Notes · Book D5The Iskandar Cycle

D5.1Iskandar Gains the Throne of Iran

Iskandar takes the throne and speaks: God grants victory, any complaint will be heard at any hour, gifts will go to the needy, the wealthy are freed of tribute, and the land will pay none for five years except from rival claimants to royal rank.

We shall demand no tribute from the land: Remission of taxes is the first act of a good reign, in the Shahnameh as in the chanceries Ferdowsi knew, and an audience open at any hour of the night is the second. From here to the end of the poem, every reign opens with a speech of this kind, and the reader is invited to measure the reign against it. A foreign conqueror of three chapters ago is given the full Iranian form.

D5.2Iskandar Proposes Marriage to Dara’s Daughter

Iskandar writes to Roshanak’s mother Dalaray: he buried Dara as a king, had sought peace before the war, and now claims the bride Dara promised him. She may keep Isfahan and its officials. A second letter invites Roshanak as his first lady.

With pens from Rum, on silk of Chin, fine-spun: The letter is an object before it is a text: a reed pen from Rum, Chinese silk to write on, musk in the ink (D4.7). Ferdowsi’s chanceries are stocked out of the whole trade of Asia, and the costliness of the materials is part of what a royal letter has to say.

Be reconciled, and let the world proclaim: Iskandar puts his claim to Iran as a marriage settlement rather than a conquest: the widow keeps her city and her husband’s officials, the daughter is sent for with her nurse, her maids and her elephants, and a Mobad of Isfahan leads her to the gate. He takes Iran by inheritance, letter and betrothal — and only then sets out on the road that fills the rest of the cycle.

D5.3Dalaray Answers Iskandar’s Letter

Dalaray weeps for Dara, then has a scribe write Iskandar a gracious answer: she accepts his rule, blesses the betrothal to Roshanak, and pledges the obedience of the chiefs. She loads the envoy with gifts, and Iskandar puts on the Kayanian crown.

Brief is the life of him who draws the blade: Dalaray’s verdict on the two ministers who killed their own master is the ethic of the whole poem: treason against one’s lord is the crime nothing excuses, and the gallows Iskandar raised for Janusiyar and Mahiyar is what makes him Dara’s heir rather than merely his conqueror. The Greek and Arabic Alexander traditions are equally careful to show him avenging the king he defeated.

The Kayanian crown he calmly took and wore: The crown is not seized but handed over. Dalaray’s letter, the betrothal to Roshanak and her circular to the chiefs and Pahlevans are the three acts by which Ferdowsi turns a Macedonian invasion into a lawful Kayanian succession. From here the poem treats Iskandar as Shah of Iran and counts him among its kings.

D5.4Iskandar Sends His Mother to Fetch Roshanak

Iskandar sends his mother from Amuriyah with gifts to fetch Roshanak. Dalaray equips a caravan that fills the road for farsangs. The bride is welcomed with scattered silver and musk, set on a throne of gold, and found wise and modest; tribute comes from Iran, Turan and Chin.

From Amuriyah he called his mother near: Amuriyah is usually identified with Amorium in Asia Minor, a city the Arabic writers knew well and whose sack became famous in Abbasid poetry. Ferdowsi’s Rum is furnished out of the Byzantine world of his sources, so Iskandar’s mother is summoned from a town that belongs to the Byzantine centuries rather than to Alexander’s.

A smile on every lip hid grief of heart: One half-line holds the whole Iranian view of this wedding. The city decks itself for the conqueror’s bride, who is the dead Shah’s daughter, and Ferdowsi lets the public rejoicing and the private mourning stand in a single couplet without comment. He keeps both in view for the rest of the cycle.

D5.5Kayd of Hind Has a Dream

Ten nights of dreams frighten Kayd of Hind, and none of his sages can read them. The hermit Mehran interprets each as a sign of a corrupt age to come, and advises Kayd to buy off the approaching Iskandar with four treasures no other king possesses.

For ten long nights strange dreams disturbed his bed: A catalogue of dreams read as the ages of the world’s decay is an old Iranian form. In the Zoroastrian apocalypse known as the Zand-i Wahman Yasn, Zardosht is shown a tree whose branches of different metals are successive ages, each worse than the one before. Kayd’s ten dreams do the same work, and Mehran reads nearly all of them as prophecy of a time still to come.

And holds the sacred twigs his rites require: The twigs are the barsom (Avestan baresman), the ritual bundle held by the officiating priest, in later practice a sheaf of metal rods. The Zoroastrian of Iran is called simply the dehqan here (on the word, see I, A6.23), and his fire and his twigs are enough to identify a whole religion.

That cloth is God’s religion, firmly spread: The cloth four men pull without tearing is the religion of God, and the four are the Zoroastrian, the Jew, the Christian Greek and the Arab. The man who comes afterward from ‘the plain where mounted lancers ride’ and spreads one creed four ways is meant for the Prophet of Islam — a forecast placed, with fine anachronism, in the mouth of an Indian hermit before Iskandar has even reached Hind.

D5.6Iskandar Marches against Kayd of Hind

Master of Iran, Iskandar turns his banners toward Kayd’s kingdom, camps before the city of Milad, and dictates a letter demanding instant submission: Kayd is not to wait for daylight, and defiance will cost him head, throne and crown.

He turned his banners toward King Kayd’s domain: The Arabic and Persian Alexander legend gives Iskandar two kings of Hind, and Ferdowsi sets them as a matched pair: Kayd, who takes his sage’s advice, buys peace with four wonders and keeps his throne, and Foor, who answers with contempt and loses head and kingdom. The wise king’s story is told first, and at several times the length.

