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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 AZAR NAFISI 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. Themes, Preoccupations, and How the Poem Changes The surface of the first half of the poem is concerned largely with tribal warfare, with the river Oxus defining the approximate territorial boundary between the factions; the obvious values celebrated are therefore those of tribal loyalty and military valor. The basic conflict is that between Iran and Turan, i.e. Khorasan and Transoxiana; the conflict is given a mythical origin in the story of the fratricidal conflict of Tur and Iraj. The inhabitants of Turan are referred to as “Turks”; this ethnic definition derives from the late Sasanian period when the area was in fact inhabited by Turkish tribes who did constantly threaten Iran. But the legends themselves must be older than this conflict, and, as the story of the common familial origin of the two peoples indicates, the stories, if they have any historical basis at all, must refer to ancient rivalries between different Iranian clans occurring perhaps around the time the Iranian people descended onto the Iranian plateau (a migration that is assumed to have happened some time before the beginning of the first millennium B.C.E.). The very earliest must refer to an even earlier period as they have parallels in Indian myth and legend (Jamshid of the Shahnameh, for example, has been identified with Yama, the Hindu Lord of the Underworld), and presumably derive from the time before the split between the Indian and Iranian divisions of the Indo-European peoples. Parallels with Western mythologies are also discernible: for example the story of Jamshid and Zahhak is not unlike that of Prometheus, in that a hubristic king introduces the arts of civilization to mankind, and is then kept in perpetual underground torment, except that the two halves of the tale are assigned to two actors within one story rather than to one. Though most of them seem to have come from eastern Iran not all of the stories in the legendary section of the Shahnameh derive from the same tradition. Two different dynastic traditions are interwoven, and much of the interest of this part of the poem comes from the relationship between two dynastic families— the Kayanids, who rule Iran as a whole, and the house of Nariman (Sam, his son Zal, Zal’s son Rostam, Rostam’s son Faramarz) who rule in Sistan but who also function as the Kayanids’ chief champions and advisors. This relationship is presented as a gradually deteriorating one: Sam is unquestioning in his loyalty to his Kayanid overlords, acting with the same loyalty toward bad kings as toward good; Zal is often critical of his kings’ actions but always finally supports them; Rostam, who is the preeminent hero of the legendary section of the poem, is openly contemptuous of two of his kings (Kavus and Goshtasp) though he too, until goaded beyond endurance, acts with general loyalty; Rostam’s son Faramarz rises in rebellion against his king and is slain. What is perhaps especially interesting is that in these conflicts between the Iranian kings and their champions/advisors the latter are virtually always shown to be ethically superior to the kings they serve. Given the legendary and tribal nature of the stories, loyalty is obviously a prime virtue of the society described in the poem, but much of the poem’s aesthetic interest derives from the fact that those who demand such loyalty are often morally inferior to those whom they govern, and that our sympathies are certainly with the governed rather than the governors. A similar situation can be found on the familial level. The three best known stories of the legendary section of the poem—those of Sohrab, Seyavash and Esfandyar—involve the deaths of sons; in each case the death comes about as a result of the father’s actions, directly so with Sohrab, indirectly but equally culpably with Seyavash and Esfandyar. Again, the inferior in the relationship is shown as the innocent (this is particularly clear in the case of Seyavash). It is worth remarking also that all three of these slain sons have foreign, non-Iranian, mothers; Sohrab’s mother is from Samangan, a frontier town with ambiguous loyalties, Seyavash’s is from Turan, the traditional enemy of Iran throughout the poem, Esfandyar’s is from “Rum” (Byzantium). Here too it seems as if the apparently monolithically authoritarian message of the poem is being somewhat called into question; just as loyalty to kings and fathers is a demand that produces a terrible human cost, so too the very centrality of Iran to the poem’s values seems questioned by the sympathy we are invited to give to these sacrificed half-foreign princes. Indeed, Seyavash and his son Khosrow, who is presented as the perfect monarch of the legendary portion of the poem, both turn away from Iran for personal, ethical reasons. Khosrow’s abdication directs us to another complexity in the poem, its treatment of the notion of kingship. A surprisingly large number of kings in the poem abdicate, and prominent among these are two of the most ethically admirable of the poem, Feraydun and Khosrow. There is a story in the Golestan, by the thirteenth-century Persian writer Sa’di, about a king who has a wonderful advisor whom he dismisses. The advisor takes up with a group of religious mendicants and there finds a spiritual peace he had never known at court. The country begins to go to rack and ruin and the king sends for his former advisor to return, saying he is the one man with enough intelligence to fill the post. The former