Notes · Book D6The Ashkanian Dynasty

D6.1Praise for Mahmud

Ferdowsi praises Mahmud as the age’s greatest king, blesses his house and his commander Nasr, and reports a decree remitting a year’s taxes. He promises that this book will outlast every age, then lists the great dynasties that have vanished.

Now fourteen days of Shawwal have gone by: One of the very few places where the poem dates itself by a passing event: a decree announced in mid-Shawwal remitting one year’s taxes. Ferdowsi rarely lets his own century into the poem at all, and when he does it is usually to credit the reigning king with the kind of justice he is about to credit to Ardeshir.

The house of Bahram and the Samanian name?: The roll of vanished dynasties ends with the Samanians of Bukhara, under whose rule Ferdowsi began the Shahnameh and whom Mahmud’s house displaced. Naming them among the great who are gone for good, inside a passage praising their supplanter, is a quiet piece of nerve.

D6.2The Tribal Kings

With Iskandar gone, no one rules the whole world. Princes of Arash’s line hold separate corners of it for two hundred years as the Tribal Kings. Ferdowsi lists the Ashkanians — Ashk, Gudarz, Ardavan, Bahram — and admits he has nothing but their names.

As Tribal Kings these rulers then were known: The Ashkanians, the Parthians of Western history, reach Ferdowsi as the kings of the tribal groups, molūk al-ṭavāyef: not a dynasty but a scatter of local rulers filling the space between Iskandar and the Sasanians. The title is not a description so much as a verdict, and it is the verdict of the house that replaced them.

Two hundred years passed by with none to claim: Two centuries is the whole Parthian age as the poem knows it. By modern reckoning the Arsacids held Iran for close to five hundred years, from the middle of the third century BC until AD 224. The shortfall is not Ferdowsi’s invention; he is following a chronicle tradition shaped by their conquerors.

The first was Ashk, of Qobad’s line and breed: Ashk is Arsaces, the founder whose name the Greeks turned into Arsacid, and some of the names that follow answer to kings known from coins and from Greek and Roman writers — Gudarz to Gotarzes, Ardavan to Artabanus. The pedigrees attached to them, tying them to Qobad, Kayanian stock and Arash, are Iranian epic tidying up a gap it cannot fill.

I heard their names alone; no more was known: The most remarkable admission in the poem. Ferdowsi disposes of five centuries in forty lines and says plainly that his sources gave him nothing but a list of names. The silence is itself the evidence: the books he worked from descend from Sasanian chronicles, and the Sasanians had little reason to preserve the memory of the house they overthrew.

D6.3Babak Dreams of Sasan, Descendant of Dara

A descendant of Dara, the fourth Sasan, herds Babak’s flocks. Babak dreams of him riding an elephant, then of three fires blazing before him; the interpreters promise kingship to him or his son. Babak learns his lineage, raises him up, and gives him his daughter.

Each father gave his son the selfsame name: The four Sasans in a row are a bridge. They carry the blood of Dara, and so of Esfandiyar and Goshtasb, down through four generations of shepherds to Ardeshir. The record is plainer: Ardeshir was son of a local lord of Pars, Babak, with Sasan the family’s eponym. But the poem is faithfully transmitting the Sasanians’ own claim to be the Kayanians restored.

Azargashasp, Kharrad, and Mehr shone bright: Three fires, not three men: the great named fires of Zoroastrian Iran, which the tradition attaches to the priests, the warriors and the husbandmen, so that between them they cover the whole order of society. On Azargashasp see I, A7.1. To dream all three burning before a shepherd is to dream that the land itself will pass to him.

D6.4Ardeshir Babakan and His Rival

Babak’s grandson Ardeshir is summoned to Ardavan’s court at Rey and treated like a son. On a hunt he shoots a Gur-e-Khar and contradicts the prince who claims the shot. Ardavan banishes him to the stables, where he lives quietly on his grandfather’s gold.

