Notes · Book D10The Bahram Goor Cycle: Justice, Foreign Adventures, and End of a Reign

D10.1Bahram Goor’s Accession and First Commands

Crowned, Bahram gives thanks and on each of his first eight days addresses the chiefs: on God and resurrection, on contentment, on defending the realm, on dealing harshly with the harsh. On the eighth he has Javanuy write to every province announcing his justice and his faith.

To just Tahmuras’s customs as of old: A Sasanian king grounds his law in the third king of the world (I, A3.1). This is the regular move of the Shahnameh’s kings: they claim not to be making law but restoring the practice of the first kings, and a new reign is announced as a return.

And Abraham, the prophet firm and true: The creed of this accession speech, one God, a reckoning, heaven and hell, and a soul that reaps what it sowed, is Zoroastrian and at the same time common ground with Ferdowsi’s Muslim readers, and the naming of Abraham beside Zardosht belongs to the same habit of speech. The Sasanian books are written for an audience whose own faith came later, and Ferdowsi rarely makes his kings sound foreign to it.

D10.2Bahram Pardons Iran and Remits the Arrears

Monzer pleads for the men who opposed Bahram and the king pardons them all. He feasts and loads the Arabs with gifts, makes his brother Narsi sepahbod, and then cancels ninety-three million dirhams of tax arrears and burns the ledgers. Iran celebrates at the fire-temples.

They counted ninety-three million in arrears: Remitting arrears and burning the registers in public is the standing gesture of the just king, and its point is that the debt was uncollectable: a sum built from levies old and new that stood over the country like a mountain. On the dirham and the dinar as coins, see I, B11.3.

A herald to the gate with this intent: The herald crying the king’s word at the palace gate is how this reign speaks to its subjects, and the device recurs through the whole cycle: wine is forbidden by proclamation and allowed again by one (D10.6, D10.7), and the poor are summoned to the riding ground by another (D10.18). Each proclamation is given in full, so the reign is partly narrated in its own edicts.

D10.3Bahram Visits Lambak the Water-Carrier

An old man tells Bahram of two townsmen, Baraham the rich miser and Lambak the generous water-carrier. The king forbids the market to buy Lambak’s water, then lodges with him three nights as a stray captain, watching him pawn his gear each day to feed his guest.

He cried, “A captain of Iran am I: Here begins the device that carries the rest of this batch: the king rides out alone, presents himself as a horseman separated from the hunt, and learns from inside a stranger’s house what his justice looks like from below. The disguised ruler belongs to an old stock of Persian royal anecdote, and it traveled on into the Arabic story-books, where Haroun al-Rashid walks his own city by night.

A chessboard, which he set before the king: A water-carrier’s house with a chessboard in it. The poem itself tells the story of how chess reached Iran much later, in the reign of Anooshirvan (III, E2), so the board here is an anachronism inside the Shahnameh’s own chronology, of the ordinary kind that comes of a storyteller furnishing a poor man’s room from his own century.

D10.4Bahram Is Ill-Treated by Baraham the Jew

The same night Bahram asks lodging from Baraham, who lets him in only on terms: no food, no fodder, payment for any broken brick, and the dung swept out at dawn. The miser eats and drinks alone, lecturing his guest, who carries the droppings out in a scented silk cloth.

There is no lodging here, and he must go.”: Two lodgings on two nights, the poor man who gives everything and the rich man who gives nothing, make a pairing as old as story. The Sasanian books are full of such matched anecdotes: they do not advance the plot, and are not meant to, but work as demonstrations laid before the reader and the king at once.

The man who has the means may eat his fill: The miser instructs his hungry guest in proverbs, first over food and then over wine, and Bahram answers only that he has heard the saying and is now watching it. In the next chapter the king gives the proverb back to him from the throne, almost word for word, as the sentence of the court; the two episodes are built as a frame with that saying for a hinge.

D10.5Bahram Grants Baraham’s Wealth to Lambak

In open court Bahram sends an honest man to empty Baraham’s house. A thousand camels cannot carry the hoard. He gives it to Lambak, quotes the miser’s own proverb back at him, leaves him four dirhams to start again, and throws the emptied house open to plunder.

And called from Jahram a thousand camels fast: The hoard is measured in animals, not sums: a thousand camels, a hundred camel-loads of gold, two hundred kharvars still left behind. A kharvar is an ass-load (see I, A9.5), and reckoning by the load is how wealth was actually moved and therefore how it was actually counted.

He gave to Lambak all this treasure bright: This is the first of three hoards that come to Bahram in this batch and are given away: the miser’s here, Jamshid’s buried treasure at D10.10, and Farshidvard’s flocks and buried gold at D10.16. The repetition is deliberate, and the king’s reasons change each time, from justice between two men, to a refusal of grave-goods, to relief of a man who had broken no law.

D10.6Bahram Forbids Wine after the Lion-Hunt

Hunting, Bahram kills a lion and lioness and is feasted in the wood by the country lord Mehr Bandad. Next day Kabruy drains seven great cups at court, rides home, and sleeps drunk on the hillside, where a crow pecks out his eyes. Bahram forbids wine in Iran.

The cup held five man; then he made this vow: The man is a weight, the maund of later English usage, and it varied widely from place to place and century to century. That is why a cup is measured in it here: five man of wine, drunk seven times over, is a joke about scale rather than a quantity anyone expects the reader to work out.

