The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ferdowsi · an epic poem in one metre · some 50,000 rhymed couplets · finished 1010 · scored on Ferdowsi’s Persian, read from knowledge, with Dick Davis’s translation (2006) beside it; no text in hand, and no translation quoted
Mode
National epic as verse chronicle of kingship; myth, heroic legend and history told as one succession
Mythos
The lent glory, given and withdrawn; the world divided among brothers; the father who kills the son; the prince whose blood grows a plant; the perfect king who leaves the world alive
Phase
From the first king to the death of the last Sasanian in the Arab conquest, reign by reign through three ages
Presentation
Poem; some 50,000 couplets in one metre, the motaqāreb, each couplet rhyming on itself; no stanza and no canto, divided only by reigns and stories
Register
From the poet’s laments and the champions’ challenges to court counsel, sermon and letter; plain words in plain order throughout
Scale
Iran and its neighbours from the first king to the last; one family of heroes across the heroic age
Governing Proposition
The history of Iran is told king after king, from the first king in his leopard skin to the last Sasanian killed in a mill, and at its heroic centre fathers and kings destroy their sons. The wager of the poem is that the glory which makes a king is lent and withdrawn by a law no throne commands, and that only the whole line, carried to its end, can show the law at work.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“به نام خداوند جان و خرد / کزین برتر اندیشه برنگذرد”
“be nām-e khodāvand-e jān o kherad / k-az īn bartar andīshe bar-nagzarad”
“In the name of the Lord of soul and wisdom, beyond whom thought does not pass.” God is named in the first line by two words, soul and wisdom, and the second is the measure the poem keeps to its end. The prologue praises wisdom before it praises anything made: “توانا بود هر که دانا بود / ز دانش دل پیر برنا بود”
“tavānā bovad har ke dānā bovad / ze dānesh del-e pīr bornā bovad”
“He is strong who is wise; through knowledge the old heart is young.” Then it tells the creation of the world and of man, praises the Prophet and his companions, and gives the history of its own book: an old book of tales, a poet who began to put it into verse and was murdered, a friend who brought Ferdowsi the text. The poem presents everything after as found in a book, and never pretends otherwise.
The book was the Persian prose Shahnameh compiled at Tus in 957 for Abu Mansur Muhammad ibn Abd al-Razzaq, whose preface survives, and behind it stood the Middle Persian Khwadāy-nāmag, the Book of Lords of the Sasanian court. The murdered poet was Daqiqi, who had made about a thousand couplets, on Goshtasp and the coming of Zoroaster. Ferdowsi set them into his own poem under Daqiqi’s name, and judged them weak. He was born about 940, at or near Tus in Khorasan, into the dehqān, the landed gentry who kept the old Iranian lore, and he worked on the poem for some three decades. A first version was finished about 994. The last is dated in its own closing lines to the year 400 of the Hijra, 1010, and was presented to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni: a history of the Zoroastrian kings of Iran, offered at a Sunni Turkic court.
The whole is in one metre, the motaqāreb: four feet to the hemistich, the last cut short, eleven syllables to the hemistich and twenty-two to the couplet. The two halves of each couplet rhyme with each other, and the rhyme changes with every couplet. There is no stanza and no canto; the only divisions are the reigns and the stories within them. On the standard round figure the poem runs to some 50,000 couplets, four to six times the Iliad by syllables. Scholars divide its history into three ages: the mythical, from the first king to Fereydun; the heroic, the age of Sam, Zal and Rostam; the historical, from Dara and Alexander through the Sasanians to the Arab conquest. The division names something the poem does. The demons, the Simorgh and the heroes who outlive centuries fall away as it nears the poet’s own time, until the world it tells is the ordinary one. How the line sounds in the recitations that have carried it is beyond this reading.
Movement II
The first kings make the world habitable and the throne together. Kayumars lives in the mountains, clad in leopard skin, and his son Siyamak is killed by a demon’s son. Hushang strikes fire from a stone, and the feast of Sadeh is founded on it. Tahmuras binds the demons, and they buy their lives by teaching him writing. Jamshid orders men into their classes and gives them their crafts. Fire, writing, the crafts and the order of society come with kings, so the history of civilisation and the history of kingship are one story from the start, and the poem never afterwards separates them. What makes a king is the farr, the divine glory, and it is lent. When Jamshid claims to be a god, the glory leaves him, and the nobles go over to another.