advisor’s answer is that it is precisely his intelligence that prevents him from resuming his position. The same problem, transferred to the ethical plain, haunts much of the Shahnameh; those ethically most fitted to rule are precisely those most reluctant to rule. The problem is graphically set out during Khosrow’s self-communing before he finally resigns the throne. The relatively frequent abdications, as well as other evidence such as the role Zal and Rostam play as kingmakers after the murder of the king Nozar, are further evidence of the eastern origin of the stories that make up the legendary part of the poem. Two traditions of kingship exist simultaneously in the work. One is that espoused by the Sasanians, through whom Ferdowsi must have received his sources; this is in essence the ancient Middle-Eastern notion of kingship, one that ties kingship to religion and to the sanction of God, that elevates the king to a quasi-divine position as God’s representative on earth, and which derived from the pre-Iranian Babylonian dynasties. The other derives from “the practice of the steppe” and involves the acclamation of the king by his peers, the notion that the king can always be replaced if he becomes incompetent (or too old to rule effectively), and that he rules by virtue of his abilities and the consent of the nobility in general. The poem’s “abdications” would seem largely to derive from this latter tradition, though in keeping with his practice elsewhere Ferdowsi frequently rewrites the topos as a problem of personal ethical choice. (There is a certain irony in the fact that of the two traditions of kingship it is the Eastern, less absolutist, one that seems to be authentically Iranian and the Western absolutist one that is ultimately Babylonian and non-Iranian; though due to the Achaemenids’ espousal of the Babylonian tradition, and its adoption by subsequent Iranian dynasties, especially the Sasanians, it is this tradition that has come to be seen as essentially Iranian). The figure of Rostam is of particular interest. He is the preeminent hero of the poem, and is presented as Iran’s savior, but his origins (as the child of an Indian princess descended from an Arab demon king and of a man brought up beyond civilization by the fabulous Simorgh) proclaim him as having a peculiarly tangential relationship with Iran and its court and culture. He is in every sense a liminal figure, ruling in a border area, with connections to both the supernatural world (the Simorgh) and with the animal kingdom (his talismanic tiger skin). He displays many of the characteristics of the trickster hero, as this figure is found in many cultures, and indeed his patronymic (“Dastan”) means “trickery.” Further his ethic and way of being in the world often seem more primitive, and even gross, than those of the suave courtiers against whom he is often pitted, and it is notable that the weapons particularly associated with him (the mace, or club, and the lariat), are of the most ancient, and incidentally pre-metallic, kind. His legend would seem to incorporate extremely ancient layers of storytelling, some of them perhaps going back in origin to prehistory. It should be apparent from even such a brief and necessarily incomplete summary of the themes of the poem’s opening section that although it is undoubtedly an epic, and its superficial concerns are those of a dynastic chronicle, the relatively straightforward content we associate with such terms does not begin to do justice to the work’s density and artistic complexity. The poem passes from legendary to quasi-historical material with the appearance of Alexander, though in the earlier sections of this “historical” part the stories are given a more or less legendary treatment (Alexander for example is half-Iranian, his father being the Iranian king Darab, and in common with other Islamic versions of his legend he is presented as much as a seeker after knowledge and enlightenment as a world-conqueror). As with the Achaemenids, the historical record of the Parthians, who ruled Iran from the third century B.C.E. until the third C.E., is largely absent from the poem; this is almost certainly due to the success of the Sasanians in deliberately obliterating the memory of the dynasty they replaced. The closing portion of the poem deals with the Sasanians; here the record is relatively complete and parts of the poem do approach the simplicity, even randomness, of a chronicle. There is also much more circumstantial detail to many of the stories recounted, and they clearly have not undergone the mythological weathering and constant refashioning of the legendary earlier narratives. Much of this section of the poem can be seen as a record of more or less direct propaganda for the glories of Sasanian civilization; the reforms of Ardeshir for example and a great deal of the narrative concerned with Khosrow (Kesra) Nushirvan, who is presented as the archetypal king of the poem’s “historical” section much as Kay Khosrow is of the legendary section. Some themes of the earlier part of the poem continue to be treated; there is as much father-son conflict here as in the legendary section (albeit it is not presented in such starkly mythical terms), and the king-champion conflict receives one of its most extended treatments in the relationship between Bahram Chubineh and his two monarchs Hormozd and Khosrow Parviz. Bahram Chubineh is virtually the only would-be usurper of kingly power whom Ferdowsi treats relatively sympathetically, and this may well be because the Samanids, under whose nominal aegis Ferdowsi began his poem, claimed descent from this hero. Often