Wine is forbidden throughout my domain.”: A general prohibition, proclaimed in grief over one dead drinker, and lifted after a year by the next chapter. Ferdowsi builds the pair as comedy with a point: the lesson the cycle actually teaches is not abstinence but measure, and it takes both a crow and a lion to state it.

D10.7Bahram Allows Wine Again

A young shoemaker fails his bride; his mother secretly gives him wine and he succeeds. Still drunk, he mounts a stray palace lion and rides it down the lane. Bahram has his pedigree searched, hears the truth from his mother, laughs, and allows wine again in measure.

His lineage? Seven cups of vintage wine!: The Shah sends the Mobadan to search a shoemaker’s pedigree for the blood that would explain such courage, and is told that the pedigree is wine. In a poem organized from end to end around descent, the mother’s answer is the sharpest comic reversal in the cycle, and it is the one that changes the law.

Drink so that you can mount a lion still: The new rule is not a count of cups but a test of capacity, with the crow and the lion marking its two ends. The herald’s cry that follows, to drink in measure and look from each beginning to its end, is as close as this reign comes to stating its ethics outright.

D10.8Rozbeh Ruins and Restores a Village

Vexed by a village that fails to bless him, Bahram orders it destroyed. Rozbeh instead proclaims every man, woman and slave its lord, and within a year strife has wrecked it. Told to restore it, he appoints one elder, and by the third year it flourishes; he explains the lesson.

When two men rule together in one place: This is the plainest statement in the poem of the Sasanian doctrine of a single ordering authority, argued upward from a village. Set it beside Bahram’s ‘I am the shepherd’ (III, D9.12), and against the Mazdakite movement later in this volume (III, D12), which proposed as a program the leveling that this Mobad stages as ruin.

The Mobad understood the Shah’s intent: Rozbeh disobeys by obeying: he executes the letter of a wicked order in a way that teaches the man who gave it, then keeps quiet for a year while the ruin does the arguing. The minister who saves his king from his own command is a fixture of the Sasanian books, and Bozorgmehr under Anooshirvan is the great instance later in this volume (III, E3).

D10.9Bahram Weds the Miller’s Daughters

Riding home by night, Bahram finds village girls singing by a mill. One toasts Bahram Goor and explains his name. He calls for wine, hears four maidens sing, and asks their father the miller for all four, refusing any dowry. Next morning the village learns its luck.

By his great hunting title: Bahram Goor.”: The poem stops to explain its hero’s name, and does it in a girl’s drinking song rather than in the poet’s own voice: he hunts nothing but lions and wild asses, so the people call him after the gur. On the animal and its name, see I, B12.5 and I, B14.28. He will return the compliment at D10.18 by having his own name engraved in gold on the ears of three hundred of them.

Moshknaz came, with Moshkanak beside: The names are scents and flowers, not genealogies: moshk is musk, so the first two maidens are musk-names, and Susanak is ‘little lily’, from susan. Women who arrive in the poem out of a song by a millstream are named this way, where a princess would be given a father and a line.

D10.10Bahram Finds the Treasures of Jamshid

A landowner’s new watercourse breaks into a buried vault. Diggers open a chamber where golden buffaloes drink at a gemmed trough, sealed with Jamshid’s name. Bahram refuses wealth not won by the sword, has it counted and given to the poor, and feasts that spring on the kings of old.

The high Mobad read on the beast the seal: The first question Bahram asks is whose name is written on the hoard, and the buffalo answers it. Royal treasuries were named and inventoried as a matter of course, and the poem will list the great named hoards of Khosrow Parviz later in this volume. Bahram’s refusal, that wealth taken without sword and right is the stripping of a shroud, is the moral center of his reign’s first half.

Two golden buffaloes bent down to drink: Jamshid is the king of the golden age, and his hoard is furnished accordingly: not arms but husbandry and orchard, buffaloes at a trough, lions and Gur-e-Khars standing round, pomegranates and apples and quinces of gold with pearls inside them. The animals’ eyes are ruby or crystal, and their heads are worn, the one touch of age in the chamber.

D10.11Bahram’s Visit to the Merchant’s House

Lodging with a merchant, Bahram asks for old cheese and almonds and is given a roast fowl and a scolding. At dawn the apprentice, blamed for overpaying, feasts him properly. Bahram rewards the youth and binds the merchant to pay him sixty dirhams twice a month.

Had you bought cheese, one dang would meet the price: A dang is a sixth: a sixth of a dirham as money, a sixth share in a piece of property. The whole quarrel between master and apprentice, and the sentence the king passes on it next day, turns on the smallest coin in the reckoning.

A king observes the world, he rules by guess: Placed in the middle of the series of disguises, this is the sentence that justifies them. A king who does not go and look cannot tell the base from the noble, and cannot know which of his subjects deserves reward; the poem has him say so to a Mobad immediately after judging a merchant he could only have judged by lodging in his house.

D10.12Bahram’s Dragon-Slaying and Visit to a Yokel

Bahram shoots a dragon and cuts it open to find a swallowed youth inside. Sick with its venom, he lodges with a generous wife and her grudging husband. Her cow goes dry when the king’s heart turns toward tyranny, and gives milk again when he repents; he rewards the couple.

