Notes · Book B1The Crisis after Manuchehr

B1.1Nohzar Accedes to the Throne

Nohzar takes Manuchehr’s throne but soon turns greedy and harsh, and the realm falls into turmoil. The nobles offer the crown to Sahm, who refuses it, rebukes them, and comes to court to set the young Shah back on the path of justice.

Nohzar assumed the throne: In the Avesta the name appears as Naotara, and the heroes of his house are called the Naotairyas, the ‘Nohzarids’. Tus, Nohzar’s son and later one of the poem’s great commanders, belongs to this family (see B1.5). Nohzar himself gets a short and unhappy reign, which ends in B1.11.

First praise Yazdan of Nahid, Bahram, Sun: On the planetary names, see A9.5. Royal letters in the Shahnameh open with praise of God as lord of the heavens before they come to business, as the chancery letters of Ferdowsi’s own day did.

If Manuchehr’s own daughter ruled instead: Sahm’s refusal sets a pattern for his whole house. The lords of Sistan make and save kings, but they never take the crown, because the farr belongs to the royal line. Zal says the same in B1.14. Sahm’s hypothetical queen is no idle thought either: women do sit on the throne later in the poem, Homai among the Kayanians (II, D2) and Purandokht among the Sasanians (III, E9.4).

B1.2Pashang Hears of Manuchehr’s Death

Hearing that Manuchehr is dead and Nohzar’s rule is faltering, Pashang of Turan resolves to avenge Tur and Salm. He summons his son Afrasiab, who eagerly takes command, although his brother Aghriras counsels caution.

Then Afrasiab, his son, was summoned near: Afrasiab now takes the stage, and he will remain Iran’s great enemy until the end of Kay Khosrow’s reign. In the Avesta he is Frangrasyan, the Turanian who dives three times into the sea to seize the royal glory and fails each time. Ferdowsi makes him far more than a villain: brave, able, capable of fear and of love for his children, and ruined by his temper.

B1.3Afrasiab Invades Iran

In spring Afrasiab crosses the Jihun with a vast army and camps before Nohzar at Dehestan. He sends a force against Zabulistan, where Zal is building Sahm’s tomb, and writes in triumph to Pashang that Iran’s one feared champion is dead.

When spring laid silk of green across the plain: Ferdowsi almost always opens a campaign with a line about the season, and it is not only decoration. Steppe armies moved when the new grass could feed the horses, and they went home when it failed. The couplet is a calendar as much as a picture, and a reader who knew the frontier would have heard it that way.

B1.4Barman and Qobad in Single Combat

The Turk Barman challenges the Iranians, and only old Qobad answers him. Qobad falls. Gharan leads a furious charge against the Turanian ranks and fights Afrasiab until sorcerous darkness ends the day.

Save aged Qobad, valiant, stern, and tried: This Qobad is not the future king Kay Qobad (B2.3). He and Gharan are sons of Kaveh the blacksmith (A5.5), veterans of Fereydoon’s rising, which is why Qobad’s hair is white and Gharan can say that Fereydoon himself put the helmet on his head. Readers should keep the two Qobads apart.

He spurred on Shabdiz, gave his heart no rest: Shabdiz means ‘night-colored’, a black horse. The most famous horse of that name belongs to the Sasanian king Khosrow Parviz (III, E8.4), and Nezami made it famous again in Khosrow and Shirin.

Then Afrasiab worked magic on my eyes: The Turanians fight with sorcery as well as swords, and darkness is their favorite spell. The same weapon, a sudden blinding night, will be used by the White Div against Kay Kavus and his army (B4.4).

B1.5Afrasiab Battles Nohzar Again

The second day’s battle goes against Iran, and Nohzar fights Afrasiab himself without result. Remembering his father’s prophecy, the Shah sends Tus and Gostaham to take the royal women from Pars to the safety of Alborz, and bids them a tearful farewell.

He summoned Tus, in sorrow and despair: Tus, Nohzar’s son, will be one of the poem’s leading commanders for generations: brave, proud and often wrong-headed. He is the Avestan Tusa, who in the hymn to Anahita asks the goddess for victory over ‘the sons of Vaesaka’. Later tradition knows that family as the house of Viseh, which enters the story in the next chapters (see B1.7).

