Notes · Book A3The First Kings: Tahmuras

A3.1The Reign of Tahmuras

Tahmuras spins wool, weaves cloth, and tames horses, hawks and fowl. Guided by his vizier Shidasp, he binds Ahriman and rides him like a horse, defeats the rebel Divs, and spares them in return for the art of writing in some thirty scripts.

Tahmuras, the Div-binder, was his name: His epithet is Divband, ‘Binder of Divs’. In the Avesta he is Takhma Urupi, who rode Angra Mainyu (Ahriman) as his horse for thirty years, the same image Ferdowsi keeps a few lines later.

They taught him writing, nearly thirty ways: A striking idea: writing is a demonic art, handed over by captive Divs as the price of their lives. The ‘Roman, Farsi, Arabic … Chinese and Sughdian and Pahlavi’ are a roll-call of the scripts known in Ferdowsi’s world.

The cock proclaimed the hour with timely cry: The rooster was a sacred bird in Zoroastrianism, the herald of dawn who drives away the Divs of darkness. Tahmuras’s domestication of the cock is no mere farmyard detail.