Its woman-like breasts swelled, immense and round: The poem’s dragons are described afresh each time they appear, and never as lizards. This one has hair trailing from its head to the ground, a woman’s breasts, venom that sickens the man who cuts it open, and a swallowed youth frozen inside it, so that the killing becomes a recovery of the body as well as a feat.

The monarch’s heart is now a tyrant’s; see: The cow that goes dry when the king’s heart turns from justice belongs to the oldest layer of Iranian belief, in which the fertility of the land answers to the conduct of its ruler and the cow is the instrument that registers it; behind it lies the lament of the ox-soul in the Gathas, and within the poem the cow Barmayeh (I, A5.2). The wife reads the udder as an astrologer reads a sky, and she is right.

“Take out this whip and hang it in my name: The whip hung at the gate is a piece of court practice the cycle uses three times over. Here the king leaves it deliberately, so that his passing troops will dismount to a gardener’s door; at D10.13 and D10.14 a servant hangs it while the king is inside, and the crowd of bowing soldiers it draws is what gives the disguise away by morning.

D10.13Bahram Weds the Daughters of Noble Barzin

Bahram rides to the sea with elephants, hawks and cheetahs. His black falcon Toghri carries off a crane; following its bells he finds Barzin’s garden and three harping daughters, drinks, and asks for all three as brides. Later he transfixes a mating pair of Gur-e-Khars with one shaft.

Behind the falconers, cheetahs came in pride: Eight score cheetahs in golden chains with jeweled torques. The hunting cheetah, taken young, hooded and carried out to be slipped at gazelle, was a mark of royal hunting in Iran long before it became one in India, and it takes its place here between the falcons and the elephants in a procession that is as much a statement of sovereignty as a hunting party.

They called that bird Toghri; its eyes were red: Toghri is usually explained as a Turkic word for a bird of prey; the name was later borne by the first Seljuq sultan, Tughril. The bird is a gift of the Khan of Chin, black with a yellow beak and bells on its legs, and it earns its keep in the story: the king follows the sound of those bells off the plain and into the garden where he finds his next three wives.

The youngest maid was lovely Shanbalid: The brides are named out of the poem’s own past and its gardens. Mah Afrid and Faranak carry names from the first volume, the second belonging to the mother of Fereydoon (I, A5.4; I, A6.14), while shanbalid is the fenugreek or melilot flower that keeps turning up beside the wine-cups all through this batch.

D10.14Bahram Slays Lions and Weds Arezu

Bahram kills two lions, hears from a herdsman of a jeweler’s harp-playing daughter, and rides alone to the house as “Gushasp.” Arezu sings to him and chooses him over the king himself; they are married by dawn. Meanwhile Rozbeh lectures the chiefs on the king’s excess with women.

“Gushasp is what men call me far and wide: On the king traveling as a stray horseman, see III, D10.3. This is the only night of the cycle on which he gives himself a name.

Called Arezu, I joy in guests like you: Ārezu means ‘desire, wish’; the name was borne by one of the daughters of Sarv of Yemen in the first volume (I, A6.6). It is well placed here, since the joke of the scene is that the harpist, asked to choose, prefers Gushasp the guest to Bahram the Shah, not knowing that she is refusing and accepting the same man.

Once in a month should satisfy desire: Rozbeh’s speech is the harshest criticism the poem makes of its best-loved king: a hundred and thirty women behind walls, a month of Rum’s tribute spent on them, and strength drained out of the arm that pins two Gur-e-Khars with one shaft. The argument is medical before it is moral, in the manner of the counsel literature, and Ferdowsi has the sense to let it be delivered on the road, behind the king’s back, where it can go unanswered.

D10.15Bahram’s Hunt and Night with Farshidvard

After a month in camp, with game so plentiful that dealers ride out from town to buy it, Bahram goes ahead alone and asks lodging of a town’s chief man. Farshidvard, in a dung-fouled hall, pleads poverty, refuses him food, bedding and water, and weeps him out of doors.

A quarter dinar bought the hunters’ gain: The poem prices the hunt, and the price is the point: ten gazelles and a Gur-e-Khar for a quarter dinar, dealers riding out from town to trade, and anyone who needs meat for a child or a guest carrying it home on an ass. The same accounting eye runs through this cycle, from the arrears of D10.2 to the inventory of Farshidvard’s flocks in the next chapter.

Would you have bird’s milk brought at once on call?”: Shir-e morgh, ‘bird’s milk’, is the Persian idiom for the unobtainable, and it is still in use. The miser reaches for it in sarcasm, and it is the one generous thing he offers all night.

D10.16A Bramble-Grubber Reveals Farshidvard’s Guilt

A thorn-cutter tells Bahram that Farshidvard is the region’s richest man and its hungriest. Bahram sends Behruz, a scribe and a hundred riders with the grubber to inventory the flocks; the scribes cannot finish the count. The king orders the whole of it distributed to the poor.

The grubber’s name was Dilafruz the bright: Dilafruz means ‘heart-illumining’, which the translation renders openly a few lines later as Light of Hearts. The man who clears brambles with an axe has the finest name in the chapter, is given a horse and told to ride at the head of a hundred horsemen, and takes a hundredth part of a fortune no one can count; the poem enjoys the arrangement.

