Notes · Book B6The Folly of Kay Kavus

B6.1Kavus Wars with Hamavaran

Kavus tours his empire from Turan and Chin to Makran, defeats the king of Barbar, receives homage at Mount Kaf and feasts with Rostam in Zabul. When Mesr and Sham rebel, he crosses the sea and defeats the allied kings; Hamavaran submits.

Who climbs to heights must face descent one day: The book’s title names its theme. Kavus is the Shahnameh’s great flawed king: brave, generous and forgiven again and again, but unable to leave well alone. Ferdowsi warns of the fall at the very height of the triumph, and Gudarz will count the follies off one by one (B6.10).

He turned his march toward Mount Kaf in the west: Kaf (Qaf) is the mountain range that rings the world in Islamic cosmology. Later Persian poets made it the home of the Simorgh, most famously Attar in The Conference of the Birds; in the Shahnameh the Simorgh lives on Alborz.

Before him Hamavaran armed for fight: Mesr is Egypt and Sham is Syria. Hamavaran is usually identified with Himyar in the south of Arabia, and Barbar perhaps with the African coast across the Red Sea, though neither identification is certain. Makran, visited earlier, is the real coastal land of south-east Iran and Baluchistan.

B6.2Kavus Seeks Sudabeh’s Hand

Kavus hears of the king of Hamavaran’s beautiful daughter and sends an envoy to ask for her. The king, grieved but afraid, consults Sudabeh, who gladly accepts. She is sent with a rich train, and Kavus marries her.

He summoned fair Sudabeh to his side: Sudabeh’s first appearance. Later in this volume she becomes the poem’s most notorious woman, the queen whose passion for her stepson Siavash destroys him, a story often compared with Phaedra and Hippolytus. It is worth noticing that Ferdowsi introduces her as a woman of spirit and, in the next chapter, of fierce loyalty.

Two rubies shone; two languid narcissus eyes: A classic Persian inventory of beauty: musk-black hair, ruby lips, the drowsy narcissus for the eye, and brows like the curved strokes of a pen. Each image is a convention, and poets were judged on how freshly they could combine them.

B6.3Hamavaran’s King Imprisons Kavus

The king of Hamavaran invites Kavus to a feast. Sudabeh warns of a trap, but Kavus goes; after a week of revelry he and his champions are seized and imprisoned in a mountain fortress. Sudabeh denounces her father and chooses to share Kavus’s prison.

Thus did he seek to trap the royal guest: Betraying a guest was among the worst of crimes in Iranian as in Arab ethics. The king of Hamavaran breaks the rule as blatantly as possible, seizing his son-in-law at his own table.

I am innocent; take instead my head: Sudabeh chooses her husband over her father and goes to prison with him. Her loyalty here gives a sharp irony to her later part in the story of Siavash.

B6.4Afrasiab Invades Iran

With the Shah a captive, Iran lies leaderless. Arab raiders and Afrasiab both invade; Afrasiab defeats the Arabs after three months and seizes Iran. Refugees beg Zal for help, and Rostam, learning of Kavus’s capture, gathers troops from Zabul, Kabul and Hind.

And met the Arabs in a bitter fight: Arabs invading a kingless Iran: Ferdowsi’s first readers could hardly miss the shadow of their own history. The poem ends, in Volume III (III, E10), with the real Arab conquest and the fall of the last Sasanian king.

One reared on leopard’s milk can heal our woe: To be ‘reared on leopard’s milk’ is a Persian way of calling a man fierce and fearless. Here it points to only one man.

B6.5Rostam’s Message to Hamavaran

Rostam sends comfort to Kavus and a warning to the king of Hamavaran, who defies him. Rostam crosses by sea and routs the first army. The king calls in the kings of Barbar and Mesr, and Kavus secretly tells Rostam to fight without regard for his safety.

The nahang ruling in the river’s flow / Strikes face to face: Rostam scorns victory by ambush: even a nahang (see A0.11) attacks head on. It is the hero’s code, but not always his practice. Later in the poem Rostam survives both Sohrab (B8.20) and Esfandiyar (II, C8.25) partly by stratagem.

With nectar poison comes in Fortune’s art: The pairing of nūsh and zahr, sweetness and poison, is one of Ferdowsi’s favorite ways of describing the world, which offers the one and delivers the other.

B6.6Rostam Battles the Three Kings

Rostam leads the Iranians against the three allied kings. He catches one king with his kamand and plucks him from the saddle, Guraza captures the king of Barbar, and the king of Hamavaran sues for peace and frees Kavus and his chiefs. Kavus gathers a vast army.