Now called the youth “Babakan Ardeshir.”: Ardeshir son of Babak: Ardaxšīr ī Pābagān, the name he bears in Middle Persian. Much of this book follows, at times closely, a Middle Persian romance about him, the Kārnāmag ī Ardaxšīr ī Pābagān, the Book of the Deeds of Ardeshir son of Babak. The quarrel at the hunt, the flight with the slave girl and the worm all stand in it.

A lie brings shame upon a noble heart.”: Ardeshir is sent to the stables for telling the truth, and the poem makes sure we notice which of the two young men spoke it. Hatred of the lie is the oldest ethical note in Iranian literature; on oath-breaking, its unforgivable form, see I, B9.28.

D6.5Golnar Falls in Love with Ardeshir

Ardavan’s favorite slave Golnar sees Ardeshir from the palace roof and climbs down to him by kamand. Babak dies. Golnar overhears the astrologers predict that a man now held low will flee and become king, and she agrees to escape with Ardeshir, taking jewels from the treasury.

Her name was Golnar, favorite by far: Golnār is the pomegranate blossom, whose scarlet gave both a dye and a byword for a glowing complexion. She keeps the keys of the treasury and sits in on the king’s counsels, so when the slave elopes she takes the crown jewels and the state secrets with her.

Then bound a kamand to the rampart’s height: The scene inverts the most famous tryst in the poem. Rudabeh let her braids down from the roof so that Zal could climb to her; Golnar knots a kamand, tests the knots by hand to see what weight they will bear, and lowers herself to the man. Nothing in her part of this story is passive.

D6.6Ardavan Pursues Ardeshir and Golnar

Ardavan learns that Golnar has fled with Ardeshir and gives chase. Villagers report a ram running behind the riders; his minister says it is Ardeshir’s farr and the pursuit is hopeless. Two strangers at a pool warn Ardeshir on. Ardavan gives up and turns back.

The minister replied, “That is his farr: Here the farr is not an aura but an animal: a ram running at the fugitive’s heels, which the minister reads at once as kingship catching up with Ardeshir. Once it reaches him the chase is pointless. The same episode stands in the Middle Persian romance of his deeds (D6.4); on the farr itself, see I, A4.1.

The pool two youths who called to him to ride: Twice in this book a pair of young strangers turns up at the moment of crisis and sets the king right — here at the pool, telling him not to dismount, and again at a doorway in D6.15, where two more will explain what the Worm is. Ferdowsi offers no account of either pair, and the second is rewarded with provinces.

D6.7Ardavan Writes to His Son to Capture Ardeshir

Ardavan orders his son Bahman to hunt Ardeshir down in secret. Ardeshir reaches the water, is recognized as Kayanian by the old boatman, and gathers the scattered kin of Babak and Dara. He claims the throne as Esfandiyar’s heir, founds a city, and rides for Istakhr.

He knew the youth was of Kayanian line: A ferryman reads royal descent off a young man’s build and face. In this book fortune is visible: the ram at his heels, the bearing a boatman can recognize, the strength that will give away Mehrak’s daughter at the well (D7.5). Blood shows, and the poem keeps proving it.

All know the shame that Iskandar has sown: Ardeshir’s case for himself is a case against the whole Ashkanian interval: Iskandar broke the lawful line, Ardavan holds what belongs to Esfandiyar’s heirs, and the new dynasty is therefore a restoration and not a beginning. This is the Sasanian account of Sasanian legitimacy, and it is why the poem gave Sasan a pedigree reaching back to Dara (D6.3).

D6.8Tabak Helps Ardeshir and Defeats Bahman

Tabak of Jahram deserts Ardavan and brings his troops and seven sons over. Ardeshir distrusts him until he swears on the Avesta and Zand, then makes him chief among his counselors. After prayer at a fire, Ardeshir routs Bahman, takes Istakhr, and shares out Babak’s wealth.

He brought Avesta and the Zand, and stood: The Zand is the Middle Persian translation and commentary on the Avesta, and the two are regularly named together, as here, for the most binding oath available. Europeans who met the phrase secondhand took it for the title of a single book, which is how the old term Zend-Avesta came about.