Leave Farshidvard the dinars he concealed: The judgment is carefully exact. The miser has stolen nothing and wronged no one, so he is not punished; he is relieved of what he could not use, and left the coin he had hidden, to spare him the pain of missing it. The list of those to be paid instead, the shamefaced, the aged past work, ruined traders, orphans, women without husband or craft, reads like a schedule of the deserving poor drawn up for an endowment.

D10.17Bahram’s Lion-Hunt

In a spring pleasance Bahram tells his counselors that he has lived thirty-eight years, will give two more to pleasure, then turn to God. He rides to Jaz, kills lions with blade and khanjar against advice, and proclaims penalties for theft and for crops damaged by his men.

Already thirty-eight full years have passed: Forty is the hinge of a life in Persian and Islamic moral writing: youth closes, the first white hair shows among the black, and a man is expected to turn his mind to the next world. Bahram does the arithmetic aloud, allows himself two more years of rose, wine and hunting, and promises to stand before God afterward in rough cloth. The rest of the cycle is the test of that bargain.

Turned backward on his horse, in shameful plight: Parading an offender seated backward on his mount, led by two armed men, was a real public shaming in the medieval Middle East. The edict then adds an Iranian second half: the thief is taken to the fire of Azargashasp to bow and give thanks, and his goods go to the man he robbed. On that fire, see I, A7.1.

D10.18Bahram’s Gur-e-Khar Hunt before the Princes

Before his nobles Bahram drives an arrow through a buck so that neither point nor feathers show, and cleaves a female Gur-e-Khar in two. He rings three hundred beasts’ ears with gold engraved with his name and frees them, holds open court for the poor, then returns to feasting.

He bade them fashion rings of shining gold: The king takes his name from the gur (D10.9) and now gives it back: three hundred beasts loosed into the waste with his name in gold on their ears, and a herald forbidding anyone to sell one. The animal that named him is turned into a moving proclamation, which is the same use he makes of heralds, edicts and remitted taxes throughout the cycle.

And reached Baghdad with gladness in his mind: Baghdad stands here for the capital district on the Tigris, where the Sasanian seat at Tisfoon lay. The city itself is an Abbasid foundation, centuries later than any king in this book; the name has come into the story from the age of the poem’s sources, who used the city of their own day for the old capital.

D10.19The Khan of Chin Invades Iran

Word spreads that Bahram neglects his frontiers, and the Khan of Chin invades. The nobles rage while the Shah keeps hunting and secretly arms. He leaves Narsi as regent and rides toward Azargashasp, and the frightened nobles send the Khan a letter of submission.

From Chin and from Khutan he raised a force: The poem keeps the old Turanian vocabulary for the eastern enemy: a Khan of Chin, with Turks out of Chin and Khutan. Historians reckon the power on that frontier in Bahram’s time to have been one of the nomad confederations of the Oxus lands, the Kidarites or the early Hephthalites, and the poem itself will come to call them Heytalians two reigns later (III, D11.2). Ferdowsi is not reporting the frontier; he is telling it in the language his sources gave him.

In secret he prepared his men and gear: This is Ferdowsi’s answer to the charge that has hung over the whole cycle. The hunting is real, the neglect is a performance, and the king lets his own nobles believe him a fool so that the Khan will believe it too. The device costs him: the chiefs who despair of him in this chapter are the ones who write to the enemy, and he has to forgive them at III, D10.22.

They penned the Khan a craven letter, fraught: Iran’s great men sue for terms behind their king’s back, and Narsi refuses to sign. Submission letters of this kind are a regular instrument in the Shahnameh’s diplomacy, but this is the only one written by the nobles against their own Shah, and the poem is careful to let Narsi state the case for fighting before it lets the panic win.

D10.20Bahram’s Assault on the Khan’s Army

Learning that the Khan lies feasting at Marv, Bahram marches a light column across northern Iran, surprises the Turkish camp at Kashmihan at dawn, and takes the Khan captive with three hundred chiefs. He pursues the fleeing for thirty farsang and divides the spoil.

Each man had two strong horses for the road: The march is described as a professional would: no baggage train, two horses to a man, armor and Roman helmets worn, lookouts by day and guards by night, and a guide for the waterless stretch. Riding with remounts and no train is the method of the steppe armies, and Bahram uses it against a steppe army; the whole surprise depends on his column moving faster than news of it.

“The hunt at Kashmihan fills all his head: Kashmihan is usually placed in the well-watered district around Marv. The irony is exact and surely enjoyed: the king whose hunting invited the invasion catches the invader in the middle of a hunt, and the scout’s report of the Khan, heedless, thinking of nothing but the chase, is word for word the report that brought the Khan to Iran in the first place (III, D10.19).

D10.21Bahram Marks the Frontier and Crowns Shahra

Bahram crosses the river, breaks the Turkish army beyond it, and accepts tribute and hostages when their chiefs plead for the guiltless. He raises a stone pillar to mark the frontier, forbids crossings without his consent, and crowns Shahra king of Turan.

He raised a pillar built of plastered stone: This pillar matters later. Bahram fixes the Jihun as the boundary and builds a marker to say so, and three reigns on the same stone becomes the legal question of a war: Pirooz marches past it, and Khoshnavaz raises Bahram’s own treaty on a spear against him (III, D11.3.2 and III, D11.3.3). Few objects in the Sasanian books are given so long a life.

