Simurgh

The tree stands in the middle of a sea with no far shore, and every seed that will ever grow is lodged somewhere in its branches. When the great bird settles, a thousand shoots snap under her weight and the seed spills into the water below. When she lifts off, a thousand more push out of the raw wood. This is the oldest work the Simurgh does, older than the epics that made her famous, and it has a strange shape to it: she keeps the world planted by breaking the tree that holds it.

Her name comes down from the Avesta, where she is mərəγō saēnō, the bird Saēna, and the word behind it is a plain one for a bird of prey. The same root gives Sanskrit śyená, an eagle or a falcon. In one Avestan hymn the deity of victory wraps good fortune around a worshipper’s house the way the great bird Saēna spreads herself, and the way rainclouds cover the mountains. In another, her tree stands at the centre of the sea Vourukasha, holds the seeds of all plants, and is called all-healing. That is nearly everything the oldest layer says. Two functions, rain and healing, and a bird large enough to be compared to weather.

The Pahlavi books filled in the rest. In the Mēnōg ī Xrad her nest sits in the tree without evil and of many seeds; when she alights she breaks a thousand branches and shakes the seed loose, and a second bird, Chamrosh, gathers what falls and carries it to where Tishtar, the star Sirius, will take it up with the water and rain it down on the fields. Elsewhere the same weight is purely destructive and she leaves the tree withered, which reads less like a gardener than like the summer sun. The system is astronomical as much as zoological. A bird that sets as the Dog Star rises is doing calendar work.

Then there is the question of what she actually is, on which the record is a mess. One chapter of the Bundahišn calls the three-fingered Sēn the largest of birds and ranks her beside the eagle and the lammergeier. A few lines later the same book files her with the bats, on the reasoning that a bat flies like a bird, has teeth like a dog, and lives in a cave like a muskrat. Zādspram keeps her among the birds but grants her teeth and milk, and says she feeds her young from her breast. Somewhere in that shuffle she also changed sex. The texts cannot agree on what she is.

The pictures are no tidier. From the sixth and seventh centuries a composite creature spreads across Iranian silver, silk and stone: a snarling dog’s head, forepaws raised in attack with only three claws showing, and the long curved tail of a peacock, most famously woven into the coat King Khosrow II wears beneath his armour in the rock reliefs at Taq-e Bostan. It travelled with the rest of Sasanian ornament into Syria, Jordan, Armenia, Georgia and Byzantium, and stayed in use for centuries after the empire that made it had fallen. Whether the people who wore it ever called it Sēnmurw is now disputed hard enough that some scholars label the creature a pseudo-Senmurv instead. In the illustrated manuscripts of the Islamic centuries she is simply an enormous and magnificent bird, with nothing canine about her at all.

By then Ferdowsi had given her the story everyone remembers. Sam’s son Zal was born with white hair, and Sam, reading demon in the child, left him on the cold slopes of Alborz. The Simurgh found the infant while hunting meat for her own chicks. Instead of feeding him to them she carried him up to the nest, and her young made room for him. She chose the tenderest meat so that the boy could suck blood in place of the milk he had no way of getting. When Sam’s conscience finally reached him through a dream and he climbed the mountain after his son, she pressed the young man against her breast until the air filled with the smell of musk, then gave him one of her feathers and told him to burn it if he ever had need of her, and to stay always in the shadow of her glory.

He burned it twice. The first was at the birth of his own son, when Rudaba had laboured past the point of surviving it. The bird’s instructions were practical to the point of coldness: dull the mother with wine, open her side, lift the child out, dress the wound with a named herb, then close it with a stroke of the feather. The child was Rostam. The second summons came when Rostam and his horse Rakhsh lay bristling with Esfandiyar’s arrows, and she drew the shafts out and healed them both. She also told Rostam what she knew, which was that whoever killed Esfandiyar would be damned in this world and the next. Then she carried him through a single night to the tamarisk tree, and the fatal arrow was cut from it anyway.