That other is Zahhak, an Arab prince whom Iblis tempts to kill his father. Iblis comes back disguised as a cook and kisses his shoulders, and serpents grow where he kissed, to be fed each day on the brains of two young men. Zahhak takes the throne and has Jamshid sawn in two. A thousand years later the blacksmith Kaveh, whose sons have been taken for the serpents, raises his leather apron on a spear and brings the people to Fereydun. The apron becomes the standard of Iran, the derafsh-e Kāviyānī, and Fereydun binds Zahhak, alive, in the mountain Damavand. The rising begins at a forge, in a craftsman’s grief for his sons, and the nation’s banner is a workman’s apron. The law set at Jamshid’s fall, that the glory follows justice and leaves pride, will run to the last reign.
Fereydun divides the world among his three sons. Salm takes Rum and the West, Tur takes Turan and the East, and Iraj takes Iran. The elder two murder Iraj, and his grandson Manuchehr avenges him. The feud between Iran and Turan, which drives the poem through thousands of couplets, begins here, and it is a feud among brothers. The poem does not let it become anything simpler. The Turanian king Afrasiyab will be the grandfather of Kay Khosrow, the best of Iran’s kings; the son Rostam kills will come out of Turan to set his father on the Iranian throne. The enemy is kin, and the division of the world is a crime inside a family, which the whole heroic age pays for.
Movement III
The heroic age belongs to one family. Sam’s son Zal is born white-haired, and his father exposes him on Mount Alborz, where the Simorgh raises him in her nest and gives him feathers to burn in need. Zal loves Rudabeh, daughter of the king of Kabul and of Zahhak’s line; she lets down her hair from the tower for him to climb, and he climbs by his lasso instead. Their son Rostam is cut from his mother’s side on the Simorgh’s instruction. He serves kings lesser than himself. Kay Kavus marches rashly on Mazandaran and is blinded and captured; Rostam rides the Seven Trials, the haft khān, to free him and kills the White Demon; and Kavus, freed, flies toward heaven on a throne drawn by eagles, and falls.
Before the story of Rostam and Sohrab the chronicle stops, and the poet speaks in his own voice: “اگر تندبادی برآید ز کنج / به خاک افکند نارسیده ترنج”
“agar tond-bādī bar-āyad ze konj / be khāk afkanad nā-raside toranj”
“If a fierce wind rises from a corner and throws the unripe citron to the dust”. He does not explain the wind. He asks a question of it: “اگر مرگ داد است بیداد چیست / ز داد این همه بانگ و فریاد چیست”
“agar marg dād ast bīdād chīst / ze dād īn hame bāng o faryād chīst”
“If death is justice, what is injustice? If it is justice, why all this outcry and lament?” A history of kings that halts to ask whether its own events are just is no longer only a history. The preface is the poem’s instrument for its tragedies, and it stands where the reader must pass it.
Rostam, hunting near Samangan, loses his horse Rakhsh, and the princess Tahmineh comes to him by night; he leaves a token for the child. Their son Sohrab grows up, learns his father’s name, and leads a Turanian army into Iran to set Rostam on the throne. Father and son meet unknown to each other, for Rostam hides his name. In the second bout Sohrab throws Rostam and spares him, when Rostam pleads a custom against killing at the first fall; in the third Rostam throws Sohrab and stabs him, and finds the token on his arm. Half a line gives the son’s answer: “بدو گفت کاین بر من از من رسید”
“bedū goft k-īn bar man az man rasīd”
“He said to him: this came upon me from myself.” Kavus withholds the healing draught that might save him, fearing Rostam with such a son, and Persian still calls help that comes too late nushdāru pas az marg-e Sohrāb, the antidote after Sohrab’s death. The poet had said what kind of story it would be: “یکی داستان است پر آب چشم / دل نازک از رستم آید به خشم”
“yekī dāstān ast por āb-e chashm / del-e nāzok az Rostam āyad be khashm”
“This is a story full of tears; the tender heart will be angry with Rostam.”
Movement IV
Kavus’s son Siyavash refuses his stepmother Sudabeh, and she accuses him. He rides through a mountain of fire to prove his innocence and comes out unburnt. Rather than break his word to the Turanians, as Kavus demands, he goes over to Afrasiyab, marries his daughter Farangis and builds a city, Siyavashgerd. Afrasiyab’s brother Garsivaz poisons the king’s mind against him, and Siyavash is beheaded over a basin, so that his blood shall not touch the earth. Where it falls a plant springs up. A second son is destroyed by the kings he served: Kavus drove him into Turan, and Afrasiyab killed him there. His son Kay Khosrow, born in Turan, is found after years of searching by Giv and brought to Iran, and the long war of vengeance ends with Afrasiyab taken and killed.
