New NaqqaliNotes · Book D1The Reign of Bahman, Son of Esfandiyar
D1.1Bahman Seeks Vengeance for His Father
Read the verse →Bahman takes his grandfather’s throne, pays his troops, and tells the nobles he means to avenge Esfandiyar on Rostam’s family. The court answers that he should do as he wishes. He marches on Sistan with a hundred thousand horsemen.
For Jamshid’s blood, Fereydoon brought disgrace: Bahman makes his case out of the poem’s own history: Fereydoon against Zahhak, Manuchehr against Salm and Tur, Kay Khosrow against Afrasiab, Esfandiyar for Lohrasp. Every one of those wars the Shahnameh treats as just. His is the first in which Iran marches against its own champions, and Ferdowsi lets him argue it in the old style so that the reader can hear what has gone wrong.
He marched on Kabul, seeking Rostam’s due: Faramarz is Rostam’s son (on him, see I, B11.7), and his sack of Kabul avenged his father’s death in the pit (II, C9). That vengeance is the pretext Bahman needs: each side can now point to a debt. The blood-feud that has driven the poem since Siavash arrives at last at the house that won all its wars.
D1.2Bahman Humiliates Zal
Read the verse →Bahman halts on the Hirmund and sends Zal a threat. Zal pleads Rostam’s long service and offers all his treasure. Bahman comes, hears him out, then has his feet bound, loads the wealth of Sistan onto camels, and gives Zabul over to plunder.
Here Dastan, son of Sahm, before you stands: Zal, who was left on a mountainside as a baby and reared by the Simorgh (I, A7.2–A7.3), is now the oldest man in the poem, reciting his own names to a boy king and leaning on a staff. On the name Dastan, see I, A7.3. Ferdowsi puts him in the full posture of a suppliant, and then has him fail.
They loaded camel after camel, packed: The sack is given as an inventory — coins, uncut gems, thrones, the rugs off the floors, Indian blades, camphor and musk — and then one line says that Rostam won all of it from kings. The catalogue is an elegy for the Sistan cycle. A later Sistani poem, the Bahman-nameh, made this war a whole epic of its own.
D1.3Faramarz Fights Bahman
Read the verse →Faramarz marches from Bost to avenge his grandfather. After three days of battle a wind turns against him and his army breaks; he fights on until his horse falls under the arrows. Taken alive, he is hung head-down on a gibbet and shot dead.
Then Ardeshir, in vengeance for the slain: Ardeshir here is Bahman himself. Iranian tradition gives him the second name Ardeshir Dirāzdast, ‘the long-handed’, and from this point the poem uses the two names as one man’s: Darab will be called Ardeshir’s son (D2.4, D4.1). The figure behind both names is usually identified with the Artaxerxes whom Greek writers called Longimanus.
They hung his elephantine frame on high: On the gibbet, see I, B13.2. Hanging a man alive and head-downward, then shooting him, is the death the Shahnameh keeps for rebels and king-killers; Iskandar will order it for Dara’s murderers at the end of this batch (D4.9). Here it falls on Rostam’s son, and with him the line of Sahm and Nariman goes out of the poem.
D1.4Bahman Releases Zal
Read the verse →Bishutan reproaches the Shah: the vengeance is finished, and an old man’s prayer against a lawless king is dangerous. Bahman repents, frees Zal, and has Faramarz entombed. Rudabeh’s mourning curses Esfandiyar’s seed, and at dawn the army leaves Zabul for Iran.
Wise Bishutan, the minister of state: Bishutan, Goshtasb’s son and Esfandiyar’s brother, is not an ordinary counselor. Zoroastrian tradition counts him among the immortals, waiting — in some accounts at Kangdez (I, B9.39) — to help restore the faith at the end of time. Ferdowsi gives him the conscience of these books, and it is his voice, not the king’s, that stops the sack of Zabul.
May earth be bare of Esfandiyar’s seed!: Rudabeh’s curse is the last speech of Rostam’s house in the Shahnameh, and it is half granted. Bahman’s own line fails within two generations, with Dara murdered by his officers (D4.8); but Bahman’s slighted son Sasan carries the blood away to Nishapur (D1.5), and through him it reaches the Sasanians.
D1.5Bahman Marries His Daughter Homahyi
Read the verse →Bahman has a son, Sasan, and a daughter, Homahyi, whom he takes as his wife. Falling ill, he leaves the crown to her and to her unborn child. Sasan flees to Nishapur in shame; his son and namesake grows up there herding the king’s flocks.
As Pahlavi belief then justified: Next-of-kin marriage, xwēdōdah, is recommended in the Pahlavi books as an act of piety, and it is one of the customs of the old faith that Ferdowsi reports without approving. The half-line holds the poem at arm’s length: this is what belief then allowed, not what the poet commends.
He took the king of Nishapur’s great flocks: A shepherd at Nishapur is the hinge of the whole second half of the poem. The Sasanian foundation legend makes Sasan a herdsman descended from the old royal line, and his descendant Ardeshir founds the dynasty (III, D7). By exiling Bahman’s slighted son, the tradition gives the Sasanians Esfandiyar’s blood, so that Iran can be ruled by one family from the first king to the last.