Like polo mallet striking up the ball: Polo (chowgān) is an Iranian game, played by kings and nobles since Sasanian times; the great square of Isfahan still has its stone goalposts. The image is one of Ferdowsi’s favorites, and later in this volume Siavash plays a famous match before Afrasiab.

In jowshans, steeds in bargostvan, a train: The bargostvān is armor for the horse. Fully armored horse and rider were the pride of Parthian and Sasanian armies, and the rock relief at Taq-e Bostan shows a Sasanian king mounted in just such armor.

He drove toward Sham’s king through battle’s tide: Sham is Syria. The three allied kings of this campaign are those of Barbar, Hamavaran and Mesr (Egypt), so Sham here stands in for one of them — a substitution Ferdowsi's rhyme invites, since the names of the western lands are largely interchangeable in the poem's geography of the far west.

B6.7Kavus’s Message to Afrasiab

Kavus seeks troops from Rum, and loyal Iranians report that they have resisted Afrasiab. Kavus orders Afrasiab out of Iran; Afrasiab claims the throne by descent from Tur and by conquest. In the battle that follows the Turanians are routed and Afrasiab flees home.

To Caesar’s court, where Roman chiefs were found: Rum is the Roman, and later Byzantine, world, and its ruler is always ‘Caesar’ (qaysar). The legendary kings of the Shahnameh deal with Caesars as the Sasanians did, a cheerful anachronism that Ferdowsi never worries about.

From Tur, my forebear, comes my royal claim: Afrasiab’s claim is not empty: he descends from Tur, Fereydoon’s son, and the feud between Iran and Turan goes back to the murder of Iraj.

My daughter, kingship, parasol I give: The parasol (chatr) was an emblem of royalty. Afrasiab offers his daughter as a prize for Rostam’s capture. It is an irony of the poem that two of his daughters, Farangis and Manijeh, will instead give their hearts to Iranians.

B6.8Kavus Sets the World in Order

Back in Pars, Kavus rules with justice and plenty, sends governors to the provinces and names Rostam World-Champion. On Alborz he sets the Divs to build stone stables, silver armories, a palace of glass and a golden hall where it is always spring.

As World-Champion, glory of the crown: The title is jahān-pahlavān, ‘World-Champion’, the highest rank a warrior can hold under the king. It is Rostam’s alone for most of the poem.

He built a palace fashioned all of glass: A king who sets Divs to build him marvels recalls Jamshid (A4.1), and also Solomon, who in Islamic tradition commands the jinn. The palace of glass recalls the glass floor Solomon laid before the Queen of Sheba in the Qur’an. Both earlier builders were undone by pride, and so, in the next chapter, is Kavus.

B6.9Iblis Beguiles Kavus

Iblis sends a Div disguised as a handsome page to tempt Kavus to master the heavens. Kavus rears eagles, ties them to a throne with meat hung above them, and flies upward until the birds tire and he crashes near Amol, spared only because Siavash is yet to be born.

He took the form of a young gholam, fair: A gholām is a page or slave-boy. Pages of this kind were familiar at the court of Mahmud of Ghazni, whose own dynasty had been founded by a Turkish slave-soldier. The Devil arrives in the most ordinary shape at court.

He brought four mighty eagles to the ground: Kavus’s flying throne is one of the best-known and most often painted scenes in the poem. The Alexander Romance has the same device, a basket carried by griffins lured upward with meat on spears, and Islamic legend tells a similar story of Nimrod. All three flights end in failure.

Many the tales; their truth remains unknown: Ferdowsi reports that his sources disagree about the king’s purpose and declines to choose between them. Such honest shrugs are among the signs that he was working from written and oral traditions and not simply inventing.

For Siavash had yet to spring from him: The first mention of Siavash, Kavus’s son, whose story is the heart of this volume. The foolish king is saved for the sake of a son he will one day fail.

B6.10Rostam Brings Back Kay Kavus

Rostam, Giv and Tus find the fallen king, and Gudarz rebukes him bitterly for his follies. Ashamed, Kavus repents with forty days of prayer and alms-giving. God forgives him, and he returns to rule with justice.

A madhouse suits you better than a town: Gudarz speaks to his king with a bluntness no courtier of Mahmud’s could have risked. The Pahlevans of the Shahnameh serve the throne but do not flatter it. Rostam will speak to Kavus even more harshly later in this volume.

Three times calamity has caught you fast: The three follies are the invasion of Mazandaran (B5), the feast at Hamavaran (B6.3) and the flight to heaven (B6.9).

For forty days he bowed himself in prayer: Forty is the traditional number of penance and retreat in the Iranian world, as in the Sufi chelleh, the forty-day withdrawal. Kavus’s repentance is genuine, and it is rewarded.