Notes · Book D3Darab

D3.1Darab Builds the City of Darabgird

After a prologue praising Mahmud, Darab tells his nobles that God gave him the throne and justice must repay it. Envoys arrive from India and Rum. He has a lake drained by foreign engineers, founds Darabgird, lights a fire there, and garrisons the frontiers.

Abul-Qasim, the king with face of light: Abul-Qasim Mahmud is Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, to whom the Shahnameh is dedicated. Ferdowsi sets short passages of praise for him at the openings of sections, and this one greets the new book at the join between legend and history. Whether the praise was ever properly repaid is the subject of a famous and much-embroidered story about the poet’s old age.

They named it Darabgird beneath the sun: Darabgird is a real town in Fars, and the ancient site is laid out as a great circle — the round plan familiar from Sasanian foundations, though the date of the surviving circuit is disputed. Kings in the Shahnameh are known by what they build, and a whole reign is often summed up in one city, one fire and a line of frontier garrisons, as this one is.

D3.2Darab Defeats the Army of Shaeeb

A hundred thousand Arab horsemen under Shaeeb of Qutayb’s line meet Darab’s army. Three days of fighting end on the fourth with Shaeeb dead and the Arabs in flight. Darab divides the spoil and sends an Arabic-speaking officer to collect two years’ tribute.

Upon the fourth, the Arabs turned in flight: Three days of battle and a decision on the fourth is Ferdowsi’s standard measure for a great engagement: it governs Faramarz’s last fight (D1.3), this war, and the war with Faylaqus (D3.3), while Iskandar’s battles stretch it to seven days and an eighth (D4.2, D4.4). The count is a convention of the verse, not a chronicle.

Who understood what Arab tongues would say: The tribute is collected by a frontier officer chosen for his Arabic, and he is sent for the past year’s arrears as well as the current levy. Tribute in this poem is never a gesture; it is an account with a due date, as the golden eggs of Rum will be (D3.3). Persian tradition gave Darab an Arabian war of which the Greek accounts of the old Persian kings know nothing.

D3.3Darab Fights Faylaqus and Weds His Daughter

Darab invades Rum. Faylaqus musters Amuriyah’s legions, loses two battles, and shuts himself in his fortress. His envoy sues for peace; Darab’s counselors praise Faylaqus’s daughter, and the king demands her along with the tribute. Nahid is sent to Pars in state.

Faylaqus ruled the Romans, and his word: Faylaqus is Philip of Macedon, Alexander’s father, whom the tradition has turned into a Caesar of Rum (see I, B10.23) with his capital at Amuriyah, usually identified with Amorium in Asia Minor. No war of this kind stands in the Greek record. Philip is here to be beaten, so that his daughter can bear Darab a son (D3.4).

Ten thousand eggs of gold, of casting rare: Ten thousand golden eggs, each weighed and paired with a jewel, is the most memorable levy in the poem — and it is set up to be refused. A generation later Iskandar answers Dara’s demand for it with the line that the bird which laid them has died (D4.2), and that sentence begins the war.

D3.4Darab Rejects His Wife, and Two Births

A foul breath spoils the wedding night. A healer cures Nahid with the herb eskandar, but Darab’s desire is gone and he sends her home pregnant. She bears Iskandar, named for the herb; Faylaqus claims him as his own son. Darab’s other wife bears Dara.

His mother chose Iskandar for his name: This is the hinge of the second half of the Shahnameh. The Greek Alexander Romance reached Iran through Syriac and Arabic, and Persian tradition then added what no Greek text has: Alexander as Darab’s son by Philip’s daughter. The conqueror is therefore a Kayanian and Dara’s elder half-brother; the conquest becomes a quarrel inside one family; and Ferdowsi can give Iskandar a reign, a coronation speech and a wise vizier like any Iranian king. The Pahlavi books, which had no such story, call him ‘the accursed’ and blame him for burning the Avesta (see D4.6).

The herb was known as eskandar by name: The etymology is folk etymology, and a good joke: the prince is named for the burning herb that cured his mother’s breath. The name is the Greek Alexandros, which reached Persian through Arabic as al-Iskandar; the first syllable is usually explained as having been taken for the Arabic definite article and dropped, leaving Iskandar.

The foal was of an age with Nahid’s boy: A horse born on the hero’s own night belongs to the same body of legend as the hero. The Greek tradition remembers Alexander’s war-horse Bucephalus; the Persian one gives him a white foal, lion-chested and short in the shank, dropped by the royal mare in the hour of his birth. Ferdowsi records the coincidence and leaves it to speak for itself.