the stories in the poem’s closing sections seem to be providing a kind of mirror image of the world of myth and legend of the poem’s opening half. In the first half of the poem, prominent fathers (Rostam, Kavus, Goshtasp) are directly or indirectly responsible for their sons’ deaths (Sohrab, Seyavash, Esfandyar), but in the second half prominent sons (Khosrow Parviz, Shirui) are held to be directly or indirectly responsible for their fathers’ deaths (Hormozd, Khosrow Parviz). In the first half, the major champion is Rostam who, despite increasing provocation, attempts to maintain loyalty to the royal families of Iran and emphatically rejects the notion that he might ever be the king of the country. In the second half the major champion is Bahram Chubineh, who rebels against both of his monarchs and attempts to seize the throne for himself. Most striking perhaps is the way that the role of women, and particularly non- Persian women, is redefined in the poem’s second half. Virtually all of the significant women in the poem’s mythological and legendary sections are non- Persian in origin (Sindokht, Rudabeh, Sudabeh, Farigis, Manizheh, Katayun) and, with the signal exception of Sudabeh, almost all of them are positively presented. Even Sudabeh, the first time we meet her, is a positive figure like Rudabeh and Manizheh, who defies her non-Persian father to be faithful to the Persian she loves. The most prominent female figure in the poem’s second half is certainly Gordyeh, who is not foreign but Iranian, and represents the traditional and deeply Iranian virtue of loyalty to ancient mores. When foreign women do appear in the second half they are much less welcome than they had been in the legendary narratives. In the poem’s earlier sections most of the narratives’ major heroes have foreign mothers, but this doesn’t prevent them from being seen as great exemplars of Persian virtues, and miscegenation is an accepted and generally welcomed fact. Indeed, perhaps the most positively presented king of the whole poem, Kay Khosrow, has only one Iranian grandparent; the other three are all Central-Asian Turks. But miscegenation is regarded with deep suspicion in the poem’s second half, and that Hormozd has a Chinese mother and Shirui a Byzantine mother is seen in each case as a distinct negative. The preference here is for emphatic endogamy, although Ferdowsi is clearly embarrassed by the pre-Islamic laws that encouraged marriages within the immediate family, as is evident from his treatment of the daughter- father/Homay-Bahman relationship, and the way that he glosses over something earlier historians unequivocally recorded, that Gordyeh was married to her brother Bahram Chubineh. One notable woman who has gone down in Persian legend as foreign in origin, and whose story is recounted by Ferdowsi, is Shirin. Unlike Nezami (the twelfth-century author of the better known romance version of her tale), Ferdowsi doesn’t explicitly tell us that she is not a Persian, but given the suspicion of foreign consorts in the poem’s second half, the unexplained scandal that surrounds her in his version of her tale, and the fact that her presence at court needs strenuous justification from her husband and king, Khosrow Parviz, perhaps point to this. This unexplained scandal is also an example of how not only the content of the tales changes in the poem’s second half, but also Ferdowsi’s method of telling them. In general, when reading the poem’s earlier narratives, we have a clear idea of the ethical issues involved, and of where our sympathies are supposed to lie. We know that Seyavash is ethically superior to both Kavus and Sudabeh; that Piran Viseh acts from more morally admirable motives than does his king, Afrasyab; and that Goshtasp is at fault when he sends Esfandyar to bring Rostam to his court in chains. This moral clarity is often much harder to find in Ferdowsi’s portraits of the central characters of his poem’s later sections, many of whom are presented in a highly ambiguous and ethically unresolved fashion. Are we to approve or disapprove of Shirin? When we first meet her she is an abandoned woman and a figure of pathos; she elicits our sympathy. She is accused of some unspecified moral impurity and the charge is never really denied, merely evaded; we suspend judgment. She secretly murders her husband’s favorite wife and assumes her position in the harem; we disapprove. She rejects her odious stepson, Shirui, and has a splendid speech of self-defense and a moving death scene; we approve, and this seems to be the final impression we are meant to bring away from her tale. But the figure she is most similar to from the poem’s first half is the generally evil Sudabeh. Like Sudabeh she is a fairly ruthless and (probably) foreign royal consort who combines a dubious ethical reputation with an absolute hold on the king’s affections, and at one point she seems to be about to become erotically involved with her stepson. With this comparison in mind we are again tempted to disapprove. This moral ambiguity is not confined to Ferdowsi’s portraits of female characters. Another prime example is that of the reformer Mazdak. We read that he is knowledgeable and that his words are wise, and when there is a famine the analogies he makes to the king concerning the populace’s sufferings seem cogent and laudable. But the man who defeats him in argument is sponsored by Nushin-Ravan (Anushirvan), who is presented as one of the most admirable monarchs in the poem, and Ferdowsi explicitly tells us at the end of Mazdak’s tale that a wise man would not act as he did. At the opening of his tale we seem