Of Ram Kharrad, and called upon God’s name: Before marching, the king goes to a named fire and asks for victory there. The great shrines of Zoroastrian Iran had names, histories and reputations of their own, and one of the three that Babak saw burning in his dream (D6.3) was likewise called Kharrad.

D6.9Ardavan Fights Ardeshir and Falls

Ardavan brings up his armies; after forty days of fighting a black storm breaks his men’s nerve, and he is captured and cut in two at Ardeshir’s order. Two sons are imprisoned, two flee to Hindustan. Ardeshir marries Ardavan’s daughter and founds Khorra-e-Ardeshir.

With your khanjar, cut him in two,” he said: Cutting a captured rival in two at the waist is the poem’s regular sentence on a defeated king, and Ardeshir passes it on the man who fed and raised him. Ardavan is Artabanus, last of the Arsacids; his defeat is usually dated to AD 224, the year from which the Sasanian era is reckoned.

Both Ardavan and Ardeshir must pay: The narrator interrupts his own hero’s triumph to level the two kings: the sky that raised one will bury the other. From here on this aside becomes almost a refrain in the Sasanian books, and it is the note on which the whole poem eventually ends.

By its own name of Khorra-e-Ardeshir: Ardashīr-khwarrah, ‘the glory of Ardeshir’, his new foundation in Pars, which the poem says came later to be called Gur. Its remains, a walled city laid out as a near-perfect circle on the plain near modern Firuzabad, are among the most striking Sasanian sites, and the spring and water channels of these lines belong to the same place.

D6.10Ardeshir Fights the Kurds and Is Defeated

Ardeshir attacks the Kurds, is beaten, and escapes with a handful of men to a shepherds’ fire on a mountain, where he sleeps on his khaftan. Guided down to the villages, he sends word to his court, learns the Kurds think him finished, and picks eleven thousand men.

When he drew near, the Kurds advanced in might: In sources of this period ‘Kurd’ is generally used more loosely than it is now, for herding and tent-dwelling populations of the uplands rather than for a single people. The shepherds who take the beaten king in a few lines later, with their goats and their curdled milk, belong to the same world as the enemies who beat him.

He spread his khaftan out to make his bed: Ardeshir is defeated three times in this book, and here he sleeps on the ground with his helmet for a pillow and drinks what herdsmen give him. The founder of the dynasty is assembled out of reverses in a way no Kayanian hero ever is: one of the first signs that the poem has moved from legend into chronicle.

D6.11Ardeshir Attacks the Kurds by Night

Ardeshir rides through half the night and falls on the sleeping Kurdish camp, killing many and taking captives past counting. He gives their lands and money to his troops, makes no boast of the victory, and returns to Istakhr to rest his men before the next war.

Gold on his head, borne safely in a tray: The old man who can carry uncovered gold across open country and be neither robbed nor even looked at is the standard Persian measure of a just reign. The Shahnameh applies it to more than one king, and it went on serving the prose mirrors for princes long after the poem was finished.

D6.12The Story of Haftvad and the Worm

At Kojaran a spinning girl finds a worm in an apple and her day’s output doubles. Her father Haftvad grows rich on its luck, seizes the city, and builds a mountain fortress. The worm swells to the bulk of an elephant, and no army that faces it can win.

A worm that lay within the apple’s side: The creature is a kerm, a word that runs from a worm in fruit to a dragon, much as the Norse ormr covers both. It begins as luck in a girl’s spindle case and ends as a fed and clothed monster with an army behind it, and the story has always been known by its name: the Worm of Haftvad.

And why was he called Haftvad? You shall hear: The poem derives the name from his seven sons. In the Middle Persian romance of Ardeshir’s deeds he appears as Haftān-bōxt, read by tradition as ‘saved by the seven’, that is by the seven planets — fortune granted by the sky, which is what this story turns on. Specialists now doubt that reading and trace the name instead to an old title for the lord of a seventh part of a province.

In Chinese silk they clothed the worm with heed: Fed on rice, milk and honey, dressed in silk, housed in a masonry tank and served by sixty attendants, the worm is given the care of a cult image rather than a pet. Readers have long suspected a hostile memory of some real shrine in Pars behind the tale, and the coastal setting and the silk have suggested trade as well.

