Notes · Book E8Shiruyeh’s Coup and the End of the Great Reign

E8.1Shiruyeh Takes the Throne

Crowned as Qobad, Shiruyeh promises justice and sends Ashtad and Kharrad Barzin to Tisfoon with a written charge against his father. Galinush admits them. A quince rolls from Khosrow’s cushion to the floor; he reads his house’s ruin in it, hears the charges out, and answers with a rebuke.

Say: ‘Neither we nor Iran caused your fall: The coup states its case in writing, item by item: his father’s blood, the hoarded treasure, the riders driven into exile, the Cross withheld, the seizing of poor men’s goods, the sixteen sons in prison. Khosrow’s reply in E8.2 answers each charge in order. The pair make up the longest formal argument in the Shahnameh, and they read like a document Ferdowsi’s source had preserved whole.

The quince slipped from the cushion, smoothly round: Ashtad does the correct thing, wiping the dust from the fallen fruit and raising it to his head in homage, and the king turns his face away so as not to see or smell it. The Persian for quince, beh, is also the ordinary word for ‘good’, which sharpens the omen: what has fallen and been soiled is the good of the house, and Khosrow says so at once.

E8.2Khosrow Parviz Answers Shiruyeh

Khosrow answers every charge: his flight from Hormizd, his vengeance on Bandvi and Gostaham, the comfort of his sons’ prison, the sealed horoscope, his treasuries, the frontier armies, his gifts to Caesar, the worthlessness of the Cross. Then he blesses the world, names the dead kings, and says farewell.

This Pahlavi account of word and deed: The king addresses posterity through a document, and the Middle Persian royal book that lies behind these volumes (I, A6.7) is quietly named inside the speech as the thing that will carry his words. The arguments are those of the Pahlavi literature of counsel: treasure is the sinew of the crown, a king without it is called a fraud, weapons put into an enemy’s hand come back against you.

Iran’s stout wall is army, arms, and gear: The finest passage in the speech. Iran is an orchard of quince and pomegranate; the army is its wall and every soldier a thorn in the hedge; tear the wall down and nothing marks the garden off from the open plain. On the walled garden that gives us the word paradise, see I, B7.1. He is answering a son who thinks frontier armies a waste, and within a generation the hedge is gone.

Where Gudarz and his seventy chosen sons: On this roll-call of the vanished, see I, B9.39. What is new is who recites it. The last great Shah of Iran, in fetters, lists Hushang, Jamshid, Tahmuras, Fereydoon, Arash, Gharan, Siavash, Rostam, Zal, Esfandiyar, Gudarz, Goshtasb and Jamasp, the whole poem before him, as consolation for joining them.

When we must cross the Chinvat Bridge one day: The bridge of judgment, which the soul comes to after death. In the Pahlavi books it broadens under the feet of the righteous and narrows to a blade’s edge under the wicked, who fall from it. Khosrow prays for flowers underfoot there, and in E8.5 he makes the formal confession of faults that the faith prescribes before dying.

E8.3Shiruyeh’s Grief Displeases the Chiefs

Shiruyeh weeps at his father’s answer and leaves the throne, and the chiefs take fright: if Khosrow is restored, they hang. The young Shah asks one month’s patience, hoping still for the treasure, and orders rich dishes sent to the prisoner, who eats only from Shirin’s hand.

“If he should sit upon the throne again: This is the only motive Ferdowsi allows the conspirators: not policy, not any charge against Khosrow that they believe, but their own necks. The son’s grief is what frightens them into murder, so that affection rather than ambition kills the king, and the fall of the Sasanian house stays in the register of family tragedy.

From Shirin’s loving hand alone he fed: He fears poison, and he is right to, though not from the kitchen: the men who send the golden trays will send a man with a khanjar instead (E8.5). A reader who remembers Maryam (E7.4) will notice whose hand this king trusts.

E8.4Barbad Breaks His Art in Grief

Barbad comes from Jahram to Tisfoon, stands a while before his fallen master, then goes out and laments in Pahlavi for the crown, the horse Shabdiz, the armies and the halls. He curses Shiruyeh, swears never to touch a lute, cuts off four fingers, and burns his instruments at home.

Where is your crown, the Kaviani sign: The lament is built out of the inventory of E7.8. The crown and armlets, the ivory throne, the jowshan, Shabdiz with his golden stirrups (I, B1.4), the mules and litters, the white elephant, the women and minstrels are all named again, one by one, as losses. Ferdowsi has the minstrel sing the catalogue of glory backwards, which makes the most economical elegy in the poem.

Four fingers from his plucking hand he sheared: Four fingers are the ones that pluck the strings. The maiming and the bonfire are a single act, an artist ending his art rather than let it pass to the son, and he swears it by Nowruz and by Mehr (I, A4.1; I, A6.1), which for a court musician are the working year itself.

E8.5The Death of Khosrow Parviz

The conspirators frighten Shiruyeh into consent, and Zad Farrokh hires a nameless wretch for a bag of gold. Khosrow calls for water, musk and clean robes, prays over the barsom, confesses his faults, and covers his head; the man stabs him. Fifteen imprisoned brothers are killed the same day.

They found a wretch, blue-eyed and pale of face: The murderer is assembled from the same catalogue of ugliness as the governor sent to ruin Rey (E6.49), and he has no name until the king demands one: Mehr Ormozd, two divine names, Mithra and Ohrmazd, carried by the basest man in the poem. The histories give Khosrow’s killer the same name. Ferdowsi notes that nobody of high or low rank knew him, and asks Paradise to shut him out.

He held the barsom twigs, took baj in prayer: The barsom is the bundle of twigs held in the hand at Zoroastrian prayer. Khosrow dies as a layman of his faith should: water, a golden basin, clean robes and abir (I, B9.17), the barsom taken up, idle speech put aside, confession of his faults murmured, and a new cloth bound round his head so that the last thing he sees is not his murderer’s face.

E8.6The Deaths of Shirin and Shiruyeh

Fifty-three days after the murder Shiruyeh summons Shirin as a sorceress, then offers her marriage. Before the nobles she defends her name, unveils, and is cleared; she secures her wealth, gives it all away, and drinks poison beside Khosrow in his tomb. Shiruyeh is poisoned in his eighth month.

Then she unveiled her face before them all: Shirin conducts her own case. She sets the three grounds on which a woman was to be judged, modesty with wealth, sons, and beauty kept covered, then produces the third in open court as evidence, and no chief present has ever seen her hair. She wins the hearing outright. Only the reader knows about Maryam (E7.4), and Ferdowsi never lets the two facts touch.

Nastur, Shahryar, Forood, each noble boy: The sons she names matter for what follows. By the poem’s reckoning this Shahryar is the father of Yazdegard, the last Sasanian Shah (E10), so the woman defending her honor here is grandmother to the king in whose reign Iran is lost.

She gave in Khosrow’s name, that goodness might: This is not simply generosity. Giving for the soul of the dead, endowments to the fire-temples, to the feasts of Nowruz and Sadeh (I, A2.2), to lodgings on the roads, was a recognized institution with rules of its own, and it is how a widow saw to her husband’s standing in the next world before following him into it.

The camphor crown and passed through death’s own door: Camphor belonged to the dressing of the dead, so the camphor crown is the last turn of phrase in the reign: seven months of the real one, then this. The Arabic historians say Qobad died in the plague that was raging in the empire; the poem says poison, and makes his death the completion of the murder he allowed.