If this arrives by night, do not delay: The cycle is carried by letters — six of them in these chapters alone — and Ferdowsi gives Iskandar’s the manners of a bully while his conduct stays that of a philosopher. The Greek Alexander Romance is likewise built largely out of an exchange of letters, and the habit survived every stage of the story’s passage into Persian.

D5.7Kayd of Hind Answers Iskandar

Kayd receives the envoy with honor and answers that he will not present himself unprepared. He offers instead four things unmatched anywhere in the world, to be sent whenever Iskandar commands, and promises then to come and serve him as a bondsman.

Silk brought from Chin, a pen from India’s land: Ferdowsi’s kings write on silk, not paper, and close it with a seal of musk or gold. Here the writing materials are themselves a boast of Kayd’s reach: silk out of Chin, the pen out of Hind. Kaydafa’s chancery works the same way later in the cycle (II, D5.18).

D5.8Iskandar Is Intrigued

Iskandar sends the envoy back to learn what the four things are. Kayd names his hidden daughter, a cup that never empties of wine or water, a physician who diagnoses from a drop, and a philosopher who reads the heavens. Iskandar is delighted and promises to spare Hind.

Her hair, a pitch-black kamand, downward slips: The kamand is the coiled rope a warrior throws to take a man alive. Turned on a girl’s hair — black, long, falling in a loop — it is one of the most persistent images in Persian verse: the beloved’s tresses are the noose that takes the lover captive. Here a father uses it to advertise a bride.

Within a drop, the illness to define: Diagnosis by inspecting a drop of the patient’s water was the first act of the medieval physician, Greek and Arabic alike, and ‘reading the water’ is how this healer works throughout the next chapter. Kayd’s third wonder is not magic but the best medicine of Ferdowsi’s own century, placed in India.

D5.9Nine Sages Are Sent to Inspect the Four Wonders

Iskandar sends nine Roman sages to verify the wonders. Shown Kayd’s daughter enthroned in gold, they are struck motionless and can only agree that each will describe a single feature. Iskandar reads their reports, sends for all four wonders, and guarantees Kayd his kingdom.

He chose from Rum men learned, wise and sound: Nine sages are sent to inspect marvels and report in writing. The Romance tradition made a set text out of exactly that traffic: the celebrated Letter of Alexander to Aristotle on the wonders of India, in which the conqueror describes his marvels to his old teacher. Here the reports travel the other way, from the scholars to the king.

Let each describe one feature with his pen: Ferdowsi declines the set-piece description of a beauty and gives instead nine learned men whose legs fail under them and who can manage one feature apiece, filling their sheets until no white is left. It is a better portrait than any catalogue of moon-faces, and it lets the king read her in nine hands.

D5.10Nine Sages Return with the Four Wonders

Kayd sends the four wonders with three hundred camel-loads of treasure. The bride comes weeping before Iskandar, who marvels at her beauty, praises her Maker, and marries her by Christian rite before his Mobadan and Roman sages, heaping gold upon her.

And by their Christian rite the two were one: Iskandar and his Romans are Christians throughout this cycle; he swears by the Cross and the Holy Spirit at II, D5.23. Ferdowsi received Alexander through late antique and Islamic-era sources in which Rum meant Byzantium, so the pagan Macedonian arrives as a Christian emperor — and is married by Roman rite with a company of Mobadan summoned from the legions of Rum looking on.

Like Paradise’s two narcissi bright: The narcissus is the standing Persian figure for the eye: pale petals around a dark center. In six lines the bride is given the complete conventional inventory — moon face, cypress stature, bow brows, musk-black curls, narcissus eyes — and Ferdowsi has already undone the sweetness by noting that she wept tears of blood as she rode.

D5.11Iskandar Tests the Sage, the Physician, and the Cup

Iskandar tests the philosopher with a bowl of ghee, answered with needles, then a mirror, then rust; the sage explains every step and refuses his gifts. The physician’s regimen and his shrewd diagnosis delight the Shah, and the sage explains that the cup draws water like a loadstone.

He quickly made a mirror full of light: Needles beaten into a lump and polished into a mirror, then left to rust and cleaned again: the sage turns metallurgy into a parable of a heart darkened by years of bloodshed and brightened by knowledge. The mirror of the heart, which must be scoured before it will hold an image, became one of the great figures of Persian mystical verse, most famously in Rumi’s contest of painters.

He knew each nush-daru and deadly bane: On nush-daru, see I, B8.22. Here the word has come down to earth: not the fabled remedy Kavus withheld while Sohrab died, but simply the sound drug, gathered on the hillside and told apart from the poison growing beside it.

Observe how loadstone draws the iron near: The self-filling cup is explained rather than admired: as the loadstone draws iron, the cup draws sweet water out of the air, and astrologers watched the sky for years to get it right. Ferdowsi’s Indian wonders are craft, not sorcery, and the cycle keeps returning to mechanism — the iron horses at II, D5.14, the throne of seventy parts at II, D5.23.

D5.12Iskandar Leads an Army against Foor of Hind

Iskandar brings his army against Foor of Hind and dictates a letter: God gives and removes crowns, earthly days are short, and Foor should exchange his throne for a horse and seek safety, or face legions fierce as spreading fire.

To Foor, the mighty chieftain ruling Hind: Foor is Porus, the Indian king Alexander fought on the Hydaspes in the hardest of his Indian battles; the name reaches Ferdowsi through Middle Persian and Arabic as Fūr. The historical record has Porus defeated and then restored to rule as Alexander’s vassal. The poem gives him a duel, a death, and a successor named Soorag — a difference worth watching rather than correcting.