meant to admire him; at the end we are virtually told to despise him. Perhaps the poem’s most extreme instance of apparent authorial moral ambiguity, in the portrayal of a character, occurs in the account of Sekandar (Alexander), who is presented as both a barbarous conqueror and an ethically motivated searcher for enlightenment. The reasons for this complexity, and ways in which it affects our experience of reading the tales, can be considered as separate, if related, issues. A major cause of some of the tales’ ambiguities seems clear: Ferdowsi had much fuller sources for many of the quasi-historical narratives than he had for the legendary material, and some of these sources seem to have been quite radically contradictory of one another. The fact that he did not, apparently, attempt to resolve these contradictions seems significant. His method sometimes seems analogous to that adopted by a number of medieval Islamic historians (e.g., Tabari) who, when their sources offered differing versions of the same events, put down both versions, and then added, “But God knows best.” Ferdowsi doesn’t say this, and he doesn’t explicitly tell us that he is recording different versions, but he (apparently) simply splices them together and leaves the contradictions intact in the one narrative. What is perhaps especially interesting is that in the pre-Sekandar portion of the poem we can sometimes see him choosing one version over another in the few instances when we know that he had more than one account available for a tale. For example, there were two versions as to why Rostam and Goshtasp quarreled. One was that Rostam despised Goshtasp’s family as upstart, and Goshtasp resented this; the other was that Rostam vehemently denounced Goshtasp’s adoption of the new religion of Zoroastrianism. The first version, which Ferdowsi follows, is found in Tabari’s History; the second is in Dinawari’s History, as well as in a number of works written after Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, e.g., the anonymous History of Sistan. This second version is wholly ignored by Ferdowsi. Here, for one of the legendary tales, we see him choosing one account over another, but in the historical sections of his poem his method seems to be more one of splicing than of choice and exclusion. The contradictions are not only moral, but often factual. Sometimes these seem significant (Sasan has two differing lineages), often they seem simply incidental. Who, for example, is responsible for the blinding of King Hormozd? A prophecy says his wife will do it; we are told that members of a mob stirred up by Gostahm do it, unbeknownst to Hormozd’s son, Khosrow Parviz. Khosrow Parviz is later accused of either having done it personally or of having instigated it. Ferdowsi apparently favors the second version (the mob), but he still includes the other two in his text. When we compare the quasi-historical stories to those in the poem’s legendary portion we see the truth of A. J. P. Taylor’s aphorism, “History gets thicker as it approaches recent times—more people, more events, and more books written about them.” One senses Ferdowsi dealing with these accumulating people, events, and books in his presentation of the historical narratives, which are thick with detail in a way that is quite absent from most of the earlier tales. If this multiplicity of detail can occasionally lead to contradictions, and sometimes to outright anachronisms (as in Sekandar’s Christianity), it can also, paradoxically, give the tales a quotidian realism that is largely absent from the legendary material, as well as providing for sudden and arresting shifts of tone. Furthermore, the intensity of a number of the psychological portraits in this section (e.g., that of Bahram Chubineh) depends largely on the telling accumulation of such details. This concern with the quotidian brings another advantage: it is in the Sasanian section of the poem that we most often glimpse daily life outside of the court and the realm of the heroic. The occasional vivid vignettes of rural life that we encounter in the reigns of the later Sasanian monarchs contribute a kind of stylized realism that can be charming or sobering, depending on the circumstances recounted. In the same way, much of the humor of the poem also occurs in the Sasanian section, again frequently in moments located outside of the court. A new problem is that when Ferdowsi’s sources lack detailed accounts, he must nevertheless give some version of what he believes to have happened. His apologetic and relatively perfunctory account of the Ashkanians (Parthians) was clearly caused by the fact that the Sasanians had fairly efficiently obliterated them from the historical record. Interestingly enough, this is something that Bahram Chubineh threatens to do to the Sasanians themselves. When the government of the Islamic Republic expunged from public life all positive references to the Pahlavis, even changing all the street names in the major cities, they were following ancient precedent. From the opening of the poem the Persian courts are characterized as centers of both justice and pleasure. The ideal king will administer justice, which includes protecting the frontiers of the country against invasion, and his court will also represent a kind of earthly paradise whose pleasures include feasting, wine-drinking, the giving and receiving of gifts, hunting, and the celebration of the major festivals of the Zoroastrian year. The worst sins, for both the king and his subjects, are greed and excessive ambition. Erotic pleasure is hardly dwelt on in the poem’s legendary section, although it