Then bring them up Alborz without delay: Alborz is the poem’s mountain of refuge. Fereydoon was hidden there as a child (A5.3), and Kay Qobad will be found there (B2.4). On the mythical Alborz, see A7.2.

B1.6Nohzar’s Third Battle with Afrasiab

In the third battle Shapur falls and Nohzar retreats into the fortress of Dehestan. When Afrasiab sends Kurukhan to seize the royal women in Pars, Gharan and the chiefs slip away by night against the Shah’s wishes, and Gharan kills Barman on the road.

The Shah grew drunk and passed behind the screen: The king drinks while his kingdom burns, and his chiefs decide the army’s course without him. Wine at court is normal in the Shahnameh, but here the timing condemns Nohzar. Kay Kavus’s ruinous plan will also be born over wine (B4.1).

That night they reached White Castle’s guarded gate: The White Castle (Dezh-e Sepid) is Iran’s frontier fortress against Turan, and Gazhdaham is already its keeper. Later in this volume the young Sohrab will attack it, and Gazhdaham’s daughter Gordafarid will ride out in armor to fight him.

Then Gharan drove his spear through Barman’s belt: Barman killed Qobad with a blow at the waist, where the belt was fastened. Gharan avenges his brother with the same wound, a piece of poetic justice that Ferdowsi leaves the reader to notice.

B1.7Nohzar Is Taken by Afrasiab

Nohzar rides after Gharan but is overtaken and captured with twelve hundred nobles. Afrasiab orders a search for Gharan, learns that Gharan has killed Barman, and sends Barman’s grieving father, Viseh, after him.

Though heaven sit beside you as a friend: At the moment of the king’s capture Ferdowsi breaks off to reflect. The culprit in such asides is the charkh or sepehr, the turning sphere of heaven, not God. Blaming the sky for the reversals of fortune is a habit Ferdowsi shares with Khayyam and Hafez.

Your son is dead; prepare to play your part: Viseh’s house will matter greatly in the poem. His sons Piran and Houman, Barman’s brothers, become Afrasiab’s wisest counselor and one of his fiercest champions. The family is very old: the Avesta’s ‘sons of Vaesaka’, against whom Tus prays for victory (see B1.5), are usually taken to be the same clan.

B1.8Viseh Finds His Son Slain

Riding for vengeance, Viseh finds Barman dead on the field. He meets Gharan, who has come from Pars, and taunts him with the captive Shah, but the Turanians are beaten in the battle that follows, and Viseh returns weeping to Afrasiab.

From Ghanooj, Kabul, Ghaznin, Zabul’s land: Ghaznin is Ghazni, the capital of Ferdowsi’s own patron, Sultan Mahmud (A0.12), and Ghanooj is Kanauj (A8.2), which Mahmud’s armies reached. A Turanian boasting of Ghazni gives the ancient story a contemporary map.

His shroud was tulip-red where he lay still: The red tulip as the blood of the fallen is an image Persian poetry never tired of. In modern Iran it became the emblem of the martyr, painted on walls and carved on gravestones.

B1.9Shamasas and Khazarvan Raid Zabulistan

Shamasas and Khazarvan march on Zabulistan while Zal mourns at Sahm’s tomb. Mehrab of Kabul, claiming descent from Zahhak, pretends to submit and buys time with promises of gold, while secretly sending a rider to summon Zal.

He marched them onward toward Hirmund’s strand: The Hirmund is the Helmand, the great river of Sistan, which ends in the lakes and marshes on the Iran–Afghanistan border. The Avesta already knows it as Haetumant. It is the home river of Rostam’s family.

From Zahhak’s line my ancestry I trace: Mehrab’s descent from the tyrant Zahhak was the great obstacle to the marriage of his daughter Rudabeh to Zal, earlier in the poem. Here the embarrassing ancestry becomes a useful lie: a descendant of Zahhak can plausibly pose as Iran’s enemy.

At Sahm’s ostudan, kept from the fight: An ostudan (Middle Persian astōdān) is a bone-house, an ossuary. Zoroastrians exposed their dead to the birds and sun, then gathered the bones into such a chamber, and Ferdowsi’s heroes are buried in these old ways. Stone ossuaries of this kind survive from Sasanian Iran and Sogdiana.

B1.10Zal Comes to Mehrab’s Aid

Zal comes to Kabul and announces himself by shooting three arrows into the enemy camp at night. Next day he kills Khazarvan with his father’s ox-headed gorz and Kulbad with an arrow. Shamasas flees, only to run into Gharan, and escapes with a handful of men.