Consult no Mobad, nor a guide you heed: Iskandar orders an Indian king not to consult his Mobadan, and at II, D5.10 a Christian wedding in Rum is attended by them. Ferdowsi staffs every court in the poem — Indian, Greek, Roman — with the officers of a Sasanian one, and lets all his kings argue in the moral vocabulary of Iran.

D5.13Foor Answers Iskandar’s Letter

Foor answers with contempt. Dara’s fall has made Iskandar overbold; Foor is of his own royal line, sent Dara elephants and courage, and has ranks so thick they stop the wind. He warns Iskandar to sow no more seeds of greed.

I am King Foor, born from King Foor’s own line: Ferdowsi’s Foor is the son of a Foor, as though the name were a throne-title rather than a man’s. The instinct is sound: the historical Porus’s name is usually explained as a dynastic one, the ruler of the Paurava people, so an Indian king could indeed be Foor son of Foor for generations.

Your nature mirrors Ahriman within: On Ahriman, see I, A3.1. The insult is Ferdowsi’s rather than an Indian king’s: Foor rebukes Iskandar for greed in the vocabulary of Zoroastrian Iran, and both letters in this exchange rest their case on the same God, the same transience, and the same duty of kings.

D5.14Iskandar Makes Iron Steeds Filled with Naphtha

Iskandar marches through ruinous country and rebukes his complaining Romans. He musters Iranians, Khazars and Arabs, learns how Foor’s elephants throw horses, and has three thousand smiths forge a thousand iron horses and riders filled with naphtha, to be wheeled onto the field.

Black naphtha filling all its hollow heart: The iron horsemen are the cycle’s most famous stratagem. The Greek Romance has Alexander meet Porus’s elephants with heated bronze statues; the Persian tradition fills the figures with naft instead and sets them alight. Naphtha, the burning oil of Iran and Iraq that later fed Greek fire, gave Greek and then English the word.

Full sixty, read the stars for battle’s date: Sixty astrologers choose the day for the battle. Electing an auspicious hour for a war, a marriage or the founding of a city was ordinary business at the Sasanian court and in Ferdowsi’s own age, and the poem records it as flatly as it records the count of horsemen.

D5.15Iskandar Fights the Army of Foor

The blazing iron horses panic Foor’s elephants and his army breaks. Next morning Iskandar proposes single combat; when a shout behind the lines turns Foor’s head, he strikes him dead. The Indians submit, are consoled, and Soorag is given Hind’s throne.

Foor’s heart grew troubled at the sudden shout: Iskandar wins by the shout. Having despaired of his life against a bigger man on a bigger horse, he strikes when a noise behind the lines makes Foor turn his head, and Ferdowsi reports it without excuse. The Greek Romance tells the duel the same way. It is one of several places in the cycle where the hero is less than heroic and the poet lets it show.

Such is this fleeting lodging we must know: On the world as a lodging for one night, see I, B14.10. The aside is placed with care: Iskandar sits down to a feast on Foor’s throne while the Indians are still mourning, and the poet’s comment — that one man finds his joy inside another’s grief — is a criticism dressed as a commonplace.

D5.16Iskandar Goes on a Pilgrimage to the Kaaba

Iskandar turns from Hind toward Haram and the House that Ismail built. Nasr of Mecca meets him and tells how Qahtan and Khuza oppressed Ismail’s line; Iskandar destroys Khuza’s kin, frees Hijaz and Yemen, visits the shrine on foot, and relieves the poor.

God named it Baitul Haram, holy seat: Bayt al-harām, ‘the sacred house’. Iskandar as a pilgrim at the Kaaba is an anachronism Ferdowsi inherited rather than invented: the Arabic tradition identified him with the Qur’anic Dhul-Qarnayn, ‘the two-horned’, and set him inside sacred history, where the House belongs to Ibrahim and Ismail and a just king of the nations may honor it centuries before Islam.

Khuza arose, audacious and unjust: Ferdowsi has compressed the Arab genealogies into a few lines. Qahtan is remembered as ancestor of the southern Arabs of Yemen; Khuza stands for Khuza‘a, the tribe remembered as holding Mecca and the keys of the shrine before Quraysh; and Ismail’s line is the northern Arabs from whom the Prophet came. Iskandar’s intervention restores the line that matters most to Ferdowsi’s readers.

D5.17Iskandar Leads His Troops from Judda to Mesr

Iskandar has ships built at Judda and sails to Mesr, where Qaytun submits and the army rests a year. In Andalus, Queen Kaydafa sends a draftsman to bring back Iskandar’s likeness; the portrait warns her never to oppose him. Qaytun praises her wealth and her stone city.

Kaydafa held the scepter of command: Kaydafa is Candace, one of the best-loved figures of the Alexander Romance, where she is queen of Meroë in Nubia. The portrait she has secretly drawn, and the recognition it brings about when Iskandar comes to her disguised as his own envoy, are hers in the Greek story too, and Ferdowsi keeps every turn of it (II, D5.20).

In Andalus a queen held royal sway: The Romance’s queen ruled in Nubia; the Persian tradition moved her to al-Andalus, Muslim Spain — a resettlement only possible after the Arab conquest of the far west. Ferdowsi keeps a separate Ethiopian campaign at II, D5.26, so the two halves of the old story now sit at opposite ends of the world.