is understood that this too is a constituent of the court’s function as an earthly paradise. In the stories from the “historical” section of the poem, erotic pleasure is sometimes brought into the foreground in a way that it had not been in the earlier tales, and the simultaneous association of both justice and pleasure in the person of the ideal king becomes more problematic. The three most positively presented kings of the post-Sekandar section of the poem are Ardeshir (the founder of the Sasanian dynasty), Bahram Gur, and Nushin-Ravan (Anushirvan the Just). Ardeshir is presented as a vigorous reformer who rewrites his country’s legal code, energetically puts down internal dissension, and secures the country’s borders against invasion. Nushin-Ravan is a man who inherits an empire and strives to administer it justly and according to ancient precepts, while remaining open to wisdom from other sources, especially India. The main difference between them and the more admirable legendary monarchs whom they succeed is the centralization of their administrative and cultural control. The sense of various centers of power (e.g., Sistan) only tangentially under the central government’s authority, which is everywhere present in the legendary material, has largely disappeared from the narratives. Nevertheless, both these kings are re-embodiments, in Sasanian terms, of ideals that have been explicit throughout the poem’s legendary section. Bahram Gur, of whom Ferdowsi seems, in general, emphatically to approve, introduces a relatively new element into the poem, which is the emphasis on pleasure, especially the pleasure of erotic adventure, as the primary, and apparently often sole, activity of a monarch. Bahram Gur is presented as an ideal monarch who is largely preoccupied with sensual, private pleasure, but who is nevertheless just, and widely loved by his subjects, even if his vizier is worried about what he sees as the king’s excessive attachment to women. Two stories— one beginning in comedy and ending in tragedy, the other wholly comic, which are placed back to back in his reign—also elaborate on another pleasure that had been taken for granted in the earlier sections of the poem, and this is drinking wine. The first story ends with wine being forbidden, and the second with this prohibition being abrogated as long as one does not drink to excess. It seems more than a coincidence that the outcome of the stories concerning wine in Bahram’s reign reverses orthodox interpretation of the Qur’anic texts on wine, according to which the prohibition abrogates the implied permission to drink in moderation. At the end of the poem, when Rostam the son of Hormozd prophesies the disasters that will come to Iran as a result of the Arab invasion, Bahram Gur’s reign is singled out as emblematic of all that the Arabs will destroy, and we realize that the emphasis on sensual pleasure and its attendant luxuries in his reign was deliberately presented as an alternative to the civilization brought by the Moslem Arab conquerors, which is characterized, by Rostam at least, in wholly negative and dour terms. But despite Rostam’s unequivocally bleak prophecy, the final episodes of the poem are profoundly ambiguous. Hormozd and Khosrow Parviz are complex, weak kings who seem to have inherited Bahram Gur’s attachment to pleasure but have none of his panache or instinct for largess, and are unable to command the affection and loyalty of their subjects. They are followed by a virtual rabble. The sense of an empire destroyed as much by the weakness, extravagance, and squalid infighting of its rulers as by outside invasion pervades the poem’s closing pages. Although the poet is emphatic in his lament for the civilization that was destroyed by the invasion, his depiction of the negotiations between the Arabs and the Persians seems at times weighted in the Arabs’ moral favor. It is difficult to read the scene in which the laconic and almost naked Arab envoy Sho’beh confronts the arrogant Persian commanders, resplendent in their golden armor, as anything but an indictment of the Persians. Despite the undeniable epic grandeur of its best-known passages, the Shahnameh is never a simple poem, and the moral complexities it explores throughout its immense length come to a magnificent and unresolved climax in its last pages. If Ferdowsi’s final claim is one of pride in his work, an emotion that seems almost as strongly present is that of bewilderment. As he frequently remarks whenever he has to record the untimely death of a character he admires, he cannot understand what the heavens are about, and this sense of a repeatedly frustrated interrogation of God’s purposes reaches its apogee in the poem’s closing scenes. But although in the narrative of the Sasanian reigns we may regret the absence of that epic force present in the earlier sections of the poem, there are other compensating virtues to this latter part, which often, incidentally, receives much less attention than the opening half. The circumstantial quality of much of the detail can give the scenes great vividness (e.g. the scene of the minstrel Barbad playing to Khosrow Parviz,) as well as pathos (e.g. the events leading up to the murder of Khosrow Parviz,) and tragic intensity (e.g. the suicide of Shirin, a scene that seems in its details to owe something to the story of Cleopatra’s suicide over Antony’s body in order to escape falling into the hands of Octavian, and whose ultimate source may be the story of Panthea in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia). Few passages of any literature can equal the profound sense of the passing