Kaveh the Blacksmith

The forge stinks of scorched hide and hot iron, and the man at the anvil has stopped counting. Zahhak’s soldiers come for the sons of Isfahan the way tax collectors come for grain, and the smith has been paying. He is a large man in a leather apron blackened by sparks, and his arms have the particular thickness that comes only from thirty years of swinging a hammer at cooling metal. When the soldiers take the last boy, he puts the hammer down and walks to the palace.

Zahhak is having a good day. The serpent-king, whose shoulders sprout two black snakes that must be fed on human brains, has decided that his reign requires paperwork. He has drawn up a testimonial declaring his rule just and merciful, and one by one the nobles of the court are signing it. Into this walks the blacksmith, unannounced, filthy from the forge, shouting about his son.

The tyrant, remarkably, gives the boy back. Then he hands Kaveh the document and invites him to add his name to it.

What happens next is the reason anyone remembers Kaveh at all. He reads the testimonial aloud. He looks at the courtiers who have already put their names to it and tells them exactly what they are. Then he tears the parchment to pieces, throws them on the floor, tramples them, and walks out of the throne room with his son under his arm. Zahhak, who has a thousand ways of killing a man and enjoys most of them, says nothing.

Afterwards his nobles ask why he let it happen. The king’s answer is one of the strangest passages in the epic: from the moment he laid eyes on the smith, he says, he felt something like a mountain rise between them, and he could not act. Iron has always been the metal that demons cannot cross, and the man who bends it for a living carries that protection into court with him. Zahhak’s snakes eat the brains of princes. They cannot touch a man who smells of the forge.

Outside in the street, Kaveh takes off his apron, spikes it on a spear shaft, and lifts it over his head. The crowd that follows him out of the palace gate follows him out of the city. He leads them to the Alborz, where a young prince of the old royal line is waiting, and Fereydun takes the banner as his own. Gold thread goes onto it, and brocade, and jewels, and tassels of red, of yellow or blue, and of violet. Every king who came after added more stones until the thing was said to shine at night like a small sun. They called it the Derafsh Kaviani. It stayed the standard of Iran for something like a thousand years, until an Arab soldier carried it off the field at Qadisiyya, the gems were prised out of it, and the caliph Omar had what was left of a blacksmith’s apron burned.

Kaveh himself vanishes. Ferdowsi walks him into Fereydun’s camp and then never mentions him again. His sons Qaren and Qobad go on to become captains of the Iranian armies, and generations later Fereydun is still snapping at Qobad that his father was nothing but a blacksmith out of Isfahan who happened to pick the right side.

The gap he leaves in the epic has been filled by everyone else. The historians who wrote before Ferdowsi tell it differently: in the version Tabari’s translator Bal’ami preserves, Kaveh is a farmer, not a smith, and he does not run to a prince at all. He storms the governor’s house in Isfahan, seizes the city, hands out the governor’s treasury to the people, cancels the taxes, beats the army Zahhak sends against him, and marches north taking towns as he goes. At Ray his men offer him the throne. He turns it down flat. He is a blacksmith, he tells them, and if a blacksmith takes the crown the country will tear itself apart arguing about it; go and find someone with royal blood. They take two months and come back with Fereydun. Masʿudi knew a version in which he was a shoemaker. Others simply call him a poor and pious commoner. The banner is variously his apron, his turban, a bear skin, a lion skin, a goat skin, or, in Tabari and Masʿudi, a panther hide some five metres by seven and a half.

The arithmetic of his grief shifts too. The epic gives him eighteen sons with seventeen already gone. The village storytellers say twelve with eleven gone, or seven with six, and the professional reciters, who never met a number they could not inflate, put it at eighty sons with seventy-eight fed to the snakes.

Folklore gives him the powers the poem withholds. There, it is Kaveh who forges Fereydun’s ox-headed mace, taking two years over it and working talismans into the metal. There, he can plunge his bare hands into the coals and lift red-hot iron without a mark, a gift earned by giving away free grain to a starving woman in a famine year, who prayed that fire in this world and the next would never touch him. And there, it is not Fereydun but Kaveh who deals with Zahhak in the end, chaining him in a well under Mount Damavand, where the sound he makes can still be heard by anyone who stands close enough. Travellers who claimed to have found the tyrant burning in a cave on that mountain reported being driven off by an old man who said he was the prisoner’s keeper, and gave his name as Kaveh.

Set against all that, his limits are the ordinary ones. He has no crown, no lineage, no claim on anything, and he knows it. He cannot kill Zahhak himself in the version that became canonical, because killing kings is work for kings, and the most he can do is find the right one and hand him a flag. What he actually possesses is a hammer, a bad temper in the presence of a lie, and the nerve to be the first man in the room to say so out loud. It turned out to be enough.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Kaveh the Blacksmith?

Kaveh the Blacksmith is a hero of Persian mythology, best known from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, who led the popular uprising against the tyrant Zahhak. After Zahhak’s agents seized his sons to feed the serpents growing from the king’s shoulders, Kaveh tore up the royal decree declaring Zahhak a just ruler and raised his leather apron on a spear as a banner of revolt.

What is the Derafsh Kaviani?

The Derafsh Kaviani is the banner Kaveh made from his own leather apron and a spear shaft. When the prince Fereydun took command of the rebellion he decorated it with gold, brocade, jewels and tassels of red, yellow or blue, and violet, and it became the royal standard of Iran. It was captured by Arab forces at the battle of Qadisiyya in the seventh century, stripped of its gems, and burned.

How did Kaveh defeat Zahhak?

In the Shahnameh Kaveh does not kill Zahhak. He raises the revolt and leads the people to Fereydun, a prince of the old royal line, who defeats the tyrant and binds him beneath Mount Damavand. Persian folk versions are less modest, and many of them credit Kaveh himself with chaining or imprisoning Zahhak, and with forging Fereydun’s ox-headed mace.

How many sons did Kaveh lose?

Accounts differ. The Shahnameh gives Kaveh eighteen sons, seventeen of whom had already been killed to feed Zahhak’s serpents, with the last taken when Kaveh finally went to court. Folk retellings variously count twelve sons with eleven lost, seven with six lost, and, in the professional storytellers’ tradition, eighty sons with seventy-eight killed.

Was Kaveh a real person?

There is no historical evidence for Kaveh. He is absent from the Avesta and from Achaemenid and Parthian records, and the scholar Arthur Christensen argued that the legend took shape in the Sasanian period, connected to the prestige of the noble house of Karen, which traced its descent from Qaren, son of Kaveh. The banner’s name most likely derives from kavi, an old Iranian word for king, with Kaveh supplied later to explain it.

Related Entries

Zahhak, Div, Daeva, Angra Mainyu, Ahura Mazda, Rostam, Simurgh, Homa, Shahbaz, Peri, Anahita, Mithra, Karkadann, Chamrosh