D5.18Iskandar Writes to Kaydafa, Queen of Andalus

Iskandar writes on silk demanding tribute and pointing to the fates of Dara and Foor. Kaydafa answers that her glory, troops and treasure exceed theirs, that a commander leads each hundred of her millions, and that his boasting has swollen since Dara’s death.

They set a seal of musk upon the whole: The chancery detail is consistent throughout the poem: the scribe writes on silk, the wind dries the heading, and the letter is closed with a seal — Iskandar’s scented with musk, Kaydafa’s of gold — before a courier takes it by camel. On the silk and the pen, see II, D5.7.

What empty words you utter in your pride!: Kaydafa is the only correspondent in the cycle who answers Iskandar’s threats with open scorn, and the only one proved right by events: she never fights him, and she keeps her kingdom, her sons and her own terms. These letters set up the finest sequence in the Iskandar story, in which the conqueror is outwitted twice by a queen who has simply looked at his face.

D5.19Iskandar Captures King Faryan’s Fortress

Iskandar storms King Faryan’s fortress within a week and forbids bloodshed. Among the captives are Kaydafa’s son Qaydrush and his bride. Iskandar sets his minister Bitlqun on the throne to condemn Qaydrush, then pleads for him in the guise of an envoy, and wins the prince’s gratitude.

And formed a secret plan for what he sought: In the Greek Romance the queen’s son earns Alexander’s help differently: his wife has been carried off, and Alexander, passing as one of his own officers, recovers her. Ferdowsi’s version is a staged trial — the minister crowned, the headsman called, the envoy pleading — but it does the same work, putting the queen’s son deep in Iskandar’s debt before Iskandar reaches her court.

With catapults and engines they would need: The Shahnameh besieges with the engines of Ferdowsi’s own age: the manjaniq, the great stone-thrower whose name came through Arabic from the Greek, and the lighter arrada. A wall no crane can fly over falls to them in a week.

D5.20Iskandar Plays Envoy and Is Recognized

Calling himself Bitlqun, Iskandar rides with Qaydrush to Kaydafa’s court, marvels at her crystal halls, and delivers his own demand for tribute. Taken aside, he is confronted with the silk portrait and named. Cornered, he regrets having no blade and threatens bloodshed.

He kissed the ground, as flatterers will do: On the prostration, see I, A6.17. The comedy is that Iskandar, who receives this homage from the whole earth, must now perform it before a queen — and that Ferdowsi says exactly what it is worth, done ‘as flatterers will do’.

Without a khanjar ready to his hand: The khanjar is the short curved blade a man wears at his belt when he is out of armor. Iskandar’s regret marks the one moment in the cycle when he is genuinely helpless: unarmed, unattended and named, in the hall of a ruler he came to threaten.

D5.21Kaydafa Counsels Iskandar

Kaydafa reproves Iskandar for risking his life, explains the gallery of royal portraits and horoscopes by which she knows every king, and promises secrecy if he swears to spare her kin. He swears by his faith and his sword; she warns him against her son Taynush.

On silk their forms are painted, each consigned: Kaydafa keeps a gallery: every ruler of the earth painted on silk in the care of a trusted keeper, with an astrologer’s reading attached to each to say whether the man will bring her safety or fear. A likeness for recognition and a horoscope for intention is how Ferdowsi’s own century would have run an intelligence archive, and it is what defeats Iskandar.

And by the Christian faith beneath the sky: On Iskandar’s Christianity, see II, D5.10. What matters here is that the oath works: Kaydafa lets him go because he swears by his own faith and his own sword, and he keeps that oath at II, D5.23 even with her son ringed by armed men.

D5.22Taynush, Son of Kaydafa, Rages against Iskandar

Taynush threatens to tear off the envoy’s head in vengeance for Foor. His mother has him dragged out, then recalls him at Iskandar’s request. Iskandar offers to deliver Iskandar unarmed into an ambush; Taynush promises him a treasury. Kaydafa understands the trick and says nothing.

A citron severed from the parent shoot: On the toranj, the citron, see I, B8.1. In Volume I it passed between lovers; here Taynush promises to pluck a head from its shoulders as the fruit is pulled from the bough — and the head he means to show his troops belongs to the man standing in front of him.

She smiled within, but kept her features still: The best stroke in the episode. Kaydafa alone knows that the envoy plotting Iskandar’s capture is Iskandar, so she watches her son bargain for a prisoner he already holds, veils her mouth with a cloth, and says nothing. Ferdowsi builds a scene in which one person on stage holds the whole secret, and gives her not a word.

D5.23Iskandar and Kaydafa Reach an Agreement

Iskandar swears a Christian oath never to return in arms. Kaydafa’s chiefs counsel peace, and she sends him off with her father’s crown, a seventy-part throne and a vast inventory of gifts. He then rings Taynush’s ambush with armed men, spares him, and reveals himself.

By priestly girdle, deacon, sacred name: The fullest Christian oath in the poem: the Cross, the creed, the Holy Spirit, the deacon, and a churchman’s girdle. On the zonnār, the belt by which Christians were known in the Islamic world, see I, B9.54. Ferdowsi furnishes the religion of Rum in circumstantial detail, and this is the oath on which Kaydafa stakes her kingdom.

Her throne had seventy parts; a craftsman’s art: A throne of seventy interlocking pieces held by twisted pins, that a craftsman could take apart and rebuild, and that traveled on forty camels. Ferdowsi lingers over the joinery as he lingers over the self-filling cup and the iron horses: mechanism delights him, and the queen’s greatest treasure is a feat of carpentry as much as of jewels.