of a civilization that informs the closing pages of the Shahnameh, in which the cry that “Our long travails will be as nought” seems to call up the whole vast history of a country in its despairing summation. As the Zoroastrian chronicler quoted above wrote, “The world passes from us.” These last scenes have a wonderful vividness and pathos; very telling for example is the way Ferdowsi emphasizes the pomp and wealth of the Iranian army and its commanders glittering in their jewels and gold, and then contrasts this with the hardiness and poverty of their Arab opponents. Two almost contradictory messages are being given to us at once; the wealth underlines the splendor that is about to pass, it brings home to us the sheer magnitude of what was about to happen, the gorgeousness that had been the indigenous Iranian civilization; but in the ascetic unconcern of the Arab warrior Sho’beh it also brings home the virtues of spartan simplicity, the laconic uncluttered force that an attitude of contemptu mundi can bring with it. In a brief scene of great richness and with consummate skill Ferdowsi sees and conveys both the glamor of the civilization that is dying and the valor of the new civilization that is emerging. The Poem’s Reception If Ferdowsi began his poem under the Samanids, and in hopes of contributing to the revival of a politically independent Islamo-Persian civilization such as that promoted by the Samanids and their western neighbors the Buyids, he lived to see such hopes dashed within his own lifetime. In the closing years of the tenth century and the opening years of the eleventh the Samanid dynasty collapsed and eastern Iran was taken over by the Ghaznavid Turks under their energetic king Mahmud of Ghazneh. Whether Ferdowsi completely rewrote his poem or simply revised it to suit the new political climate is not known, but as it stands now the work contains frequent episodes of panegyric on Mahmud, though the irony of the author of a poem celebrating countless Iranian victories over the Turks writing such passages cannot have been lost on either the poet or the king. Legend has it that Ferdowsi’s poem was not appreciated by Mahmud and that he died a poor and embittered man. The closing lines of the poem certainly attest to resentment at being poorly rewarded for what must have been virtually his life’s work. Just as the politics of Ferdowsi’s own time seem to have affected the reception of his work so too modern politics have played a part in defining the poet’s and his poem’s reputation. The Pahlavi kings who ruled Iran from 1925 until 1979 were particularly interested in emphasizing Iran’s pre-Islamic past as the ultimate source of Persian civilization, and to this end they assiduously promoted the study of Ferdowsi’s poem, as it takes exactly this past as its subject matter. Since the Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran the Islamic component of Persian culture has received emphatic state support, and the pre-Islamic period has been downplayed as a factor within the culture. In each case scholarship, both Western and Iranian, has tended to follow the current political fashion. Scholars writing on Iran before the revolution tended to emphasize a continuity of culture across the Islamic watershed; some recent writing tends to suggest that little of significance survived the conquest, that Iran became a wholly new cultural entity after its incorporation into the Islamic world. (Similar arguments as to the sources of national tradition can of course be found in other countries’ histories; in Greece for example there are both partisans of continuity between ancient and modern Greek civilization, and those who assert that the coming of Christianity and the fashioning of a distinctive Byzantine civilization virtually negated all that had gone before in the culture.) But Ferdowsi’s poem has survived other political vicissitudes and its immense value both as a literary work and as an unrivaled source of Iranian legendary material will certainly ensure its continued vitality as a component of the culture. Whatever else it is, the Shahnameh is the one indisputably great surviving cultural artifact that attempts to assert a continuity of collective memory across the moment of the conquest; at the least it salvaged the pre-conquest legendary history of Iran and made it available to the Iranian people as a memorial of a great and distinctive civilization. The Translation A word or two about the form of the present translation is perhaps appropriate. In Persian, the poem is written in one form throughout, couplets, which correspond quite closely in length to the English heroic couplet. But the stories of the Shahnameh have always enjoyed a vigorous popular life, told by itinerant story tellers called naqqals, and in this incarnation they have been recounted largely in prose with some episodes in verse. As Kumiko Yamamoto has put it in her fine book The Oral Background of Persian Epics (Leiden, 2003) “Prose is used to tell a story, and verse to mark the internal divisions of a performance . . . In terms of narrative structure too, verses which appear intermittently . . . are used, for example, to enhance dramatic effects, to express the internal feelings of characters, or to sum up the story. Hence, verse functions as an attention-getter in the narrative, introducing different rhythms into the prose narration” (p.28). If therefore one wrote down a naqqal’s performance, sticking to his formal choices, one would finish up with a prosimetrum, a text that is largely prose but contains passages of verse at significant moments of the narrative. The