There is a second Simurgh in the same epic, and she is nothing like the first. She sits on a mountain and looks like a mountain, or like a low black cloud, and she lifts crocodiles, panthers and elephants off the ground the way a hawk lifts mice. Her two chicks are as large as she is. Esfandiyar kills her by building a chariot studded all over with blades and letting her strike it. Perhaps she is not a different bird at all. The kindness shown to Zal is credited to God putting love into her, which rather implies the love was not there to start with, and one sour line in the poem says she spared the child only because she could not stomach him. The older cosmology had an outright anti-Simurgh as well: the bird Kamak, who spread her wings over the whole earth so that the rain fell back into the sea, and ate men and cattle the way a bird pecks grain, until Karshasp shot arrows at her day and night until she dropped.

She outlived the language. Kurdish storytellers know her as Sīmīr, Armenians as Sīnam, Georgians as p’asgunǰi, and in their tales a hero kills the serpent climbing toward her nestlings and is repaid with feathers to burn, or with passage out of the underworld. In one Armenian version the food runs out mid-flight and the hero cuts a piece from his own thigh to keep her flying; she tastes that it is human, refuses to swallow it, and sets it back into his leg at the end of the journey. Healing again, in the least sentimental form imaginable.

Her last transformation was into an absence. In Attar’s Manṭeq al-ṭayr the birds of the world set out to find their king, who lives behind the mountains of Qaf with a hundred thousand veils of light and darkness hung in front of him, and thirty of them survive the crossing. Persian does the rest of the work: si murgh is thirty birds. What they find at the end of the road is themselves, and the poem does not present that as a swindle.

What she can do follows from all of this without much stretching. She scatters the seed of every plant and sets the rain going. She heals: the tree she nests in is called all-healing, her feather closes a wound that should have killed, and she can draw arrows out of flesh. She knows what fate has settled. She carries whatever she chooses, over any distance, in less time than it ought to take. Her limits follow just as plainly. She comes only when summoned, only by fire, and only so many times; across the whole of the Shahnameh, Zal spends his gift twice. Knowing fate is not the same as bending it, and she says as much to Rostam and then flies him to the tree that will kill him. Her own weight ruins the tree she guards. And the Pahlavi Rivāyat says that at the resurrection, when the earth is made flat and the waters stand still, she will build her nest in the forest and stop, because a world that no longer needs planting has no further use for her.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Simurgh?

The Simurgh is an enormous benevolent bird of Persian and Zoroastrian myth, known in Pahlavi as the Sēnmurw and in the Avesta as Saēna. She nests in the tree that holds the seeds of every plant, at the centre of the mythic sea Vourukasha, and her comings and goings shake those seeds loose so they can be rained down on the earth. She is also a healer, and in later epic she becomes the protector of a specific human family.

What does the Simurgh look like?

Sources disagree sharply. The Pahlavi Bundahišn calls her the largest of birds and gives her three claws instead of the usual four, while another passage in the same book reclassifies her as a kind of bat with a dog’s teeth, and Zādspram says she suckles her young. Sasanian art from the sixth and seventh centuries shows a composite creature with a snarling dog’s head, three-clawed forepaws and a peacock’s tail, though whether that image was ever called Sēnmurw is disputed. Later Persian manuscript painters simply drew a very large and magnificent bird.

What does the Simurgh do in the Shahnameh?

In Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh the Simurgh rescues and raises the abandoned albino infant Zal on Mount Alborz, feeding him alongside her own chicks. When Zal is returned to his father Sam she gives him a feather to burn whenever he needs her. She answers twice: once to deliver Rostam by opening Rudaba’s side after a labour she could not survive, and once to draw Esfandiyar’s arrows from the wounded Rostam and Rakhsh and to warn Rostam that killing Esfandiyar will damn him.

What does the name Simurgh mean?

The name descends from Avestan mərəγō saēnō, “the bird Saēna”, where Saēna was an ordinary word for a raptor, related to Sanskrit śyená, an eagle or falcon. In New Persian the name also reads as si murgh, “thirty birds”, and the poet Attar built his Manṭeq al-ṭayr on that coincidence: thirty birds complete the journey to find their king the Simurgh and discover that they are what they were looking for.

Where does the Simurgh live?

In the Zoroastrian texts she nests in the many-seeded, all-healing tree that stands in the middle of the sea Vourukasha. In the Persian epic she lives on the peaks of the Alborz range, which is where she finds the abandoned Zal. In Attar’s mystical poem her dwelling is moved beyond reach entirely, behind the mountains of Qaf and a hundred thousand veils of light and darkness.

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