Each weighed two mithqals, each a crimson bead: The mithqāl is the Arabic weight used for gold and precious stones, and the ratl at II, D5.28 is its pound-weight cousin. The whole inventory — gems by weight, leopard skins of Barbari, hounds that outrun arrows, couches of shiz wood dressed in khazz — reads like the gift-list of a medieval Islamic embassy, here presented as the treasure of Andalus.

D5.24Iskandar Questions the Brahmans

Iskandar visits the Brahmans, who write that their wealth is patience and knowledge. He finds them naked, feeding on seeds, and questions them about the dead, the sea, greed and wrongdoing; they tell him his own soul desires hell. He answers that no one escapes God’s decree.

They ran with bodies naked, head to toe: These are the gymnosophists, the naked philosophers of India, whom the Greek tradition has Alexander question and who answer in riddles; Plutarch tells the story of ten of them, and the dialogue circulated on its own before reaching Persian by way of Arabic. Ferdowsi keeps both the question-and-answer form and the sting, and he has already shown a single specimen in the hermit Mehran (II, D5.5).

No man escapes the will of God on high: The Greek versions tend to leave the sages with the last word. Ferdowsi gives it to the king, and what Iskandar says is the poem’s own theology rather than a conqueror’s excuse: the men killed in his wars were undone by their own turned fortune, and he is bound by the same decree they were. It is the argument that closes every reign in the Shahnameh.

D5.25Iskandar Sees the Great Western Sea

Traveling west, Iskandar reaches a shore of veiled fish-eaters whose speech nobody knows. A yellow mountain proves to be a fish, and it drags a boat of thirty men under. Beyond lie reeds like plane-trees, and a sweet lake where snakes, scorpions, boars and lions kill many of his men.

That mountain was a yellow fish; they drew: The island that proves to be a fish is among the most traveled marvels in the world: the zaratan of the Arabic geographers, the whale on which Sindbad’s crew light their fire, the great fish Jasconius of the Irish voyage of Brendan. Ferdowsi’s version has no comedy in it — thirty men go down with the boat, and the moral drawn is that the wise man sends somebody else.

And forty rash in height its stem would grow: The rash or arash is the forearm-measure, the cubit, and it is the unit Iskandar’s wall is reckoned in at II, D5.30. Reeds as thick as plane-trees are among the wonders the Greek tradition reports out of India, where the traveler’s giant canes are bamboo.

D5.26Iskandar Conquers the Land of Habash

In Habash an army of naked men with bone-tipped spears attacks in thousands; Iskandar’s troops kill uncounted numbers and burn the dead. That night a kargadan larger than an elephant, its horn dark blue, kills many chiefs before arrows bring it down.

At night the kargadan’s loud cry rang clear: The Greek tradition has Alexander’s camp attacked by night at a watering place by a huge horned beast that fire will not drive off; here the marvel is a kargadan, a rhinoceros larger than an elephant and horned with dark blue, which arrows finally kill. The one-horned beast that overpowers elephants is standing lore about India and Africa in Arabic and Persian writing.

They carried bones as spearpoints in the fight: Ferdowsi marks the edges of the world by what men lack. The men of Habash fight naked and tip their spears with bone; the shore people at II, D5.25 speak no language anyone knows; the Narm-Pawyawn at II, D5.27 have no horse, armor or gorz and fight by throwing stones. Iskandar’s road out of India is a steady descent from courts to creatures.

D5.27Iskandar Continues the March

Iskandar destroys the giant stone-throwing Narm-Pawyawn, is welcomed by a great city, and kills a mountain dragon by feeding it five ox-hides stuffed with naphtha and poison. Climbing another peak, he finds a dead king enthroned, and a voice tells him his own hour has come.

He reached the Narm-Pawyawn, where his searching eyes: The Narm-Pawyawn, the ‘soft-footed’, are the people of Narmpai (see I, B5.8). They arrive here as giants, tall as cypresses, naked, roaring like Divs, and without a weapon of metal among them — the same name for a people the poem has kept at the edge of the map since Rostam’s seven stages.

He stuffed the hides with naphtha mixed with bane: Killing a dragon by feeding it something it cannot digest is very old: in the Greek addition to the Book of Daniel, the prophet destroys the dragon of Babylon with cakes of pitch and fat. Iskandar’s five ox-hides, stuffed with naphtha and poison and rolled down from the summit, work the same trick with the same material as his iron horses (II, D5.14).

His Glory seemed to shine though life had flown: The farr still shines on a dead man; on the farr, see I, A4.1. The corpse enthroned on an unreachable peak, whose treasure kills anyone who climbs for it, is the first of the cycle’s warnings to Iskandar, and the voice on the summit supplies the words: he has emptied the thrones of the world, and the hour has come to leave it.

D5.28Iskandar and the City of Women

At Harum, women warriors rule and answer Iskandar’s letter with a full account of their customs. He crosses snowdrifts and a burning city whose people breathe flame, then visits Harum, studies its ways, and hears of a darkness beyond the sea that hides the Fount of Life.

Their right breasts kept a woman’s rounded line: The women of Harum are the Amazons, whose name the ancients explained as ‘without a breast’, from a story that one was burned away so the bow could be drawn; Alexander’s correspondence with them belongs to the Romance. The Greek accounts take the right breast, on the side of the drawing arm. Here it is the left side that is a man’s, and the right that keeps a woman’s line.