prosimetrum is a common medieval Persian form—Sa’di’s Golestan is perhaps the most famous example—but it was also a not uncommon medieval European form; perhaps the best known European examples are the De Consolatione Philosophiae by Boethius and La Vita Nuova by Dante. To translate a medieval Persian poem into what had been a medieval Persian and European form seemed to be an undertaking that would not wholly traduce the formal qualities of the original. There was a further reason for my choosing the form favored by the naqqals. The naqqali diffusion of the narratives of the Shahnameh has ensured, and been the most obvious manifestation of, these narratives’ popular life within the culture. My aim in translating the Shahnameh was not to produce a text for scholars, but to make it available to a wide non-specialist audience. I hesitate to say a popular audience: perhaps no medieval literary artifact, from any culture, can have a truly popular existence now. We prefer our medievalism to be derivative and ersatz; The Lord of the Rings rather than Beowulf, Camelot rather than Malory or Chrétien de Troyes. Nevertheless there is still a world of readers, especially relatively young readers, who are not scholars, who might try Beowulf or Malory, and it was them I aimed to reach with my translation. I translated not for scholars, who after all have access to the original text, now in relatively good editions, but for that radically endangered species, the general reader. The naqqals’ choice of form, the form of the popular diffusion of the stories of the Shahnameh in Persian, thus seemed all the more appropriate. Given the poem’s immense length, some passages have inevitably been omitted, and others are presented in summary form (the italicized prose passages are summarized translations of sections of Ferdowsi’s text). In general, I did not omit passages within a given episode, and when I did it was usually because the poem had become highly repetitious. For example, in the later reigns there is an enormous amount of ethical advice handed out by kings either at their coronations or on their death-beds. Much of this advice is extremely repetitious, and much of it I omitted. This of course changes the structure of Ferdowsi’s poem, and ideally a reader should be aware of this. But our appetite for moral sententiae is considerably smaller than that of a medieval audience, and I did not feel I could try the patience of the general reader—who I again emphasize is my intended audience—too high. Conversely, in what I take to be the greatest stories of the poem, for example those of Seyavash and Esfandyar, virtually nothing is omitted. In particular I was scrupulous in translating everything that related to the interiority of the characters and the ethical dilemmas they face, simply because these seem to me to be among the most distinctive and aesthetically admirable sections of the poem. The most substantial omission is the episode of the Twelve Champions, the Davazdah Rokh, which occurs during Kay Khosrow’s war against Turan. The contemporary Iranian author Golshiri claimed that this episode is the heart of the poem, which only goes to show how far two devoted readers of the Shahnameh can, in all good faith, hold utterly differing views of it. The episode is highly repetitious (this is of course deliberate, but that does not make the repetitions any more palatable for a modern reader), and it also strikes me as otiose in its descriptions, and embarrassingly ethnocentric in its triumphalism. It is an extreme example of the kind of episode that can be found in ethnocentric epics the world over: but no other epic that I am aware of has an equivalent to the story of Seyavash, or to the story of Esfandyar, and since, for reasons of space, I had to make choices as to what could stay and what could go I felt I had much rather lose the Davazdah Rokh than either Seyavash or Esfandyar. In working on this translation I have used various editions of Ferdowsi’s text (which differs widely from manuscript to manuscript). For the stories prior to the tale of Esfandyar, my chief source has been the edition edited by Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh (5 volumes, New York, 1988-1997). At the time of writing, only the earlier sections of the poem have been published in this edition. Sometimes, in the interests of producing a coherent narrative, it has proved to be impossible to follow this edition (for example, during the narrative of Zal’s being tested by the sages of Manuchehr’s court, where this edition, following what most scholars believe to be the oldest manuscript of the poem, gives too garbled an account to make narrative sense), and at these moments I have turned mainly to the so-called Moscow edition, edited by Bertels et al., (9 volumes, Moscow, 1966-1971). For the story of Esfandyar, I have used Azizollah Jovayni’s Hemaseh-ye rostam o esfandyar (Tehran, 1995). For the remainder of the stories, i.e. those after Esfandyar, I have used the Moscow edition. For a few moments, chiefly in order to add clarity to narrative details, I have used the nineteenth-century edition edited by Jules Mohl (reprinted Paris, 1976). A Note on Four Words The word farr refers to a God-given glory, and inviolability, bestowed on a king, and sometimes on a great hero. Its physical manifestation was a light that shone from the king’s or hero’s face. It has been suggested that the practice of saluting derives from an inferior’s complimentary covering of his eyes with his hand, in order not to be blinded by the farr supposedly emanating from his superior. The geographical term Rum, and its adjective