D6.13Ardeshir Fights Haftvad and Is Defeated

Ardeshir’s advance force is destroyed by troops Haftvad has hidden in the hills. The Shah comes himself; Haftvad’s son Shahvi arrives by boat, and the two armies fight to a standstill. Ardeshir withdraws to the shore, where his men begin to starve with the roads cut.

From elephants the mighty kousts rang out: Kettledrums carried on elephants. The Sasanians took both the beasts and the practice from India, and from here to the end of the poem elephants are standard equipment in a royal army rather than an exotic sight. On the drums themselves, see I, B10.4.

The foe had blocked the road by which they fed: Hunger, blocked roads and failing supply decide more in these books than single combat does. It is a change of key: the legendary volumes turn on duels between named champions, while Ardeshir is beaten by logistics and will have to win by a trick.

D6.14Mehrak of Jahram Sacks the Palace of Ardeshir

While Ardeshir is pinned against the sea, Mehrak sacks his capital and gives the treasure away to his soldiers. As the Shah sits down to eat, an arrow buries itself in the roast lamb, carrying a taunt from the fortress two farsang away.

In Pahlavi the words addressed the king: Pahlavi, Middle Persian, was the language of the Sasanian chancery and of the books that lie behind these chapters; Shapur will be taught to write it in D7.3. Here Ferdowsi has the insult on the arrow-shaft written in it, and the impossible range of the shot is the Worm’s fortune showing itself.

In Jahram lived Mehrak, Nushzad’s son: Mehrak’s raid looks at first like one more setback in a book full of them. It turns out to be the hinge of the reign: Ardeshir will wipe out his line for it, and then learn from Kayd of Hind that his own house cannot prosper until it is joined to Mehrak’s (D7.4, D7.6).

D6.15Ardeshir Discovers the Truth about the Worm

In flight, Ardeshir is sheltered by two young men who tell him the Worm is Ahriman’s creature and cannot be beaten by force. He kills Mehrak, leaves Shahrgeer in command, enters the fortress as a merchant, drinks the keepers senseless, and feeds the Worm molten metal.

The Worm was born from Ahriman’s dark brain: This settles what kind of story it is. Creeping and crawling things belong in Zoroastrian thought to Ahriman’s creation — the khrafstar, vermin a pious man was encouraged to destroy — so killing the Worm is a religious duty and not merely a stratagem. On Ahriman, see I, A3.1.

Esfandiyar showed how such arts suffice: Ardeshir names his model: Esfandiyar took Ruyin Dezh disguised as a merchant with chests on pack animals (II, C7). The poem is explicit that the first Sasanian is copying a Kayanian ancestor, which is exactly the claim of descent the dynasty wanted made for it.

With molten metal, boiling hot instead: Molten metal is not a random cruelty. In Zoroastrian accounts of the end of the world the mountains melt and run as a river of molten metal through which everyone must pass, scalding to the wicked and warm as milk to the righteous. Ardeshir pours the last judgment down the throat of Ahriman’s creature.

D6.16Ardeshir Slays Haftvad

Haftvad storms the fortress and fails. Ardeshir calls Shahrgeer up, and Haftvad and Shahvi are taken, hung on gibbets by the sea and shot dead. Ardeshir gives away the spoil, founds a fire-temple, rewards his two hosts with provinces, and takes the throne at Tisfoon.

And brought Mehrgan and Sadeh back to fame: Every victory in this book ends with a fire founded and the two great fire festivals revived (on Mehrgan, see I, A6.1; on Sadeh, I, A2.2). Restoring the festivals after the Ashkanian centuries is the poem’s shorthand for the whole Sasanian restoration of the faith.

He journeyed on to Tisfoon, where the throne: Tisfoon is Ctesiphon on the Tigris, the Parthian capital that the Sasanians took over and held for four centuries; later writers called the double city Madain, ‘the cities’, a name the poem uses as well. Occupying it, rather than winning any one battle, is what makes Ardeshir King of kings.