And neared the city Naft, still in the frost: Naft is naphtha (see II, D5.14), and the city named for it stands on ground that burns: black smoke over the road, armor scorching its rider, flame coming out of the mouths of its people. Behind the marvel lie the burning oil and gas seepages of the Caspian and Mesopotamian country, reported by travelers for centuries as earth alight.

Three ratls apiece, heaped up before our face: The ratl is the Arabic pound; on the weights used through this cycle, see II, D5.23. Two hundred gem-set crowns at three ratls each is the kind of figure a court chronicle gives for a gift of state, and the women of Harum offer it as one power to another, not as tribute.

D5.29Iskandar Seeks the Fount of Life

Iskandar watches the sun sink into the sea, then enters the darkness with Khizr as guide. At a fork he loses him; Khizr finds the Fount of Life and drinks. Iskandar reaches only a shining mountain, where green birds question him and Israfil warns him to prepare for the end.

Khizr, the counselor of that noble band: Khizr, al-Khidr, ‘the Green One’, is the immortal guide of Islamic legend, associated with the servant of God in the eighteenth sura and with the water of life, and often paired with Ilyas. The whole point of the episode is that the guide drinks and the conqueror does not: Khizr’s years are raised to Saturn’s sphere, and Iskandar loses him at a fork in the dark.

They spoke in Roman tongue with voices clear: The green birds address Iskandar in his own language, then examine him on the state of the world: whether men commit adultery, build in brick, drink and sing, and whether any still worship on the mountains. Each answer brings the bird a stage lower, until it stands on the ground — an interrogation that measures how far the world has fallen, and that prepares the angel waiting on the summit.

He saw Israfil with his head raised high: Israfil is the angel of the resurrection, who stands with the trumpet at his lips and his eyes brimming, waiting for the word to blow, exactly as Islamic tradition describes him. Ferdowsi puts his own battle-horn into the angel’s hand: the instrument is a karnay (see I, A6.20), the long trumpet that opens every engagement in the poem.

Will rue the thing he carries in his hand: The voice on the mountain sets a riddle with no safe answer: whoever takes a stone will regret it, and whoever takes none will regret it too. In the light the stones prove to be rubies and uncut gems, and the men who carried least grieve most. It is the emblem of the whole journey — Iskandar comes out of the dark with a lapful of treasure, and with a warning, having missed the water of life by one turning.

D5.30Iskandar Builds a Wall against Yajuj and Majuj

Coming out of the darkness, Iskandar’s men find that the stones they gathered are gems. Traveling on, he hears of Yajuj and Majuj and walls their pass with fused layers of charcoal, iron, copper and sulfur, blown molten by a hundred thousand smiths.

From Yajuj and Majuj our hearts are sore: Yajuj and Majuj are Gog and Magog, and the barrier is the wall Dhul-Qarnayn builds in the eighteenth sura, of iron and molten brass, to shut in the peoples who will break out at the end of time. It is the deed above all others that fixed Iskandar in Muslim memory. Ferdowsi’s recipe is richer than the Qur’an’s — charcoal, iron, copper, gypsum, sulfur, oil and naphtha, fused by a hundred thousand pairs of bellows.

From Khavar toward Bakhtar went his train: The two words name the ends of the earth; on Khāvar, see I, A6.7. Bākhtar is usually the west in classical Persian, though its sense wandered in the older language, and the pair here means simply that Iskandar crossed the world from one edge to the other, choosing, as the line says, to travel every lane of it.

D5.31Iskandar Sees Wonders and Omens

A month’s march brings Iskandar to a jeweled mountain house where a boar-headed corpse lies guarded, and a voice from a salt spring warns that his end is near. At the world’s edge a two-trunked speaking tree foretells his death far from Rum.

Two trunks grow upward from the selfsame ground, / Whose matching branches speak with human sound: The Speaking Tree reaches the Iskandar story from the Alexander Romance, where the Trees of the Sun and the Moon tell the conqueror that he will die soon and will not see his mother again. Ferdowsi keeps the pair but genders them: the male branches speak by daylight, the female by night, and it is the female that accuses him of greed. Illustrators sometimes drew such a tree in the manner of the wāqwāq tree of Islamic legend, with human and animal heads among its leaves.

Your mother, kin, and women veiled shall wait / In Rum, but never see you at their gate: The tree’s answer is the hinge of the last act: he will die in a stranger’s town, and the women of his house will wait in Rum and never see him come. Ferdowsi lets the reader carry that sentence through the embassy to Chin and the omens at Babil, and pays it off when the mother who was told to wait weeps over a coffin at Iskandariya (II, D5.39).

Each egg weighed sixty mann upon the scale, / By diram weight, as measures told the tale: A mann (the English “maund”) was a large weight used across the Islamic world; local manns differed from one another, and each was defined as so many dirham weights, the dirham serving as a unit of mass as well as a coin. On the coin, see I, B11.3. Sixty mann of gold to an egg is the tribute of a fabulous country rather than of an accountant’s ledger.

D5.32Iskandar Marches His Army to Chin

Iskandar enters Chin and carries his own threatening letter to Faghfoor as if he were its envoy. Faghfoor answers with a rebuke about mortality, refuses either fear or war, and sends lavish tribute. Shamed, Iskandar swears never to travel in disguise again.

As envoy went the Shah; to share the ride: Going as his own ambassador is Iskandar’s signature trick in this cycle; earlier he tried it on Kaydafa of Andalus, who had his portrait and knew him at once. Here nobody unmasks him, and the ruse fails anyway: Faghfoor’s reply shames him so thoroughly that he gives the habit up. The one person embarrassed is the envoy of Chin, who discovers whom he has been riding beside.