Rumi, are particularly hard to translate consistently in the stories in the Shahnameh. The words refer to the civilizations that lie to the west of Iran, in Asia Minor and in Europe. Thus Sekandar the Macedonian is a Rumi, as are the Roman emperors who fought the early Sasanians, as also are the Byzantine emperors who fought the later Sasanians. For the sake of relative historical veracity I have translated the words in different ways in stories that occur in different epochs. Thus in the time of Sekandar I have translated Rum and Rumi as Greece and Greek, in the reign of Shapur I have used the terms Rome and Roman, and for the reigns of the later kings I have used Byzantium and Byzantine. This has the advantage of reflecting the actual enemies of Iran at the relevant periods, but it does also disguise the way in which for Ferdowsi these Western civilizations were one and continuous. Ferdowsi also uses Rumi (usually to describe cloth or armor) during the legendary stories, which take place in a nebulous prehistoric time, and here I have simply kept the word unchanged, as all translations would be anachronistic. The Parthian and Sasanian capital was at Ctesiphon, on the River Tigris. In the reigns of the later Sasanian kings, Ferdowsi frequently refers to the city as “Baghdad” (he occasionally does this earlier in the poem too), and I have kept this usage in most instances, though it sounds and is anachronistic. The Abbasid (751 C.E.–1258 C.E.) capital of Baghdad was deliberately located close to the ruins of Ctesiphon, and materials taken from the ruins were used in its construction. In referring to Ctesiphon by the name of the Arab city that would almost literally take its place as the administrative center of a great empire, Ferdowsi seems to be simultaneously asserting a continuity of civilization across the divide of the conquest, and predicting the conquest itself. The word nard is usually translated as “backgammon,” and it is often said that the story of the importation of chess from India to Iran, and the Persian invention of backgammon in response, comes from the Shahnameh’s account of the reign of Nushin-Ravan. However, it is fairly clear from Ferdowsi’s description of nard that the game referred to is almost certainly not backgammon, which does not, for example, involve kings. There were medieval variants of chess, at least one of which involved the use of dice to determine permissible moves, and it seems likely that it is one of these variants that Ferdowsi is describing, rather than backgammon. As we have no names for such variants I have left the word in Persian. Dick Davis A NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS The immense popularity of the Shahnameh’s narratives and characters within Persian culture is indicated by the fact that they have been illustrated in a multitude of ways, from frescoes in palaces to sumptuous miniatures in court- commissioned manuscripts, to large screens painted in a direct and naïve style (somewhat similar to that used by cinema poster artists in the Indian subcontinent), which could be unrolled as a backdrop for a naqqal when he was telling a particular story. The illustrations used for this translation are taken from lithographs for popular nineteenth-century editions of the poem. They bring together traditional Iranian styles and the Western styles of illustration that were beginning to be known in Iran at this time, and in their combination of the homely and the heroic, the familiar and the fabulous, they give us a glimpse of the imaginative ways in which the poem’s narratives have flourished within Persian popular culture. THE FIRST KINGS The Reign of Kayumars What does the Persian poet say about the first man to seek the crown of world sovereignty? No one has any knowledge of those first days, unless he has heard tales passed down from father to son. This is what those tales tell: The first man to be king, and to establish the ceremonies associated with the crown and throne, was Kayumars. When he became lord of the world, he lived first in the mountains, where he established his throne, and he and his people dressed in leopard skins. It was he who first taught men about the preparation of food and clothing, which were new in the world at that time. Seated on his throne, as splendid as the sun, he reigned for thirty years. He was like a tall cypress tree topped by the full moon, and the royal farr shone from him. All the animals of the world, wild and tame alike, reverently paid homage to him, bowing down before his throne, and their obedience increased his glory and good fortune. He had a handsome son, who was wise and eager for fame, like his father. His name was Siamak, and Kayumars loved him with all his heart. The sight of his son was the one thing in the world that made him happy, and his love for the boy made him weep when he thought of their being separated. Siamak grew into a fine young man, and he had no enemies, except for Ahriman, who was secretly jealous of his splendor and looked for ways to humble him. Ahriman had a son who was like a savage wolf; this fearless youth gathered an army together, spread sedition throughout the world, and prepared to attack the king. Siamak Is Killed by the Black Demon Kayumars was unaware of these machinations, but the angel Sorush appeared before Siamak in the guise of a magical being swathed in a leopard skin, and told him of the plots against his father. The prince’s heart seethed with fury and he gathered an army together. There was no armor at that time, and the prince dressed for war in a leopard skin. The two armies met face to face, and Siamak