To cross to Iran, Turks and Khalaj would need: The Khalaj are named beside the Turks rather than among them. Medieval geographers place a people of that name in the eastern marches toward Ghaznin and Zabulistan, and the name survives in Iran today in the Khalaj of the central plateau. Ferdowsi’s frontier lists tend to be drawn from the peoples of his own century, not from the fifth.

He made him king of Turan; at its height: Turan is disposed of here as a province in the Shah’s gift: an officer from his own army is crowned over it on a silver throne. Set beside the long wars of Volume II (II, C2–C4), in which Turan is the other half of the world, the casualness of the scene is the measure of how far the poem has traveled from Afrasiab.

D10.22Bahram Returns to Iran in Triumph

Bahram writes Narsi an account of the victory; Iran rejoices, and the nobles who had written to the Khan beg pardon through Narsi and are forgiven. The Shah worships at Azar Abadagan, scatters largess at Istakhr, repairs roads and bridges, and returns to Tisfoon.

Full many a heavy qintar’s weight was weighed: The qintar is the hundredweight of the medieval Mediterranean and Middle East, from Greek kentenarion through Arabic qintār, and the ancestor of the English quintal; hundredweight is the native English name for a measure of the same size, not a descendant of the word. Ferdowsi uses it where a Roman or Arab account would: a bulk weight for coin poured out of ox-hide sacks, not a counted sum.

With barsom, Gharchi Mobadan joined the crowd: The barsom (Avestan baresman) is the bundle of twigs the priest holds through the liturgy, later replaced by thin metal rods. It is the visible sign that a man in the crowd is a priest at his office, and it appears again when Sapinud is received into the faith (III, D10.36).

They hung the Khan’s own crown, a radiant prize: The Khan’s crown is not kept in the treasury and not melted: it is hung in the fire-temple. Dedicating the enemy’s regalia to the gods is old and widespread practice, and it also settles a political question, since a captured crown in a treasury is an awkward thing to own. On the great fire itself, see I, A7.1.

D10.23Bahram Instructs His Officials

At a feast Bahram dictates a long edict to his officials: justice for the oppressed, seven years without taxes, relief for debtors, schooling for children. Heralds carry it through the provinces, and spring is proclaimed a holiday. He then sends Narsi to govern Khorasan.

I write in Pahlavi, that ancient speech: Middle Persian was the working language of the Sasanian chancery, so Bahram would have written in it without remark. It is Ferdowsi, four centuries into New Persian, who hears it as an ancient speech, and the aside quietly tells his readers that the edict they are reading is a translation out of the old books.

Half of the day they feasted in delight: Half the day for work and half for rest is a rule this reign keeps coming back to. It is stated here as a description of a holiday and reappears as law at III, D10.38, where the Shah orders that no one leave off work before noon and calls the second half of the day rest, with folly the name for whoever scorns the measure.

One dirham bought a lone narcissus spray: Prosperity is priced rather than praised. A garland of willow-blossom at two gold dinars and a single narcissus at a dirham are absurd prices, and nobody grudges them, which is the point: flowers have become dear because everyone is buying. The same accounting eye prices the hunt at III, D10.15.

In Plato’s school his learned mind was known: For Ferdowsi’s age Rum is the country of the philosophers, and the compliment is the natural one to pay a learned Roman. Platonic teaching was in fact still going on in the fifth century, at Athens and at Alexandria, so the credential is not impossible, only unexpected in an envoy. The poem’s Rum is remembered rather than observed, and remembered largely through the Greek learning that reached the Islamic world in translation.

D10.24Bahram Receives Caesar’s Envoy

Caesar’s aged envoy is received at last and puts seven questions to the court. The high Mobad answers them all in a single speech, and next day sets questions of his own, which the Roman answers. Each praises the other, and the envoy grants Iran’s claim to tribute.

To ask seven questions of your learned band.”: The seven are asked in one breath and answered in one speech: within, without, above, below, the boundless, the lowly, and the thing of many names. The riddling embassy is an old motif, and in this reign it is diplomacy by other means, with the tribute of Rum as the stake; Caesar’s man concedes it at the end of the chapter on the strength of a Mobad’s answers.

Yet you would count the stars that nightly gleam: The answer to the riddle of the lowliest thing is a small masterpiece of counsel literature: the lowly thing is not a creature but an occupation, the attempt to number what cannot be numbered. The Mobad makes his case with an arrow, which the eye can barely follow across a single sky, and ends by handing the remainder back to God.

D10.25Bahram’s Dismissal of Caesar’s Envoy

Bahram loads Caesar’s envoy with gifts and dismisses him, then apportions lands and offices among his chiefs. He speaks to the Mobadan of his father’s injustice, of death that spares no one, and pledges to repay from his own treasury any loss his officers or thieves inflict.

Where are the heads and crowns of kings of kings?: On the ubi sunt, the roll-call of the vanished great, see I, B9.39. What is new is the mouth it comes from: not the poet mourning, but a reigning king putting his own mortality into a policy speech, so that the promise of justice rests on the fact that he too will be under the burial dust.

