Zal

The bird that came down to Mount Alborz had a nest of her own to feed. She found the infant on bare rock where his father’s men had left him, high enough that the air was thin and the wind never stopped scouring the stone, and something in her turned. She carried him up to her crag and set him among her own fledglings. Instead of tearing him apart, she fed him.

Sam, lord of Sistan and the foremost noble of Iran, had waited years for a son. When one finally came the boy was flawless but for a single detail. His hair was white. Not fair, not pale, but white, the white of a man at the end of his life, growing from the head of a newborn whose face the epic compares to paradise. Sam looked at him and saw the get of a dev, a child of Ahriman, some obscenity visited on his house, and gave the order.

The Simurgh raised him on the mountain, and she raised him well. He grew tall and immensely strong, with a mind that took in a problem whole, and he learned the turning of the stars from a creature that flew among them. Caravans crossing beneath the peak began to look up. One of them saw a young man standing on the rock with a body like a cypress, a chest like a mountain of silver, and a waist as narrow as a reed. Word of him moved down the trade roads faster than the camels did.

It reached Sam as a dream. A rider came to him out of India and told him he had a grown son. He woke and put it to his wise men, who declined to comfort him and said plainly that he had thrown away something God had given him. The second dream was worse. An army came down from a mountain led by a youth with a Zoroastrian priest at one shoulder and a counsellor at the other, and the counsellor asked him the question the poem has never needed to improve on. If white hair is a cause of shame, what say you of your own white hair and beard?

Sam rode to Alborz and asked God to forgive him. What he found at the summit was a figure fit for a crown: the arms and flanks of a lion, a face like the sun, black eyes under black lashes, coral lips. The young man did not want to leave. The Simurgh, who had every reason to keep him and let him go regardless, told him his future lay below and not above, and gave him feathers from her own body, each carrying farr. Put one on a fire, she said, and you will see me.

He came down off that mountain with a handful of names. Dastan. Zar. Zal. Zal-e Zar. They all circle the same joke at his expense, since zal is simply what Persian calls a white-haired old man, and he was handed it long before he was old enough to object. King Manuchehr summoned him, looked at him, and saw the royal glory sitting on him plainly. The court astronomers cast his horoscope and promised the country a paladin.

Sam gave him Zabulestan and rode off to campaign in Mazandaran, and Zal governed. He proved an unusually serious young man. He studied astronomy, religion and the conduct of war, and became better at all three than the men teaching him. This is the part of his life the paintings never show, a white-haired prince bent over his books in a border province, and it is the part that made him indispensable for the rest of the epic.

Then he went to Kabul and heard a description of Mehrab’s daughter. Rudaba’s black hair fell to her ankles in two musky ringlets, her cheeks were pomegranate blossom, her eyes narcissi under long lashes. He fell in love with a report. She fell in love with her father’s account of him, which was equally secondhand and proved equally binding. Her maids arranged a meeting. When he reached the foot of the castle wall she let her hair down over the parapet for him to climb, and he declined and threw his lasso instead, which is either very good manners or a sound assessment of the tensile strength of hair.

The obstacle was her blood. Mehrab descended from Zahhak, the serpent-shouldered tyrant Iran had spent generations trying to put behind it, and no Iranian king was going to bless that match without a struggle. Manuchehr’s priests examined Zal in open council. They put riddles to him about time and the turning of the world, and he answered them, and then he rode and shot against the best men at court and beat them. The astrologers were called and reported that this union would produce the greatest hero the country would ever hold. The objections stopped.

They were right, and it very nearly killed her. The child was too large to be born. Rudaba laboured until she lost consciousness, and Zal, who had spent his whole life being told how fortunate he was, stood in a room where his fortune counted for nothing and burned the feather. The Simurgh came. Her instructions were practical to the point of coldness: make her insensible with drink, open her side, lift the child out that way, close her and treat the wound. Rudaba lived. The boy was Rostam.

