Notes · Book D8The Shapur Zul-Aktaf Cycle and Later Early Sasanian Reigns

D8.1Shapur, Son of Hormizd, Surnamed Zul-Aktaf

D8.1.1The Posthumous Birth and Crowning of Shapur

The queen bears a son, Shapur, crowned on his father’s throne at forty days with the Mobad Mehri to rule for him. At five the boy hears the crowd on the bridge and orders a second one built. He outstrips his teachers and makes Istakhr his seat.

They set him on his father’s throne of old: An infant is crowned, fed, and swaddled in the same passage, and a Mobad takes the golden seat below him to govern. Because the tradition counted the reign from the birth, this Shapur holds the throne for some seventy years, the longest in the dynasty — a span the poem itself reaches, at fifty years of rule (III, D8.1.10) and past seventy years of age (III, D8.1.12).

The Shah then sat in Tisfoon’s royal town: Tisfoon is Ctesiphon on the Tigris, the Sasanian capital, which the Arabs later called Madain, ‘the cities’, because it had grown into a cluster of them on both banks. On the river, see I, B10.28. The boy’s first act of government is to hear the crowd on a single overloaded bridge and pay for a second, so that traffic runs one way on each: the poem’s idea of justice is very concrete.

D8.1.2Shapur’s Vengeance and Malika’s Love

Tair the Ghassanid sacks Tisfoon and carries off Nusha, the Shah’s aunt, who bears him a daughter, Malika. Grown, Shapur besieges Tair in a Yemeni fort. Malika sees him below the walls, loves him, and offers him the hold through her nurse if he will marry her.

Tair, the Ghassanid, rose fierce in pride: The desert frontier is the new enemy of the Sasanian books, and the poem gives the raid a coalition drawn from Bahrain and Kadisiya as well as Rum. The Ghassanids are usually placed as Rum’s Arab allies in Syria, while the Arab kings who served Iran were the Lakhmids of Hira, whom the poem will call kings of Yemen in their turn (III, D9.2); its Arab geography is generous.

Nusha’s own daughter, of your lineage true: The besieged king’s daughter who sells her father’s fortress for love of the man outside is a tale of its own. Arabic tradition tells a close variant in which the daughter of the lord of Hatra opens it to a Sasanian Shapur. Compare the Greek Scylla, who cut the charmed lock of her father Nisus for love of the besieging Minos, and was destroyed for it; Malika, unusually, is crowned and kept.

D8.1.3Malika Betrays Tair and Shapur Triumphs

Malika feasts the garrison and has Tair drunk, then opens the gate. Shapur storms the hold, takes Tair, and sets him before his crowned daughter. Tair warns against her and is beheaded. Shapur tears the shoulders from his Arab captives, and earns the name Zul-Aktaf.

Thus Arabs named him Zul-Aktaf in dread: Zul-Aktaf is Arabic Dhū’l-Aktāf, ‘lord of the shoulders’, and it is the name by which this Shapur is known in Arabic writers, who give the same grim explanation the poem gives here. Some have suspected an older and blander sense — the broad-shouldered — with the atrocity invented afterward to account for it. The poem takes the epithet at its word, and makes the tax-paying survivors those whose shoulders were left whole.

Beware her love; regard all strangers here: Tair’s last words are the moral the tale-type usually enforces by killing the traitress: whoever betrayed for you will betray you. Ferdowsi keeps the warning and declines the ending — Malika sits crowned beside Shapur while her father is dragged out — and the poem does not tell us whether the Shah remembered the advice.

D8.1.4Shapur Goes to Rum and Is Captured by Caesar

Astrologers warn Shapur of a trial no one dares describe. He goes to Rum as a merchant, is recognized by an Iranian living there, and Caesar has him sewn into a donkey hide and locked in a cell. Roman armies strip Iran while no one knows whether the Shah lives.

He watched the Lion’s Heart, whose shining light: The Lion’s Heart is Regulus, Arabic Qalb al-Asad, the brightest star of Leo, long treated as a royal star and so the natural one to consult about a king’s fortune. The scene is a set-piece: the astrolabe comes out, the omen is bad, and the Shah is told what the poem believes anyway — that no skill escapes the turning sky.