When tidings reached Faghfoor that envoys came: Faghfūr is a title rather than a name, the emperor of Chin (see I, B10.23). Ferdowsi makes him the moral opposite of his visitor: he keeps his temper, argues that the deaths of Foor and Dara were their appointed day and not Iskandar’s work, and says that he worships God and not kings. The man who has beaten every king in the world is beaten by a letter.

Where now are Zahhak, Jamshid, Fereydoon?: The “where are they now” question is a favorite of Ferdowsi’s (see I, B9.39), but here it is aimed rather than mused: a foreign king uses Iran’s own dead kings to tell a conqueror that he is mortal. The same argument, in much the same figures, is what the philosophers will make over Iskandar’s coffin a few chapters later (II, D5.38).

D5.33Iskandar Wars against the Sindians

After resting a month, Iskandar takes the submission of Chaghavan, then beats the Sindians and their Indian allies under Bandavar, gaining elephants and captives. He refuses the pleas of the women and the old, marches by Bost and Nimruz, and receives the king of Yemen’s gifts.

He showed no mercy to their stricken race: Ferdowsi’s Iskandar is two men at once: the seeker of wonders and wisdom, and the conqueror who listens to the women and children of Sind ask him to remember that kings also die, then rides on without turning his face toward them. The poet gives the victims the very argument the sages will make over his coffin (II, D5.38), and lets him refuse to hear it.

By way of Bost he marched to Nimruz then: Bost stood on the Hirmund in what is now southern Afghanistan and was a city of some consequence in Ferdowsi’s own day; Nimruz is Sistan, Rostam’s country (I, A7.5). The itinerary is romance geography rather than the map: Sind to Sistan to Yemen in a dozen lines, with the world laid out for a conqueror’s convenience.

With eighty-five unpierced pearls, pure and bright: Unpierced pearls were the costliest kind, since boring a pearl to string it lowers its worth, and Persian poets took the unpierced pearl as a figure for untouched beauty. The cup of green gemstone and the lapis cup filled with yellow gems belong to the same taste, which prizes jewels by color and water rather than by name.

D5.34Iskandar Finds the Treasure of Kay Khosrow

Marching toward Babil, the army crosses a great mountain and reaches a sea full of game. A wild man, Goosh-bistar, describes an island city of bone whose walls are painted with Kay Khosrow and Afrasiab, and fetches its elders to greet the Shah.

Goosh-bistar is the name I bear on earth: The name is a description: gūsh is ‘ear’ and bestar ‘bedding’ — the man sleeps on one ear and draws the other over him. Ears of that scale are a standing wonder of the world’s margins, and classical and medieval European geography had all-ears peoples of their own, set now at the northern rim of the map and now at the eastern. Ferdowsi’s version is friendly: the wild man makes himself useful as a messenger.

Afrasiab’s great battle decks the hall: At the far edge of the world Iskandar is shown a picture of the Iranian past: Kay Khosrow, whose long war with Afrasiab filled much of this volume (II, C3–C4), painted on the bone walls of a town that lives on fish. It is Ferdowsi’s quiet way of keeping the Greek conqueror inside his own poem — even the ends of the earth are decorated with the Shahnameh.

D5.35Iskandar Goes to Babil and Writes to Arastatilis

Fearing an Iranian revenge on Rum, Iskandar plans to destroy the Kayanian nobles; Arastatilis argues him out of it and has him parcel Iran among tribal kings instead. At Babil a monstrous stillbirth is read as an omen of his end, and he falls ill.

He wrote Arastatilis of his will: Arastatilis is Aristotle, and the tutor goes on working as his pupil’s conscience: he answers the plan to kill the Kayanian nobles with the warning that an Iran left undefended would be overrun, and that the victors would come on to Rum next. Letters of counsel from Aristotle to Alexander were a genre of their own in Arabic and Persian, and Ferdowsi’s Iskandar takes the advice.

As Tribal Kings, they won their lasting fame: The settlement is the tradition’s account of the centuries between Iskandar and the Sasanians: Iran shared out among molūk al-tavāyef, “kings of the tribes”, which is how Persian historians remembered the Parthian age. Ferdowsi turns a political vacuum into deliberate policy, invented by a philosopher to keep Iran from ever uniting against Rum. The payoff is the Ashkanian book, where he finds little left to tell (III, D6).

You came to birth beneath the Lion’s light: Reading a monstrous birth as an omen of a reign’s end is an old art in the country where the scene is set, and Babil is also where poem and historians agree that he died. The star-readers make the omen personal: the dead child has a lion’s head, and Iskandar was born under the Lion, so the head that will bow to earth is his own.

D5.36Iskandar’s Letter to His Mother

Iskandar dictates a letter to his mother: she is not to mourn, the Roman chiefs will obey her, the poor are to be paid yearly, his Indian wife is to go home with her dowry, and he is to be buried in Mesr in a golden coffin.

In Mesr, bury me with faithful care: The wish is granted twice over, by the mountain oracle in the next chapter (II, D5.37) and by the burial at Iskandariya after it. History agrees with the romance here: Alexander’s body was taken to Egypt rather than home to Macedon, and his tomb at Alexandria was shown to visitors for centuries afterward.

First pour the honey in, and let there be: These are instructions for an embalming, not for a Zoroastrian burial: a golden coffin sealed with pitch, a shroud of Chin’s gold-woven cloth, camphor, musk and abir, and the body laid in honey, which was used in the ancient world to keep a corpse from corruption. Iran’s own kings in the poem are laid in a dakhmeh (I, B12.25); Iskandar is packed for a long journey, and gets one.

