Gayomard the first man

At a Glance

• Central figures: Gayomard, the first man and first king of Iran; Ahriman, the spirit of destruction and the lie; Siyamak, Gayomard’s son; Hushang, Gayomard’s grandson.
• Setting: The primordial world at the beginning of creation, when Ahura Mazda shaped the first living beings and set them on a mountain above the plain, as told in the Shahnameh and in the older Zoroastrian Bundahishn texts.
• The turn: Ahriman, unable to tolerate Gayomard’s radiance and righteous rule, sends a host of divs led by his own son to destroy the first king and his line.
• The outcome: Siyamak is killed in battle against Ahriman’s son; Gayomard dies of grief after thirty years of mourning, but not before raising Hushang to carry vengeance and kingship forward.
• The legacy: From Gayomard’s body, precious metals grew in the earth. Hushang took the throne and avenged his father’s blood, beginning the unbroken chain of Iranian kingship recorded in the Shahnameh.

He was bright. Not bright in the way a clever man is bright - bright in the way that fire is bright, or the sun at the edge of the Alborz when it first clears the rock. The radiance came off his skin. It pooled in the hollows of his collarbone and ran down his arms to the tips of his fingers, and when he walked across the high meadow the animals followed him because the light was warm and they had nothing else to follow. There was no other man. There was no city, no road, no planted field. There was Gayomard, standing on a mountain, wearing the skin of a leopard, and around him the first of all creatures grazing on grass that had never been cut.

Ahura Mazda had made him. The wise lord had shaped the world in stages - sky, water, earth, plants, animals - and then, as the final act before resting, made a man and set the divine farr upon him like a crown that could not be removed. The glory was visible. It announced what Gayomard was: the first shah, the first keeper of truth, the axis around which the turning world was meant to hold.

The Light on the Mountain

Gayomard ruled from his mountain for thirty years in unbroken peace. His throne was a flat stone. His court was the open air. The beasts obeyed him not from fear but from recognition - they saw the farr and understood that this creature, upright and bare-skinned, stood above them in the order Ahura Mazda had fixed.

He had a son, Siyamak. The boy grew tall and strong and carried a portion of his father’s radiance, though dimmer, as a coal carries the memory of the fire that made it. Gayomard loved him with the helpless directness of a man who has only one thing to love. He taught Siyamak to walk the mountain’s ridges, to name the animals, to stand still at dawn and face the light and know that the light was Ahura Mazda’s thought made visible.

Below the mountain, in the cold places where sunlight did not reach, Ahriman stirred. The spirit of the lie had been flung into darkness at the beginning of creation, and he lay there seething, aware of everything Ahura Mazda had made and hating it with a hatred that had no floor. The radiance of Gayomard was the worst of it. Every time the farr flared on the mountaintop, Ahriman felt it like a blade drawn across his face.

He could not go himself. The direct presence of truth repelled him. But he had a son - a thing of smoke and malice, half-formed and enormous - and he had the divs, the demons who served him. He gathered them in the dark and gave the order.

Siyamak in the Pass

The divs came up out of the lowlands like a black tide. They moved at night. They feared the light but they feared Ahriman more, and his son led them, a shape taller than the tallest cedar, his eyes two points of sulfurous yellow in the dark.

Siyamak saw them first. He had been walking the lower slopes alone, as young men do when they want to prove they do not need their fathers, and he saw the dark mass moving and understood what it was before he could name it. He did not run. He turned to face the column and called out a challenge, the way Gayomard had taught him a king’s son should.

Ahriman’s son answered. The two met in a narrow pass between two ridges, and the fight was short. Siyamak had his father’s courage and a portion of the farr, but Ahriman’s son was something outside the natural order - a creature built for killing, without pity or exhaustion. He seized Siyamak and broke him. The young man fell in the pass and did not rise.

The divs withdrew. They had done what they came for.

Gayomard’s Grief

Gayomard found his son’s body at dawn. The light was coming up over the Alborz, pink and gold, and Siyamak lay face-down in the stones with his arms bent wrong, and the portion of farr that had been in him was gone. The animals on the mountain stood still and would not graze.

Gayomard knelt beside his son and wept. The sound of it carried down the mountain to the plains and up into the sky, and Ferdowsi tells us that even Ahura Mazda heard it and was moved. The wise lord sent Sraosha, the angel of obedience, down to the grieving king with a message: Rise. Do not surrender the world to the lie. Your grandson will carry your vengeance.

For Siyamak had left a son behind - Hushang, still a child, fierce-eyed and dark-haired. Gayomard lifted the boy onto his shoulders and carried him to the high stone where the throne stood, and he began to raise him. He taught Hushang everything he had taught Siyamak and more. He taught him to fight. He taught him the names of the divs and the places they hid. He told him what Ahriman was and what Ahriman wanted - the extinction of truth, the corruption of all created things, the reduction of light to ash.

Hushang listened. He grew. He gathered warriors from among the first men who had begun to appear in the world, and with them he formed an army, the first army Iran had ever known.

The Metals in the Earth

Gayomard did not live to see the vengeance. The grief had hollowed him. Thirty years he had reigned in light, and the loss of Siyamak ate through him the way water eats through limestone - slowly, completely, from the inside out. He grew thin. The farr on his skin dimmed. One morning he did not stand, and by evening the first man was dead.

But when Gayomard’s body touched the earth, something happened. The Bundahishn tells it plainly: from his body, gold and silver and every precious metal grew into the veins of the rock. His flesh became ore. His bones became the ribs of the mountain. The world received him back and kept him, and the wealth of Iran’s mines - the gold that would plate the thrones of a hundred shahs after him - was Gayomard’s body, transformed.

Hushang took the throne. He marched down from the mountain with his army, found Ahriman’s son in the dark places, and killed him. The first blood-debt of Iranian kingship was paid. The chain of kings that Ferdowsi would spend fifty thousand couplets recording had its first link hammered shut.

What Remained

On the mountain, the flat stone where Gayomard had sat still held the faint warmth of the farr. The animals returned to graze. Below, Hushang built the first fires, forged the first iron, planted the first seed. The world moved forward into time, carrying inside it - in its rock, in its metal, in the memory of a king who wept for his son - the body of the first man who had ever lived.