And sewed him in a donkey hide with string: A raw hide sewn around a living man dries and tightens, which is the whole cruelty of it; the punishment turns up in Persian and Arabic story, and the poem sharpens it into an insult aimed at rank, an ass’s skin in place of a crown. Fourteen days of warm milk will undo it (III, D8.1.5).

From Jaz I came with merchandise for sale: The king traveling in merchant’s disguise is a favorite device of this part of the poem — Iskandar goes to Kaydafa as his own envoy in II, D5.20 — and it usually fails in the same way, through someone who has seen the face before. Here the informer is an Iranian settled in Rum, which is the detail that makes the trap plausible.

D8.1.5Shapur Is Freed by a Clever Damsel

An Iranian maid who keeps the key pities Shapur, swears secrecy, and softens the hide with warm milk for fourteen days. While Rum feasts outside the walls they take horses and weapons and ride for Iran, killing two pursuers. A gardener in Khuzian shelters them.

At mealtime bring me milk, and warm it well: Warm milk to soften a dried hide is the hinge of the whole escape, and the poem gives it fourteen days. Shapur adds a prediction of his own fame — the tale will be told long after he is dead — one of those moments where a character in the Shahnameh seems to know he is in it.

Bring Zand-Avesta, bring the barsom near: The barsom (Avestan baresman) is the bundle of twigs, later metal rods, held in the hands during Zoroastrian worship; Zand-Avesta is properly the Avesta together with its zand, the Pahlavi translation and commentary. A fugitive king in a gardener’s house asks for the two things that make a service possible, and then prays before deciding what to do.

The Shah impressed his signet as agreed: The signet is proof of identity where a face is not: the Shah presses his seal into clay, and the high Mobad weeps over the mark before he will believe the story. Sasanian sealings in clay survive in quantity, and the poem treats the impression exactly as the documents do, as the presence of the man himself.

D8.1.6Mobad and Chiefs Assemble to Welcome Shapur

The high Mobad reads the gardener’s description of his guest and knows the Shah. Word goes to the scattered army, and the chiefs gather by night at the gardener’s door. Shapur tells them of the hide and the maid, and has the roads to Tisfoon closed so Caesar learns nothing.

The farr of Shah Shapur is now restored: The farr is spoken of as returning, which is how the poem keeps its metaphysics in step with its plot: it dispersed when a reign ended (III, D7.12.3), and it comes back to a king who has lost his throne, his army and his clothes but not his legitimacy. The Mobad treats the news as an order to remobilize.

I am the slave of her whose loving mind: A king calls himself the slave of a slave, and the poem lets the claim stand: the rescue was the work of a treasurer-maid and a gardener, and Shapur says outright that whoever owns such a servant owes her service in return. She is rewarded with a name and a place among his women (III, D8.1.10).

D8.1.7Shapur Attacks and Captures Caesar

Scouts find Caesar hunting, drunk and unguarded. Shapur attacks by night, takes Caesar and eleven hundred and two Roman nobles, and writes to the provinces. He splits Caesar’s ears for a nose-rope, and demands the captives, the treasure, replanted trees, and ten Romans for each Iranian killed.

At last they seized proud Caesar in the raid: Behind this lies something that happened: a Sasanian Shapur did capture a Roman emperor, and had the submission carved on the cliffs of Pars, where the emperor kneels before the mounted king. That was the first Shapur and the emperor Valerian. The tradition Ferdowsi received had gathered the deeds of the earlier Shapur into the long reign of this one, which is why the poem’s Caesar dies a prisoner in Iran.

Kaveh’s bright banner blazed through smoky gloom: On Kaveh’s banner, the Derafsh-e Kaviani, see I, A5.5. The poem keeps it flying without a break from a smith’s apron in the first book to a night raid on a Roman camp here, and tradition has it captured at last at Kadisiya, in the final book of the poem — which is one reason Ferdowsi’s Sasanians feel continuous with his Kayanians.