Let none lay hand on water or on fire: Fire and water are the pure elements, and it is the consecrated fire and the water of the rite that only a priest may handle; on the hirbad, see I, B9.7. The laity keep their own hearths but must not defile either element. The clause belongs with the two that follow it, sparing the draft ox and the cow in calf, and together they show a king legislating from Zoroastrian law rather than from his own judgment. On the cow and the king’s justice, see III, D10.12.

If in night watches some thief steals away: The pledges are extraordinary and quite specific: brocade for a stolen quilt, a good horse for a stolen sheep, a year’s keep for a wounded Pahlevan’s family. The treasury standing behind private loss is this reign’s signature, and it returns in the tax edicts (III, D10.38) and again in Pirooz’s famine relief (III, D11.3.1).

D10.26Bahram’s Embassy to Shangul of Hind

A vizier warns that Shangul of Hind is raiding toward Iran. Bahram has a letter written demanding tribute, then carries it himself in the guise of an envoy. He reaches Ghanooj, is admitted to the crystal-roofed hall, and delivers his own message to Shangul.

I will approach him as an envoy sent: The disguise that carried the middle of this cycle, the king riding out as an ordinary horseman (III, D10.3), is now exported. Inside Iran it cost him a night’s discomfort and taught him what his justice looked like from below; abroad it puts his life in a foreign king’s hand for the length of ten chapters, and the poem never tells us whether he weighed that.

Past Jadustan’s waters, in the sorcerers’ land: Jādū is sorcery, and Jadustan is the sorcerers’ country; the translation says so in the same line. India is the land of magic in Persian writing from the Sasanian books onward, and Bahram will throw the word back later, promising to carry dust out of Wizard-land to Iran (III, D10.29).

D10.27Shangul Answers Bahram’s Letter

Shangul turns yellow at the letter and answers with a long boast of his treasures, elephants and kinsmen, hinting that only custom saves the envoy’s life. Bahram sets out his Shah’s terms: a contest of wise men, or a hundred Indian horsemen against one Iranian.

My aloeswood and musk in plenty flow: Shangul’s boast is the standard catalogue of what came to Iran through the Indian ports: aloeswood, musk, camphor, ambergris, gems of mountain and sea, and every drug a sick man needs. Hind is the world’s pharmacy and perfumer’s shop in Persian writing, and a king of Hind is made to recite the bill of lading as his pedigree.

Were there a precedent for kings to slay: The immunity of envoys is a rule both sides here know and both are tempted by. Shangul says he would cut his guest in two if there were any precedent for it, and when he does resolve on murder his own sage stops him with the same argument, that killing a royal envoy is senseless and would stain his name among kings (III, D10.32).

D10.28Shangul’s Feast and Bahram’s Prowess

Shangul puts the embassy off and holds a feast. Wrestlers perform; Bahram asks leave to try them and breaks a champion’s bones. Next morning at the polo ground he strings a Kayanian bow and shatters the mark with a single shaft, and the Indians call blessings on him.

And tied their wrestling cloths before the crowd: Court wrestling, with the cloth tied at the waist before the company, is one of the oldest entertainments of the region and one of the living ones; on koshti and the zurkhaneh, see I, B8.20. The comedy here is that the disguised king wins by exactly the strength that will give him away, and Shangul begins counting him worth forty men.

He loosed his thumb; one shaft flew to the mark: The Asian draw again, with the thumb taking the string; on the thumb-ring, see I, B13.28. Ferdowsi gives the whole test in two lines, where the great set-pieces of Volume I take twenty, and the brevity is the point: to this archer, splitting a mark at a foreign court is nothing worth describing.

D10.29Shangul Detains Bahram in Hind

Shangul, reading farr in his guest’s stature and archery, guesses he is the Shah’s brother; Bahram denies it and asks leave to go. The king has his minister offer land, office and wealth, and press for a name. Bahram calls himself Barzvi, and Shangul resolves to destroy him.

Such signs of farr as mark this man today: On the farr itself, see I, A4.1. Two things are new. It is read here by a foreign king who worships idols, so the poem treats the royal glory as visible to anyone with eyes rather than as an Iranian doctrine; and it is the one thing the disguise cannot cover, which is why the rest of the story is a struggle to leave.

If you would know my name, call me Barzvi: The second alias of the cycle: he was Gushasp for one night in Iran (III, D10.14) and is Barzvi for a year in Hind. The name looks built on barz, height or stature, which would make it a quiet joke, since his stature is precisely what has betrayed him. He keeps it to the end, and Sapinud uses it to excuse him from the festival (III, D10.34).

D10.30Bahram Slays the Wolf for Shangul

Shangul sends Bahram against a monstrous wolf in a nearby wood. His companions beg him not to try; he answers that God fixes the place of a man’s death, kills the beast with arrows and khanjar, and sends the head back by cart. Shangul thinks next of the dragon.

Let this be yours: go face that wolf in fight: The errand meant to kill the man who carries it is very old, from Bellerophon sent to the Lycian monster to Uriah sent to the front line. Shangul works it twice, wolf and then dragon, and says openly why: if the guest chooses to fight dragons, no one can charge his host with the death.

A nahang’s savage force in it abides: The beast is called a wolf and then furnished like a monster, with a nahang’s strength in it, lions dead in its wood and vultures leaving the sky above; on the nahang, see I, B6.5. The Shahnameh’s marvel-beasts are named loosely and described precisely, which is why the poem’s wolves are sometimes the size of hills.