At the height of his reign Kay Khosrow fears that he will become another Jamshid. He gives away his treasures, names Lohrasp to succeed him, and goes into the mountains with his paladins. At a spring, at dawn, he vanishes. The paladins who would not turn back, Tus, Giv, Fariborz and Bizhan among them, are buried in snow. The best of the kings leaves the throne before the glory can leave him. The poem does not say whether that is wisdom or a judgment on kingship itself, and no later king finds the same way out.
Lohrasp’s son Goshtasp takes up Zoroaster’s faith, and his son Esfandiyar fights for it and rides seven trials of his own. Goshtasp has promised him the throne and will not yield it, so he sends him to bring Rostam in chains. Rostam offers him everything but the chains. Esfandiyar is ruyin-tan, “brazen-bodied”, wounded nowhere but in the eyes. Beaten in the first fight, Rostam is healed by the Simorgh, who shows him the tamarisk branch for a double-pointed arrow and warns that whoever sheds Esfandiyar’s blood will suffer in this world and the next. The arrow goes into the eyes. Dying, Esfandiyar blames his father, not Rostam, and gives his son Bahman into his killer’s care. Rostam’s own death comes from his half-brother Shaghad, in pits set with blades on a hunting ground: Rakhsh balks, Rostam whips him on, and both fall. Dying, Rostam asks Shaghad to string his bow for him against the lions, and shoots him through the tree he hides behind.
Movement V
After Rostam the marvels thin. Bahman takes vengeance on Rostam’s house, and Homay and Darab reign. Alexander, Sekandar, is made Darab’s son by a daughter of Philip of Rum, sent home before his birth, so that the conqueror of Iran is half-brother to the Dara he defeats, and Dara dies in his arms. Alexander’s wanderings bring the marvels back for a while: a talking tree, a wall against Gog and Magog, the search for the water of life. Then the Parthians are passed over briefly, the poem saying its source kept little of them, and the Sasanians begin with Ardashir. The world is now nearly the poet’s own, of kings and ministers, embassies and taxes, and the demons do not return.
The Sasanian reigns hold stories and a great deal of counsel. Bahram Gur, as a prince, takes the harpist Azadeh hunting, shoots as she demands, is called a demon by her for it, and tramples her under his camel; as king he wanders his kingdom in disguise, fed by the generous water-carrier Lonbak and turned away by the miser Baraham. Anushirvan the Just puts his questions to his minister Bozorgmehr; chess comes from India and is answered with backgammon; Borzuy brings Kalila wa Dimna from India; the followers of Mazdak are planted head-down in a garden. A shoemaker offers Anushirvan money for a war, if his son may become a scribe. The just king refuses, and the poem sets the refusal beside the sermons on justice without comment.
The end comes through a son, the pattern turned over: Khosrow Parviz, who loved Shirin, dies at the order of his son Shiruy, and short reigns follow in the collapse. Before the battle with the Arabs the general Rostam, son of Farrokhzad, writes to his brother that he has read in the stars the end of Iran and the coming of an age when the base will rule. The glory leaves the last Sasanian because the time has turned. Yazdegerd III, fleeing, hides in a mill near Merv, and the miller kills him at the order of the governor Mahuy. The line that began with a king in a leopard skin in the mountains ends with a king in a mill. The world has been sarāy-e sepanj, the fleeting inn, at the close of episode after episode, and here the whole line bears it out. The last words are the poet’s own, on finishing the book.