D8.1.8Shapur Fights Yanus, Caesar’s Brother

Caesar’s brother Yanus, urged by their mother, brings out the army and a great Cross. They fight between mountain and river until Yanus breaks and flees; the Roman dead are heaped, and the Romans turn on Caesar’s name and burn their own crosses and vestments.

With tabiras he brought the Cross in sight: A Roman army in the Sasanian books is known by its crosses as an Iranian one is known by Kaveh’s banner, and the poem measures the victory by them: no rank and no cross left standing, the altars down, the vestments burned. Ferdowsi is describing an army’s standards rather than its religion, which is what makes the tally of crosses read like a tally of regiments.

His warlike mother paid the troops of state: It is the dowager who musters the troops and pays them, and her son who has to be talked into vengeance. The Rum of these books runs to formidable women — the queen who holds the key to Shapur’s cell (III, D8.1.4), Kaydafa in the Iskandar cycle — and the poem never remarks on it.

D8.1.9The Romans Crown Baranush

The Roman army makes the wise Baranush Caesar. Weighing what war with Iran would cost, he sends a letter that recalls the old feuds of Iraj and of Dara and Iskandar, pleads that Rum be spared, and offers all Rum owns as ransom. Shapur, moved, grants quarter.

If this old feud began with Iraj’s blood: The letter argues from the Shahnameh. It dates the quarrel of Iran and Rum to the murder of Iraj by the brothers who held Rum and Turan, notes that Manuchehr settled that account, and goes on to Dara and Iskandar, whose feud belongs to the volume before this one. Ferdowsi lets a Roman envoy use the poem as the diplomatic record, and Shapur accepts the argument.

The Romans hailed him Caesar, one and all: Baranush is generally identified with the emperor who made terms with this Shapur after his predecessor died on campaign in Iran. Ferdowsi has no room for such a death, since his Caesar is already in chains, so the succession happens in the Roman camp and the treaty follows in the next chapter.

D8.1.10Baranush Makes a Treaty with Shapur

Baranush comes with a hundred nobles and a great ransom. Shapur imposes tribute three times a year and the surrender of Nasibin. Nasibin resists as a Christian town, is stormed and pardoned. Caesar dies in prison. Shapur names the maid, rewards the gardener, and founds cities.

And give up Nasibin into my hand: Nasibin is Nisibis, the fortress city on the Roman-Persian frontier that changed hands repeatedly and was the real prize of these wars: the treaty that ended Rum’s failed invasion of Iran in 363 handed it to this Shapur, along with a long truce. The poem’s terms — tribute three times a year and Nasibin — preserve that settlement, with the tribute running the other way.

He is no Christian; fire is his law: The townsmen’s reason for resisting is religion, and the poem states the Sasanian position for them: their king keeps the fire and the Avesta. Christianity was already strong in these frontier provinces, and the poem has just watched Iranians go over to it under Roman occupation (III, D8.1.4); once Rum itself was Christian, such subjects became politically suspect, and this reign is remembered for their persecution.

He named her Dilafruz Farrukhpish; above: The maid who softened the hide is finally named: Dilafruz Farrukhpish, roughly ‘heart-kindling, of happy aspect’. She enters the story as a keeper of keys, without a name, and leaves it named, loved above the rest, and paired in the same passage with the gardener’s reward — the poem settling its debts to the small people of the tale.

D8.1.11The False Prophet Mani Preaches to Shapur

Mani comes from Chin claiming his painting proves his mission. Shapur is half-persuaded and summons the Mobadan; the high Mobad argues him down on light and darkness and challenges him to make his figures move. Mani is flayed, stuffed with straw, and hung up.

A forceful man, and Mani was his name: On Mani and his book of pictures, the Artang, see I, B3.4. What is new here is the dating: the poem puts him in this long reign, while the record places his preaching under the first Shapur and his death in prison under the first Bahram, four reigns before this one. Ferdowsi also makes the contest a formal disputation, which lets the priesthood, rather than the king, defeat him.

If you can make your painted figures move: The Mobad turns Mani’s proof against him: if painted figures are the credentials of a prophet, let them move. The rest of the argument is the real ground of the quarrel — that two equal powers of light and darkness would make night and day equal all year, which they are not — and it is aimed at the heart of Mani’s teaching.