Their weapons loose, their broken belts a sign: The belt (kamar) is one of the poem’s most charged objects. To gird it is to take up a task, kings give jeweled belts as honors, and the Zoroastrian faithful tie the sacred cord, the kusti, round the waist. Loosened and broken belts are the picture of an army that has ceased to be one. The motif returns when Rostam seizes Afrasiab by the belt (B3.2).

B1.11Nohzar Falls to Afrasiab

Enraged by his losses, Afrasiab has Nohzar dragged before him and beheads him with his own hand. Aghriras saves the other captives, who are sent in chains to Sari, and Afrasiab rides to Rey and sets the Kayanian crown on his own head.

The sword was brought; he struck the crowned Shah dead: Afrasiab’s killing of a captive Iranian king adds a new debt to the blood-feud that began with Tur’s murder of Iraj. It also foreshadows the greatest crime of his life, the killing of Siavash later in this volume, which the Iranians will spend a generation avenging.

In Sari let them wake to grief and shame: Sari and Amol are real towns of the green Caspian lowlands, and Amol was long the chief city of Tabarestan. Rey, where Afrasiab crowns himself, is ancient Ragha, already named in the Avesta, whose ruins lie on the southern edge of modern Tehran. On the puzzle of the Shahnameh’s other Mazandaran, see B4.1.

B1.12Zal Hears of Nohzar’s Death

The Iranians mourn Nohzar and Zal vows vengeance. The captives at Sari beg Aghriras for help, and he promises to withdraw if an Iranian force approaches. Keshvad rides from Zabul, Aghriras pulls back, and Zal welcomes the freed nobles.

Men tore their faces, rent their hair in grief: Scratching the cheeks, tearing the clothes and throwing dust on the head are ancient mourning gestures across the Near East and the Mediterranean. Achilles pours dust over his head when he hears of Patroclus’s death. Religious teachers of both Ferdowsi’s faiths frowned on such extravagant grief, but the heroes of the Shahnameh mourn this way throughout.

Who bears a kanarang’s heart to face the foe: Kanarang was a real Sasanian title, held by the lord of the north-eastern marches, around Ferdowsi’s own Tus, who guarded the frontier against the steppe. Zal is asking for a man with the heart of a frontier warden.

B1.13Aghriras Is Slain by His Brother

Afrasiab rebukes Aghriras for sparing the captives, and when his brother answers with a plea for mercy, he cuts him in two. Zal marches to avenge Aghriras, and the two armies fight for two weeks near Khar of Rey.

Across his brother’s waist the sword cut through: The murder is very old. The Avesta already names Aghraeratha, Aghriras, beside Siavash as a victim whose death Kay Khosrow must avenge on Afrasiab. Ferdowsi turns him into the poem’s first good Turanian, a man of kherad (A0.1) killed for counseling mercy: ‘one filled with fire, one filled with wisdom’s light’.

Toward Khar of Rey he led his gathered force: Khar, or Khwar, of Rey was a district on the great road east from Rey towards Khorasan. Afrasiab holds the line on the approach from the east, where armies coming from Sistan and Khorasan would meet him.

B1.14Zav, the Son of Tahmasp, Is Elected Shah

Zal insists that Iran needs a king of royal blood, and the nobles choose the aged Zav, son of Tahmasp. After five years of just rule and a famine that exhausts both sides, Iran and Turan agree a border, rain returns, and Zav dies at eighty-six.

Zav, the son of Tahmasp, of noble line: Zav is the Uzav son of Tumasp of the Pahlavi texts. Zoroastrian tradition remembered him as the king who brought back the rain after a drought that Afrasiab had caused. Ferdowsi keeps the famine and its ending, though here it simply falls on both armies.

If Tus and Gostaham possessed the farr: Being Nohzar’s sons is not enough: the farr does not pass automatically from father to son. Tus’s exclusion here is the first of several. Later, in B10.31, when Kay Khosrow is chosen, Tus will again resent the choice of another.

Where khargah tents began, Zal stayed his hand: The khargah is the round felt tent of the steppe nomads, what English calls a yurt. The frontier is drawn where the tents begin, the old boundary between the settled lands of Iran and the nomad world beyond the Jihun (the Oxus, today’s Amu Darya).