Act III · The Twelve
Length is not a cost; the question is whether the parts are required. The argument is the life of a kingship through time, glory given, abused and withdrawn, and it compels a chronicle that runs to the end: Yazdegerd’s death in the mill has its weight because the line has been carried from the first king. Slight reigns bear load: Fereydun’s division founds the feud the heroic age exhausts. What holds the axis at 7.9 is the matter a chronicle admits and its argument does not need: Daqiqi’s thousand couplets, which the poet himself judged weak; battles of the Turanian war that repeat their pattern; Alexander’s marvels; the testaments, sermons and letters of the Sasanian reigns. A sixth or more could go.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosures can be stated, and they hold. The state consumes its sons: Rostam kills Sohrab while Kavus withholds the cure, Kavus drives Siyavash into the enemy’s hands, and Goshtasp sends Esfandiyar to his death to keep his throne. Loyalty has a limit, and it is honour: Rostam serves a rash king and refuses only the chains. The enemy is kin. And justice is questioned, not asserted: agar marg dād ast bīdād chīst, “If death is justice, what is injustice?” (Rostam and Sohrab, the preface). Held below the top because much of the wisdom is stated, not disclosed: court counsel on kingship, gnomic lines on the world’s faithlessness, and some sayings about women.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The heights reach the ceiling, and in the heroic age they come often: Zal in the Simorgh’s nest; Rudabeh’s hair let down from the tower; the token found on Sohrab’s arm; Siyavash riding unburnt out of the fire, and his blood over the basin; Kay Khosrow walking into the snow; the dying Esfandiyar, who forgives his killer and blames his father; Rostam in the pit, shooting through the tree; Yazdegerd in the mill. Two things hold it down: long stretches of chronicle and counsel, with the Sasanian reigns rising less often than the heroic; and the battle and the dawn, the poem’s means of rising, recurring until some recurrences are routine. The sound of the verse is neither credited nor charged.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Myth built, and it bears the structure. Fire, writing and the crafts come with the first kings, so civilisation and the throne have one history. The glory, the farr, is the poem’s mechanism: it leaves Jamshid when he claims divinity, and the same law runs to the last reign. Fereydun’s division of the world founds the plot of the heroic age. Siyavash’s blood grows a plant; Kay Khosrow goes out of the world alive; Rostam and Sohrab is the best-known form in any literature of the father who kills the son. The particular stays particular: Rostam’s appetite, Rakhsh’s loyalty, the token on the arm. Held a step down because the historical age thins the myth to annal.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The inheritance is massive, and the poem proclaims it. It versifies the prose Shahnameh compiled at Tus in 957, follows its order and says so, passing over the Parthians because the source kept little of them, and keeps Daqiqi’s verses under his name. The turn is in voice and scale: a national history made one poem in New Persian, where before there were prose and a fragment; a diction held close to Persian in a literature open to Arabic; a tragic voice that stops the chronicle to question it; a Zoroastrian past honoured at a Sunni Turkic court. The stake was three decades of work and a dedication to a sultan whose favour did not follow. Held below the top because the poem’s own claim is fidelity.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the poem would lose part of what it knows. Told king after king, each tragedy is one moment in a succession that will end: Sohrab’s death is also a scene in the reign of Kavus, whose glory is waning. Myth passes into legend and into history, and the vanishing of the demons and the Simorgh is what the form tells: the world grows ordinary as it nears the poet’s time. The self-contained couplet makes the poem’s judgment portable, and its gnomic lines have passed into speech. Held well below the top: the chronicle is the source’s form, carried over rather than made, its episodes joined by succession, not by one action, with no ring of its own.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: a thousand years of return in three kinds. In performance, the naqqāl storytellers of the coffeehouses and the reciters of the zurkhāneh have retold and extended it; UNESCO inscribed naqqali in 2011 as heritage in urgent need of safeguarding. In painting, it is the most illustrated text of the Persianate world, from the Great Mongol Shahnameh of Tabriz, about the 1330s, to Baysonghor’s of 1430 and Shah Tahmasp’s, with 258 paintings. In criticism, from Nöldeke (1896) to Meskoob, Khaleghi-Motlagh and Davis’s Epic and Sedition (1992). The questions stay open: whether Rostam or Esfandiyar is in the right, why the perfect king withdraws, whether the poem praises kingship or indicts it. Held below the top: modern criticism is younger and narrower than the survival.
Score: 9.3 / 10
A published work, so force and reach are scored together, in its own tradition and region. The intrinsic force: the poem made New Persian a language of epic and fixed the Iranian past as one story in one metre; it stands a tenth below the figure, because the matter and the chronicle form were inherited. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Asadi Tusi’s Garshāspnāme (1066) in its metre and world; Nezami’s romances of its kings; Saadi’s Bustan (1257) in the same metre; al-Bundari’s Arabic in the 1220s; Ottoman and Georgian versions, and an Ottoman court şehnāmeci; the proverb nushdāru pas az marg-e Sohrāb, “the antidote after Sohrab’s death”; its heroes’ names given across Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan; and Mohl, Rückert and Matthew Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum” (1853).
Score: 9.6 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over a thousand years. The poem has been copied, recited and painted continuously since the eleventh century, across changes of dynasty and faith; it is readable to a modern Persian speaker as few texts of its age are in their own languages; and it has outlived the sultan it praises. Two costs remain. The surface is fixed in places to its moment: the praise of Mahmud, the court counsel of the Sasanian reigns, the long genealogies. And the text did not survive whole: the oldest manuscripts are two centuries late, the vulgate is swollen, and some of the most quoted couplets are doubted. That cost is the copyists’, charged here, lightly, where survival of the text is the question.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Judged on Ferdowsi’s Persian; its sound is beyond this reading, neither credited nor charged. One metre is held for some 50,000 couplets with the clarity the Persian tradition calls sahl-e momtane’, “the easy that cannot be done”: plain words in plain order, never obscure. The diction keeps to Persian’s own stock, and the poem became a reserve of the language. The preface is an instrument: before Sohrab’s death the poet speaks in his own voice of the wind that throws down the unripe citron. Rostam’s answer to Esfandiyar, everything offered but the chains, is a negotiation whose courtesy is the tragedy. Charged for battle and dawn rendered by recurring means that sometimes idle, and for counsel in which the verse is correct and not alive.