D10.31Bahram Slays a Dragon

Shangul promises Hind’s tribute if Bahram will rid the land of a dragon that lives by sea and shore. With thirty Iranians he rides to the water, sews the beast’s mouth with arrows and cuts through its heart. The head is carted to the throne, and Shangul pales.

It roams both land and sea with furious will: Each dragon in the poem is built fresh (III, D10.12). This one is amphibious, kills nahangs, and draws elephants in with its breath, which makes it the sea-beast of the eastern ocean rather than the hill-dragon Bahram killed in Iran; the fight is fought from horseback along the shore, in wheeling passes, and finished with a watered blade.

If I am doomed to perish by this beast: Twice in two chapters Bahram answers a warning with the doctrine that no courage lengthens a man’s span and no danger shortens it. This is the fatalism of the poem’s heroes in its later, Islamic-era wording, decree and destiny; on qazā and qadar, see I, B13.28. In a cycle where the king is repeatedly told to take care of himself, it is also an argument he finds useful.

D10.32Shangul Gives His Daughter to Bahram

Shangul asks his council how to have the envoy killed; a sage forbids it. Instead he offers his daughter and command of his troops. Bahram, seeing a lion caught in a fox’s net, consents, chooses Sapinud from the three princesses, and a week of feasting follows.

Caught in the fox’s net so slyly cast.”: Bahram’s aside is the frankest thing he says in Hind: he cannot win a fight here, so he will marry into the trap. The poem’s kings seldom admit to being outplayed, and the image of the lion held in a fox’s net gives Shangul more credit than any Indian gets in the rest of the story.

The maiden known at court as Sapinud: Sapinud belongs only to this story, and no accepted meaning has been established for the name. She is the one foreign queen of the Sasanian books who is given a will of her own: she arranges the escape (III, D10.34), is enthroned in ivory at Tisfoon, and carries her father’s deed of gift home in Indian script (III, D10.37).

D10.33Faghfoor of Chin Writes to Bahram

Faghfoor of Chin hears of the envoy’s marriage and his killing of wolf and dragon, and writes inviting him to visit freely. Bahram answers in anger: the titles Faghfoor claims belong to Bahram Goor alone. He praises his own Shah, declines the gifts and the visit.

News reached the mighty Faghfoor, king of Chin: Faghfoor is a title, not a name, and belongs to the emperor of Chin; see I, A8.2. Notice that the poem’s east now holds two of them at once: the Khan of Chin whom Bahram carried off on a camel (III, D10.20) and this settled Faghfoor, who is father-in-law to Shangul and writes chancery letters. The nomad power and the imperial court keep the same geographical name.

Bahram Goor alone is king of kings: The joke of the whole embassy comes to a head here. Obliged to answer as his own servant, the Shah writes a page in praise of himself, assigns his deeds in Hind to his master’s star, and thanks Bahram for gifts three watches a day. Ferdowsi lets the comedy stand without a wink, which makes it funnier.

D10.34Bahram’s Flight from Hind to Iran

Sapinud has learned who her husband is. Bahram tells her he means to flee; she times the escape by her father’s forest festival and excuses him from it as sick. They ride out at night, and Bahram swears a caravan of Iranian merchants who recognize him to silence.

The merchants were Iranians, men who bore: The one glimpse in the episode of how Iran and Hind were really joined: Iranian traders camped at a river crossing, carrying the risks of land and sea, and known to their king by sight. They are also the crisis of the escape, and Bahram handles them as a king should, with an oath, a warning and praise, not with silver.

An idol stands there, fashioned by their art: Shangul’s festival is held at a forest shrine twenty farsang off, where an image stands and the people weep before it; on the bot and the idol-house, see I, B4.3. The detail earns its keep twice over: it is the poem’s standing picture of Hind, and it is the reason the king and his whole army are out of the city on the night of the flight.

D10.35Shangul Learns Bahram’s Identity

A rider brings Shangul word; he gallops from the feast, crosses the water and abuses his daughter. Bahram warns him what thirty Iranians would do, then promises him honor and his daughter a queen’s rank. Shangul lays down his turban, embraces him, and the two feast.

What has an Iranian heart to do with trust?: Ferdowsi gives a foreign king a page of abuse against Iranians as a people, faithless, saying yes and meaning dust, a lion’s cub washed in the blood of the nurses who reared it. The poem almost never lets this note be sounded against its own side, and it does not answer the charge either; Bahram simply changes the subject to what he can give.

She shall be luster of the western land: For one line the compass swings round. Iran is the west, Hind is home, and the Shah is promising a daughter of Ghanooj that she will be the ornament of a western country. Ferdowsi keeps to Shangul’s point of view here, as he does through most of these chapters, where the Shah is a stranger and the court is Indian.

D10.36Shangul and Bahram Return to Their Realms

The two kings swear to keep faith and part. Bahram is met by his son Yazdegard, by Narsi and the Mobad, and resumes his throne with a speech on justice and the fear of God. At Azargashasp he gives to the poor, and Sapinud is received into the faith.

One served Yazdan; one served the gods of clay: The oath of the two kings is sworn across a religious divide the poem states in one line and then leaves alone: to uproot guile, keep faith and listen to the wise. Ferdowsi’s Shangul is an idolater and a schemer, but he is never made ridiculous, and the pact he swears here holds for the rest of the reign.

