Sohrab

At one month old he already had the body of a boy of twelve. By five he could handle a bow and a mace. By ten there was nobody left in Samangan willing to wrestle him, and the poem records this the way a clerk records a harvest, without wonder, as a plain fact about the child. Ferdowsi is not interested in how it happened. He is interested in how little time it leaves.

The father was in the country by accident. Rostam had been hunting near the Turanian border, slept in the reeds, and woke to find Rakhsh gone from the grass where he had been grazing. He tracked the horse into Samangan, and the king there, knowing exactly whose shoulders those were, took him in as a guest and promised to find the animal. That night the king’s daughter came to Rostam’s chamber with a single servant and a lamp, and told him plainly that she had wanted him since she was old enough to hear his name. Her name was Tahmineh. They were married before morning and the marriage lasted about as long as the search for the horse.

Before he rode out, Rostam left her a token and instructions for it. If the child was a girl, Tahmineh was to plait the jewel into her hair. If it was a boy, she was to bind the clasp on his arm. Nine months later she had a son and called him Sohrab, and she did bind the clasp on his arm, and she kept quiet about whose it was for as long as she could. When the boy finally forced the answer out of her she told him the truth and begged him to sit on it, because if Afrasiab of Turan learned that Rostam had an heir he would want the boy dead, and if Rostam learned it he would want the boy in Zabulistan.

Sohrab did the opposite of sitting on it. He decided he would raise an army, march into Iran, break Kay Kavus off the throne, put his father on it, then turn around and take Turan from Afrasiab, and the two of them would hold the world between them. It is the plan of a very strong child. Afrasiab heard about it and did not try to stop him. He sent his own men along instead, with orders to make certain that father and son never learned each other’s names.

The campaign opened at the White Fortress on the frontier. Hojir, the Iranian champion inside, rode out to meet him as custom required and was on the ground and in ropes within minutes. Then the gate opened again and a second rider came out, slighter, fast, good with a bow, and Sohrab found himself in the only fight of the war he did not win outright. He got a hand into the helmet strap and the helmet came away and a long braid of hair came with it. Gordafarid, the commander’s daughter, had been holding him off. She talked her way clear with a promise she had no intention of keeping and was back behind the walls before he understood what had happened. He took the fortress the next morning and it was already empty.

Later, on the wall, he had Hojir brought up and made him name the pavilions in the Iranian camp below: whose is the green one, whose is the one with the elephant standard. Hojir named them all, and lied about the one that mattered, because he had worked out who this boy was looking for and would rather die than hand Rostam to him. Nobody in this story tells the truth at the moment it would have cost them nothing.

So the two of them met on the plain, and neither would give a name. Sohrab asked, more than once, in something close to hope. Rostam refused, because a champion who names himself to an unknown opponent has already conceded something, and because Rostam’s reputation had become the most fragile thing he owned. They fought with lances until the lances broke, with maces until the maces bent, and then they got off the horses and wrestled in the heat with the two armies watching and the dust standing over them like weather. Sohrab threw him. He had his knife out and Rostam, flat on his back, told him that the custom of the country allowed a killing only on the second throw. It was a lie. Sohrab, who was a decent boy and had been raised on stories about honour, let him up.

The second day Rostam prayed for his strength back, got it, broke the boy’s spine across his knee and put a dagger into his chest. What Sohrab said while he was dying was that his father would find whoever did this. Then he told him to look at the clasp on his arm.

Rostam tore his own armour and wept blood, and sent to Kay Kavus for the nushdaru, the drug that closed any wound. Kavus had it. He would not send it. A living Sohrab meant a champion of that size loose in the world with Rostam behind him, and the king preferred a dead boy to that arithmetic. Rostam went himself in the end and the news met him on the road. Tahmineh burned her son’s house, gave away his horses and his armour, and did not last the year.

His strengths all came from the same source and so did his ruin. The speed of his growth gave him a grown champion’s body and a ten-year-old’s judgement to steer it. The strength that let him throw the greatest warrior in Iran was matched by a boy’s willingness to believe a stranger’s version of the rules. He was looking for his father in every tent and every duel, which made him unstoppable and made him easy to misdirect, and every adult he met had a reason to point him the wrong way.

The tale is old but its shape is Ferdowsi’s, finished around 1010. The Rostam material almost certainly did not come to him through the Pahlavi royal chronicle that supplied most of the Shahnameh; Khaleghi-Motlagh traces the Sistan legends instead to Azadsarv, a scholar at Marv in the circle of Ahmad b. Sahl, who was said to know many of Rostam’s battles by heart. A thousand years on it is still spoken aloud rather than only read. In August 1995 an ethnomusicologist recorded a reciter in a club in Sabzevar opening the episode with its own first line: now hear the battle of Sohrab with Rostam.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sohrab in Persian mythology?

Sohrab is the son of the hero Rostam and Tahmineh, princess of Samangan, in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. He grew to full fighting strength as a child and led a Turanian army into Iran in order to find the father he had never met. He is killed by that father in single combat without either of them knowing who the other is.

How did Sohrab die?

Sohrab was killed by Rostam on the second day of their duel. Sohrab had thrown Rostam the day before and spared him, because Rostam claimed that the custom of the country allowed a killing only on the second throw. On the second day Rostam broke Sohrab’s back and stabbed him, and only then saw the arm clasp he had left with Tahmineh years earlier.

Did Sohrab know that Rostam was his father?

He knew his father’s name but not his father’s face. Tahmineh had told him the truth and warned him to keep it secret, and Sohrab went to war partly to find Rostam. On the battlefield he asked his opponent for a name more than once and was refused, and Afrasiab had planted men in his own camp to make sure the identification never happened.

What is the nushdaru and why did Kay Kavus refuse it?

The nushdaru is the elixir in the Shahnameh that heals any wound, and it was held by Kay Kavus, king of Iran. Rostam begged him for it once he realised the dying warrior was his son. Kavus refused, because a healed Sohrab would be an unbeatable champion with Rostam’s loyalty behind him, and the king was not willing to have that standing near his throne.

Where does the story of Rostam and Sohrab come from?

It survives in the Shahnameh, the Persian national epic completed by Ferdowsi around 1010. The Rostam stories are thought not to have reached him through the Pahlavi royal chronicle behind most of the poem; scholarship traces them instead to the Sistan legend cycle preserved by Azadsarv at Marv. The episode is still performed aloud in the Iranian recitation tradition of Shahnameh-khwani.

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