From head to foot strip off his body’s skin: Arabic historians report the same end for Mani, the skin stuffed and set up at a city gate. The alternative the Shah offers, the hospital, points at the same place: the city of Roman captives in Khuzestan that he founds a chapter earlier is described as a town of halls and hospitals (III, D8.1.10), and it kept a reputation for medicine long after the dynasty fell.

D8.1.12Ardeshir’s Regency and Shapur’s End

Past seventy, with only an infant son, Shapur makes his brother Ardeshir swear before scribes to return the throne when the boy comes of age. He gives him crown and signet with a long charge on justice and the four virtues of a king, then dies a year later.

Needs four great virtues under fortune’s wing: Counting is a habit of this literature: four virtues for a king here, four qualities of a noble man two reigns later (III, D8.3), and lists of three and seven elsewhere. The numbered list is how the Pahlavi andarz books organize themselves, and the poem keeps the count even in verse. On the andarz, see III, D7.12.3.

The heart and brain are rulers of the frame: The body politic, worked the other way around: heart and brain are the king, the limbs are his troops, and when the ruling organs are darkened the army scatters and the body lies in the dust. The comparison is a commonplace of Greek and Arabic political writing which the Sasanian mirrors for princes also use — here spoken by a dying king to the brother he is about to trust with his son.

D8.2The Reign of Ardeshir, Brother of Shapur

Ardeshir keeps the oath. He tells the chiefs he rules only as his nephew’s deputy, reigns ten years, takes neither tribute nor tax, and is called the Beneficent. When Shapur’s son is fit for the crown he hands it over, and keeps his covenant to the end.

They called him Beneficent for his reign: The epithet is not Ferdowsi’s invention: this Ardeshir is remembered in the tradition as the beneficent, the doer of good. It is one of the few Sasanian bynames the poem bothers to explain, and the explanation it gives is fiscal — he asked nothing from anyone.

He asked no tribute, toll, or tax to hold: A reign praised for taking nothing sits oddly beside the accession speeches that fix a rate and defend it (III, D7.12.1), but both are praise, because the poem’s sources praised both restraint and good order. Ten years without tax also implies a full treasury inherited from a seventy-year reign, which the poem does not say and its audience would have supplied.

D8.3The Reign of Shapur, Son of Shapur

Shapur takes the crown from his uncle and preaches against lies, mockery, greed and boasting, listing the four qualities of a noble man. After five years and four months he hunts, drinks and sleeps in his tent; a tempest brings the tent down on his head and kills him.

The gale tore loose the tent’s supporting frame: For once the poem and the record agree on an oddity: this Shapur was remembered as having died when his tent came down on him. Some accounts leave it a freak of weather and others suspect the nobles of cutting the ropes; Ferdowsi keeps the storm, and gets from it one of his abrupt Sasanian endings, a king dead between two lines with no farewell speech at all.

Four qualities compose a noble man: Four again, as in his father’s charge (III, D8.1.12), but the subject has shifted from what a king needs to what any man needs: skill with modesty, a single heart, contentment, and silence about one’s own merits. The short reigns of this stretch are carried almost entirely by such lists.

D8.4The Reign of Bahram, Son of Shapur

Bahram mourns his father, takes the throne, and preaches open-handed giving, knowledge that never runs out, and trust in God. After fourteen years he sickens. Having a daughter but no son, he gives troops, treasure, crown and signet to his young brother Yazdegard, and dies.

Through that sword-bearing king, whose head stands tall: The reign ends and the poet turns to praise a living king: lines of this kind, on a sword-bearing lord above all other nobles, are generally read as addressed to Mahmud of Ghaznin, to whom the finished poem was presented. Ferdowsi tucks them into the seams between reigns, where the wine-couplets already license a change of voice.

I split fine hairs in speech; the threads I twine: Hair-splitting in speech, and threads woven in the dark: the poet’s image of his own craft, set beside the complaint of age that runs through these chapters (III, D7.16). The boast and the grievance are the same gesture — the work is fine, and it has cost him his years.