The Shah brought Sapinud to learn the creed: The reception is brief and physical: a priest with the sacred twigs in his hand (III, D10.22), instruction in the faith, then washing with clean water. Water is the cleansing element of Zoroastrian practice, and the poem’s phrase, that he washed the dust and tarnish from her face, is doing double duty for the rite and for what it is thought to accomplish.

D10.37Shangul and Seven Kings Visit Bahram

Hearing from Sapinud of the Iranian court, Shangul obtains a fresh treaty and comes with seven Indian kings, elephants and tribute. Bahram meets him at Nahravan and feasts him; Shangul sees his daughter enthroned, hunts a month with the Shah, and deeds Ghanooj to him after his death.

Escorting Raja Shangul through the plain: Raja is Sanskrit rājan, king, from the same Indo-European root as Latin rex: one of the clearest cousin-words between the poem’s languages and India’s. Ferdowsi uses it as a title before the name, exactly as it is used in India, and only here, where seven crowned kings of Kabul, Sind, Kashmir, Multan and the rest ride in Shangul’s train.

Peacock-plumed parasols moved through the air: The parasol of state is Indian in origin, and the poem knows it; on the chatr, see I, B14.9. Here it arrives with its proper retinue of elephants in braided housings, bells and gongs, and the whole procession is a display of a different idea of kingship, which Ferdowsi lets pass through his Iranian plain unremarked.

When I am dead, convey me to the fire: The deed Shangul writes leaves Ghanooj to Bahram and asks, most naturally read, for cremation, the Indian rite. For the poem’s own believers this is the unthinkable act: fire must not be defiled by a corpse, which is the whole reason for the dakhmeh (I, B12.25). Ferdowsi sets the request down in a Zoroastrian king’s archive without comment, and the silence is louder than a note.

D10.38Bahram Remits the Landowners’ Tax

Shangul goes home laden with gifts. Bahram, warned by astrologers that he has sixty-three years, has his treasury counted, finds it enough, and abolishes the land tax. Reports of idleness and bloodshed follow; he appoints judges, briefly restores a levy, and orders relief for ruined farmers.

I will exact no property tax more: The land tax is the backbone of Sasanian revenue, and abolishing it is the largest thing any king does in this volume. What follows is unusually honest for a royal panegyric: the country grows quarrelsome and idle, the Shah reimposes a levy for six months to steady it, then lifts it again and governs by judges instead. The rebuilding of the land tax on a survey belongs to Qobad and Anooshirvan later in this volume (III, D12 and III, D13).

Three days comprise the world’s entire duration: Yesterday gone, tomorrow not come, and today: the answer a king gives his treasurer when told the money will run out in twenty-three years. The saying has the shape of the counsel books and of the wine poetry that grew out of them, and in Bahram’s mouth it is not resignation but a fiscal policy, since today is the only day a tax can be forgiven in.

D10.39Bahram Calls the Gypsies from Hindustan

Bahram asks his sages who suffers; the poor answer that they have wine but no roses and no music. He sends to Shangul for ten thousand Luri lute-players and settles them with oxen, asses and seed-wheat. Within a year they have eaten it all and taken to the road.

Let ten thousand skilled Luris now be named: Luri, with luli, is the ordinary Persian word for a wandering musician and, later, for a Gypsy, and the chapter is often brought into the argument about Roma origins. What is secure is linguistic: Romani is an Indian language, so the people came from India. The rest is inference. The dates proposed for that migration all fall later than Bahram’s reign, nothing joins this story to it, and the tale is told outside the Shahnameh too, with other numbers. The poem’s interest is simpler: it explains a way of life.

Thus, seeking bread, they wandered on their way: The chapter is an origin-story, and it is also the only experiment of this reign that fails. Arrears have been remitted, a ruined village restored, hoards given away, a tax abolished; then the poor ask for music, the king supplies musicians with land and seed, and a year later they are on the road. Ferdowsi puts it immediately before Bahram’s death, and the judgment it passes falls on the scheme rather than on the Luris.

D10.40Bahram Goor’s Time Comes to an End

In his sixty-third year Bahram tells his Mobad that the drained treasury no longer concerns him. He hands Yazdegard the throne and its regalia, sleeps, and is found dead in the morning. Iran mourns forty days, and Ferdowsi laments the king and then his own poverty.

Bahram, with faded cheeks, lay cold and dead: Ferdowsi gives the most famous hunter in Persian poetry a quiet death in bed, the crown handed over the day before. Later tellings could not leave it there: in the tradition that Nezami made famous, Bahram rides into a cave or pit after a gur and is never seen again. The pun is Persian and irresistible, since gur is both the wild ass he was named for and a grave.

The troops wore black and blue their grief to show: Black and dark blue are the mourning colors of Iran, worn and hung for the dead, and the forty days of the new Shah’s weeping are the mourning period still kept. The poem observes both without explaining them, which is how it usually treats the customs of Ferdowsi’s own day.

But I am left in misery and dread: The elegy for Bahram turns, in four lines, into the poet’s account of himself: goods gone to no good purpose, no hope in heaven, both worlds lost. These sudden appearances in his own voice, like the winter passage at III, D9.13, are among the few autobiographical moments in the poem, and Ferdowsi lets this one stand as the last word on a reign of bounty.