest of the Sasanians, the last pre-Islamic dynasty that ruled Iran. From the perspective of the twenty-first century this occurred almost exactly half way through the historical record: there are approximately thirteen hundred years of recorded Persian civilization before this moment (from the sixth century B.C.E. and the foundation of the Achaemenid empire) and there are approximately thirteen hundred years from this moment to the present. The longevity and distinctiveness of Persian civilization during the pre-Islamic era were major factors in the ancient world, and though in the West political power shifted from the Greeks to the Romans, Persia remained more or less constant as the center of a continuous and specific tradition of civilization. The Arab conquest of the seventh century C.E. came therefore as an overwhelming shock, especially since it must have seemed for a while as though Persian civilization would disappear as an entity distinguishable from the culture of other countries subsumed into the Caliphate. An Iranian scholar has dubbed the numbed aftermath of the conquest in Iran as “the two centuries of silence.” One can gather something of the atmosphere of the early post-conquest years in the writing of a Zoroastrian (i.e. an adherent of the religion of pre-Islamic Iran) of the period: “. . . the faith was ruined and the King of Kings slain like a dog. . . . They have taken away sovereignty from the Khosrows. Not by skill and valor but by mockery and scorn have they taken it. By force they take from men wives and sweet possessions and gardens. . . . Consider how much evil those wicked ones have cast upon this world, than which ill there is none worse. The world passes from us.”* After the conquest there were constant revolts against the new rulers, particularly in the central province of Fars, which had been the heartland of imperial Iran, and many towns had to be reconquered more than once. The Umayyad dynasty (661–750) had scant regard for Persian civilization and sensibilities, and treated even converts to Islam as second-class citizens if they were not of Arab stock (the majority of the indigenous population at this time was still not Moslem and at the beginning of the Islamic period their second-class status went without saying). The Abbasids who succeeded the Umayyads in 750 C.E. came to power partly as a result of a revolt that began in Khorasan (northeastern Iran) and were generally more sympathetic to Persian civilization and mores than their predecessors had been. The capital was moved to Baghdad, close to the ruins of the Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon—an ambiguous gesture that both reasserted the triumph of the Arabs over the Sasanians, but also signaled the more Persian-oriented direction that came to be taken by the caliphate. The caliph al Ma’mun in particular was known for his Persian sympathies; his mother was Persian and his chief minister, Fazl b. Sahl, who was also Persian, ensured that the Abbasid court, extraordinarily enough, adopted much of the ceremonial protocol of the Arabs’ defeated enemy, the Sasanians. Iranians became prominent in the Abbasid civil service (the Barmaki [Barmecides] and Naubakhti families rose to particular prominence) and the Abbasid period saw a general Persianization of the court culture if not that of the caliphate in general. But the Arab yoke still clearly rankled and the early Abbasid period was marked by a series of spectacular revolts throughout Persia against rule from Baghdad. A gradual weakening of the caliphal power meant that by the tenth century local dynasties controlled much of Iran, though they still nominally held power under the caliph’s authority. In the west, including Baghdad itself for a while, the Buyids ruled; this was a dynasty that claimed descent from the Sasanians, revived for itself the Sasanian title of “King of Kings,” and in its cultural allegiances seemed ready to embrace whatever would distinguish it from the Abbasids. It had strong Shi’a sympathies (the Abbasids of course were Sunnis) and the Buyid court also celebrated the ancient Zoroastrian festivals; this syncretic and quasi-nationalist amalgam is a curious foreshadowing of a much later period of Iranian culture, from the sixteenth century onwards. In the north east the Samanids ruled throughout the 10th century; this highly talented, energetic and culturally sophisticated dynasty claimed descent from Bahram Chubineh, a Sasanian general whom Ferdowsi treats at great length. It actively promoted an interest in ancient Iranian culture (as its claims to legitimacy of rule came largely from this source), commissioning translations and encouraging an antiquarian interest in the country’s past. Most crucially for the later development of Persian literature, the dynasty used new Persian (the language that had developed since the conquest) rather than Arabic as its court language, and a court poetry of great brilliance, in Persian, soon began to flourish in Khorasan and Transoxiana, the area controlled by the Samanids. Ferdowsi and His Sources It was into this world that Ferdowsi was born, in 940 C.E. , in a village near Tus, a town later to be supplanted in importance by its neighbor, Mashhad, but which was at the time one of the major cities of