Notes · Book A2The First Kings: Hushang

A2.1The Rule of Hushang and His Civilizing Arts

Hushang rules the Seven Climes with justice for forty years. He draws iron from stone, forges the first tools, digs canals and teaches men to sow and reap.

Hushang, a sovereign, prudent, just, and wise: In the Avesta, Hushang is Haoshyangha ‘Paradhata’, ‘the first-established’, the first to rule by law. The epithet gave the whole first dynasty its Persian name, the Pishdadians, the ‘first law-givers’.

He said: “Now all the Seven Climes are mine: The Seven Climes (haft keshvar) are the seven regions of the inhabited world. In Iranian tradition Iran sat in the middle, the central and finest of them.

A2.2The Founding of the Feast of Sadeh

Hushang hurls a stone at a black serpent on the mountain. He misses, and the stone strikes sparks from the rock: fire is discovered. He founds the feast of Sadeh, and goes on to tame beasts and teach men to make clothing from furs.

The monstrous worm escaped the flying blow: The serpent escapes, and fire is born by accident, from a miss. It is a charming piece of myth-making, and a very human origin for one of the most sacred things in Iranian religion.

And made the fire the heart of sacred rite: Ferdowsi is careful here. In the Persian he explains that for the ancients fire was what the stone mihrab is for Muslims: a focus of worship, not its object. Later in the poem (II, C4.40) he says outright that they were not fire-worshippers, but worshippers of the one pure God. The distinction mattered in a Muslim society that often called Zoroastrians ‘fire-worshippers’.

And named the feast of Sadeh by that sign: Sadeh is a midwinter fire festival still celebrated by Zoroastrians and many other Iranians in late January, with great bonfires. Its name is usually linked with sad, ‘a hundred’: it falls a hundred days and nights before the end of winter, or fifty days before Nowruz.