Score: 9.3 / 10
One law governs it: the turning sky gives and withdraws, the glory follows justice, and the world is a fleeting inn. The two most distant elements, the demons of the first age and Yazdegerd hiding in a mill, obey it: the glory leaves Jamshid for his pride, and leaves the last Sasanian because the time has turned, as Rostam son of Farrokhzad reads in the stars. The monotheist frame holds the Zoroastrian kings, who pray to one God. Breaches lower it: Rostam lives through centuries of reigns unremarked; Alexander’s marvels bring the old physics back into the historical age; and the just king of the sermons is never reconciled with the kings who destroy their sons, and may not be meant to be.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure, and the kingship integrates them. The sacred: God, the glory, Zoroaster’s coming, Mazdak, the Arab conquest. The state and history: succession, rebellion, embassy, war and its finance. The family: fathers and sons above all, mothers in Tahmineh and Farangis, brothers in Salm and Tur and in Shaghad. Love: Zal and Rudabeh, Bizhan and Manizheh, Khosrow and Shirin. Labour and class: Kaveh the blacksmith, the shoemaker refused, the water-carrier who feeds a king in disguise. The natural order: the Simorgh, Rakhsh, the mountain and the hunt. Civilisation: fire, writing, chess and books from India. Consciousness is held more thinly, the inner life spoken, not rendered, and the Sasanian reigns hold their orders in sequence rather than in one action.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.6, with The Archetypal Deep, The Imperishable and The Encompassed at 9.5. A poem that made New Persian a language of epic and became the source of the Persianate world’s later epics, painting and recitation; a myth of the lent glory built into the succession of kings; a thousand years of continuous survival; and the orders of a whole society held by one kingship.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.9, held by the matter a chronicle admits and its argument does not need: Daqiqi’s thousand couplets, battles of the Turanian war that repeat their pattern, Alexander’s marvels, and the testaments, sermons and letters of the Sasanian reigns, a sixth or more of the whole. Next above it, The Living Form at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.8: a chronicle form carried over from its source and joined by succession, and a turn made in voice and scale on matter the poem claims to keep faithfully.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5, by four tenths, the narrowest margin on the page. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.6, The Archetypal Deep at 9.5, The Imperishable at 9.5, The Unconcealment at 9.3 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, The Swerve by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.5. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · Abu’l-Qasem Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, scored as one poem: the history of Iran from the first king to the death of Yazdegerd III in the Arab conquest, finished in a first version about 994 and in its final form dated in its own closing lines to the year 400 of the Hijra, 1010 CE. The text scored is the poem as the critical editions establish it, the Moscow edition (1960–71) and Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh’s eight volumes (1988–2008, the sixth with Mahmoud Omidsalar and the seventh with Abolfazl Khatibi), not the printed vulgate, which carries many couplets that are not Ferdowsi’s. No autograph survives, and the oldest manuscripts are some two centuries later than the poem; the interpolation is the copyists’, and it is charged only to the poem’s survival. No text of the poem was in hand, in Persian or in English. The poem is read from knowledge of the Persian, reign by reign and episode by episode. Events are paraphrased, and Persian is quoted only where its words are certain, each line checked by hand against the metre, with a transliteration and a plain English gloss that is the desk’s own. Translations · Dick Davis’s Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (2006), preceded by his three volumes of 1998–2004, is read beside the Persian as the best English poem of the work: it sets most of the narrative in prose and moves into rhymed verse where the Persian rises, at the cost of abridgement, retelling or leaving out much of the Sasanian portion. Arthur George and Edmond Warner’s nine volumes (1905–25) are the only complete English version, close and in blank verse, but archaic and made from a pre-critical text. Jerome W. Clinton’s The Tragedy of Sohrab and Rostam (1987) and In the Dragon’s Claws (1999) serve for close sense of single episodes. None of these is in hand, none is quoted, and none of their shortfalls is charged to the poem. The sound of the motaqāreb as recited, and the whole Persian text read in order, are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. The length is given only as the standard round figure. Citations are by reign and episode; no volume and page is given, because no edition is in hand.