Khorasan. He was a “dehqan,” that is a member of the indigenous landed aristocracy, a class which had survived the conquest in a severely attenuated form, and which had of course had to make its accommodations with the new civilization. It nevertheless saw itself as the repository of Persian/Iranian tradition and was regarded as “echt-Persian” in its sympathies (so much so that when the two peoples, Arab and Persian, are contrasted in the literature of the period the word “dehqan” is sometimes used as the equivalent of “Persian”). Tus was generally controlled by the Samanids, though its local ruler during part of Ferdowsi’s lifetime, Mansur b. Abd al- Razzaq, sometimes tried to play off the Samanids and Buyids against each other, to his own advantage. The revival of interest in indigenous Persian culture, fostered by the Samanids, was clearly of fundamental importance in providing the milieu in which a project such as the writing of the Shahnameh, which sought to celebrate the cultural and ethnic inheritance of ancient Iran, could be undertaken. There is also the fact that it was under the Samanids that poetry in Persian came to be extensively written and so developed into a cultural force to be reckoned with; this too indicates Ferdowsi’s debt to the general ethos of ethnic and quasi-national self-promotion created by the Samanid court. Apart from those for a few relatively minor passages in the later parts of the poem, Ferdowsi’s sources have disappeared. The scholarly consensus is that he used both oral and written sources, though the exact proportion of the one to the other remains in doubt. For the later sections of the poem (from the advent of Sekandar—Alexander the Great—onwards), he certainly utilized mainly and perhaps exclusively written sources, some of which still exist, but for the earlier, legendary and mythological sections, he may well have used primarily oral sources.* One section of the poem, which was concerned with the introduction of Zoroastrianism under king Goshtasp, was written by Ferdowsi’s predecessor, the poet Daqiqi, and Ferdowsi took over the composition of the work when Daqiqi was murdered by a slave. Ferdowsi’s allegiances are apparent from the opening of the poem, as much from his omissions as from what he includes. He begins with the creation of the world, and the appearance of the first man/king, Kayumars, and then passes on to kings who fight against supernatural evil forces and establish the arts of civilization. Although there can be no doubt whatsoever that Ferdowsi was a sincere Moslem (and there is some evidence that like the Buyids he combined “nationalist” sentiment with Shi’a sympathies) he makes no attempt to include any elements of the Qur’anic/Moslem cosmology in his poem, nor does he attempt to integrate the legendary Persian chronology of the material at the opening of his poem with a Qur’anic chronology. Unlike other writers who dealt with similar material, and who did attempt to intertwine the two chronologies (e.g. the historians Tabari and Mas’udi), he simply ignores Islamic cosmology and chronology altogether and places the Persian creation myths center stage. Further, the first evil person (as against supernatural being) in his poem is the usurping king, Zahhak, who brings disaster on Iran and who is identified as an Arab. The poem ends with the triumph of the Arab armies and the defeat of the Sasanians, and perhaps the most famous passage of this closing section is the prophecy by the Sasanian commander Rostam, the son of Hormozd, of the disasters that the conquest will bring on the country. The poem is thus framed by a fairly forthright hostility toward the Arabs and the political culture, if not the religion, they brought with them. A Western reader who is unfamiliar with the poem, but who has been told that it deals with Iran’s history before the coming of Islam, would naturally expect to find the early legendary material followed by stories relating to the Achaemenid monarchs—Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes and their successors. But the Achaemenids are virtually absent from the poem until just before the advent of Alexander the Great, that is until their decline. Further, the area of Iran which was their homeland, Fars, (or Pars, from which the word Persia is derived) is only rarely mentioned in the first two-thirds of the poem, and most of the place names that figure prominently in the pre-Alexander portion of the poem (e.g., Balkh, the river Oxus, the river Hirmand (Helmand), Kabul, Marv) are not within the confines of modern Iran. In fact the homeland of Iran in the Shahnameh, at least until the advent of the Sasanians, is Khorasan, which under the Samanids extended to the Oxus, and the material utilized in the earlier sections of the poem derives from the legends of this area and of Sistan—i.e. eastern Iran and what is now western Afghanistan. It has been surmised that during the dynastic upheavals between the conquest by Alexander and the emergence of the Sasanians in the third century C.E. (and particularly under the Parthians who derived from areas celebrated in these legends) this material gradually replaced the historical record of the Achaemenids who thus to all intents and purposes disappeared from the national record.