If Roshanak should bear to me a son: In this tradition Iskandar is Darab’s son by Faylaqus’s daughter, and Roshanak is Dara’s daughter (II, D4), so a child of theirs would have knit the two houses into one line. In the event the poem follows neither branch of the provision: it leaves Rum behind, and Iran goes to the tribal kings he appointed a chapter earlier (II, D5.35).

D5.37The Death of Iskandar

Iskandar has his throne carried out onto the open plain, gives a last counsel and dies. The army mourns, and he is washed, shrouded and sealed in honey. Romans and Iranians dispute where he should lie until a mountain oracle names Iskandariya.

A thousand horses had their tails cut short: Cutting the horses’ tails, reversing the saddles and burning the dead man’s dwelling are the Shahnameh’s standing signs of mourning for a great commander, and the poem uses them for Roman and Iranian alike. Modern military funerals still lead a riderless horse with the boots set backward in the stirrups. A thousand docked tails is the scale Ferdowsi keeps for kings.

An elder calls it Khorram; waters lie: Two oracles frame the death. A tree at the end of the world told him he would die abroad (II, D5.31); now a mountain that answers questions settles where he will lie. Between them Ferdowsi stages the real argument, Romans and Iranians each claiming the body, because the tradition he works in had made Iskandar half-Iranian (II, D4). The mountain decides for neither country, but for the city he built.

No one remains within this passing hall: The narrator breaks into the funeral to ask why anyone clings to a crown: the world as a lodging rented for a night, on which see I, B14.10. Ferdowsi times the aside so that it falls between the sealing of the coffin and the quarrel over the grave.

D5.38Lamentations for Iskandar

A vast crowd gathers around the coffin at Iskandariya. Arastatilis asks where the dead king’s learning has gone, and the Roman sages speak over him in turn, each drawing a lesson from the narrow coffin, the hoarded gold and the silenced tongue.

He placed his hand upon the casket lid: The philosophers at the coffin are the most widely traveled passage in the whole Iskandar story. Sayings spoken over Alexander’s bier circulated as an independent piece of wisdom literature in Arabic, were gathered into collections of the sayings of the sages, and passed from those into Persian and, in translation, into medieval European books of counsel. Ferdowsi keeps the form exactly: a chorus of unnamed speakers, each given a couplet or two, each turning a single antithesis. Nizami tells the death again nearly two centuries later, and painters returned to the scene often.

For this is all your toil has won for you: / A narrow coffin is your treasure due: Every speech works the same turn. The man who took the world has a narrow box; the man who hid his gold now lies hidden under gold; the tongue that gave orders has stopped. It is the rhetoric of the epigram rather than of the epic, and the speakers address Ferdowsi’s own audience: a questioner waits, a Judge sits, and a harvest is reaped from the life just ended.

Where sheep from wolves are severed at the last: Ferdowsi’s Rum is the Christian Rome of his own day, an anachronism he inherits with the story; a few chapters earlier Iskandar sends off an envoy with a blessing in the name of Christ (II, D5.32). The court here where the sheep are cut off from the wolves is close to the Gospel’s separating of the sheep from the goats, and it is a Roman who says it over a Roman king.

D5.39Iskandar’s Mother and Wife Mourn

Iskandar’s mother throws herself on his breast, and Roshanak asks where all the kings he killed have gone. The coffin is buried. Ferdowsi closes the book with counsel to be generous and humane, and observes that words outlast the cities Iskandar built.

Words are the better: they will not decay / Like halls that snow and rain have worn away: Iskandar’s ten cities are under thorns, and what survives of him is words — and Ferdowsi says so a few lines before he closes the book. It is a rehearsal of his own most famous claim, the lofty palace of verse that rain and sun cannot wear away, which he makes for himself at the end of the poem (III, E11). Horace made the same boast for his odes: a monument more lasting than bronze.

Where now is Dara, ruler of the earth: Roshanak’s lament is another roll of the dead, and the first name on it is her own father’s: in this tradition she is Dara’s daughter, married to Iskandar at Dara’s dying request (II, D4). So the widow mourns her husband by listing the kings he destroyed, beginning with the one whose fall put her in his house. Ferdowsi does not comment, and does not need to.

I pass Iskandar’s mighty barrier here: The last line is a joke with a long history behind it. Iskandar’s barrier is the wall he built earlier in this cycle to shut Yajuj and Majuj out of the world, and that wall is what allowed Muslim tradition to receive him as Zu’l-Qarnayn, the two-horned servant of God in the Quran, rather than as a heathen conqueror. Ferdowsi says he has got past it, meaning the long book is behind him.

D5.40Ferdowsi Complains of the Sky

Ferdowsi arraigns the sky for stripping away his youth and leaving him old and scorned, and threatens to lay his case before God. The sky answers that it is only a created servant, ignorant of good and ill, and sends him to the Maker instead.

O lofty sky, the source of heart’s delight: The Iskandar cycle closes not with Iskandar but with the poet quarreling with heaven, an old man asking why his youth was taken from him. Ferdowsi has used the turning sky throughout as the agent of loss (see I, B1.7); here he puts it on trial and, unusually, lets it answer back. The cycle itself began in Volume II (II, D5.1).

Created as a servant, I remain: The sky’s defense is the point of the whole passage: it is a created thing under orders, with no knowledge of good and ill, so grievances belong to its Maker and not to it. Ferdowsi lets the heavens refute the fatalism his own laments keep voicing, and rounds the reply off with a blessing on the Prophet.