After that, Zal’s story becomes other people’s stories. He is the man in the room when the crown has no obvious head to sit on. When Nowzar was murdered he faced down Afrasiab. When the succession stalled he refused Tus and Gostahm and put Zav on the throne. When Zav’s line failed he sent Rostam up to the Alborz, the mountain that had raised him, to fetch a young man called Kay Qobad and bring him back to be king, and that single errand founded the Kayanid dynasty. He argued against Lohrasp, housed Goshtasp for two years, and told his son not to fight Esfandiyar.

Rostam fought Esfandiyar. Zal burned another feather, and the Simurgh showed his son where the invulnerable man was not invulnerable, and Rostam won, and Zal was left to watch what the winning cost. Later Shaghad, the son a slave girl from Kabul had borne him, arranged the pit of spears that killed Rostam and Zavara together. Zal outlived them both. Bahman came down into Sistan afterwards, broke the house, took the treasure and put the old man in chains, and released him only because his own uncle asked it as a favour.

What Zal possesses is not strength, though he had that as well. It is farr, and access. The feather is a summons rather than a weapon: it fetches the wisest creature alive to look at the situation and explain it, and explanation has limits. He could not make Sam love him on sight, could not make Manuchehr reasonable, and could not talk Rostam out of a single fight that mattered. He is the man who turns out to be right slightly before anyone wants him to be. He outlived nearly everyone he loved, and the record cannot even agree that he was allowed a quiet end, since Masudi of Marv held that Bahman killed him and destroyed his family with him.

The house he belongs to may not be Iranian at all. The stories of Rostam’s line appear to have come from the Saka, a people of the eastern steppe, and to have been grafted onto the national epic as Sistan came into the Zoroastrian world. One strand of scholarship traces the family to an Arsacid dynasty that ruled Zarang and reads Zal’s name as the land’s own. Another notices that his riddles concern time, and that he lives an unnatural while, and asks whether something of Zurvan, the god of time, stands behind the white-haired boy on the mountain.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Zal in Persian mythology?

Zal is a legendary prince of Sistan in the Shahnameh and the father of Rostam, Iran’s greatest hero. He was born with white hair, abandoned as an infant, and raised on Mount Alborz by the Simurgh. As an adult he governed Zabulestan and served as commander and adviser to a long succession of Iranian kings.

Why was Zal abandoned as a baby?

His father Sam abandoned him because he was born with completely white hair, which Sam took as a mark of demonic origin. Sam likened the infant to a child of a dev or of Ahriman and had him left on Mount Alborz to die. Years later, after two dreams and a rebuke from his own wise men, Sam returned to the mountain and reclaimed his son.

What is Zal’s connection to the Simurgh?

The Simurgh found Zal abandoned on Mount Alborz and raised him alongside her own young. When Sam came to reclaim him, the bird gave Zal feathers carrying farr, the God-given fortune of kings, and told him to burn one whenever he needed her. He used them twice at the greatest crises of his life, at the birth of Rostam and during Rostam’s fight with Esfandiyar.

Who did Zal marry, and how was Rostam born?

Zal married Rudaba, daughter of Mehrab the king of Kabul, over strong opposition because Mehrab descended from the tyrant Zahhak. Rudaba could not deliver their son in the normal way because the child was too large, and she fell unconscious in labour. Zal burned a Simurgh feather, and the bird instructed him to make Rudaba insensible with drink and deliver the child through an incision in her side. Both mother and son survived, and the boy was Rostam.

How did Zal die?

The sources disagree. The Shahnameh has him survive the destruction of his house: Bahman invades Sistan, imprisons Zal and seizes his treasure, then frees him after his uncle Pashutan intervenes. Masudi of Marv, however, held that Bahman killed Zal and slaughtered his family.

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Rostam, Simurgh, Zahhak, Fereydun, Div, Angra Mainyu, Peri, Ahura Mazda, Mithra, Anahita