Jamshid's golden age

At a Glance

• Central figures: Jamshid, fourth king of Iran, who inherited the throne from his father Tahmuras and ruled for seven hundred years; and Ahriman, the spirit of the lie, whose whisper finally reached him.
• Setting: Iran in the age of the first kings, before Zoroaster, when the world was still being shaped and the divine farr - the royal glory - rested visibly on the monarch’s brow.
• The turn: After centuries of unmatched achievement, Jamshid declared himself the source of all good in the world and demanded worship as a god, and the farr departed from him.
• The outcome: The nobles of Iran turned against Jamshid; the serpent-shouldered tyrant Zahhak crossed from the Arab lands to seize the throne; Jamshid fled and was eventually captured and sawn in half.
• The legacy: The festival of Nowruz - the Iranian New Year, celebrated on the spring equinox - is traced in the Shahnameh to Jamshid’s reign, when he set his jeweled throne on the backs of divs and flew through the sky, and the people marked that day as a new beginning.

Jamshid had the farr. It showed. When he sat on the throne his father Tahmuras had left him, the light that clung to his face was not metaphor or flattery - it was a visible thing, the luminous mandate of Ahura Mazda, and no man in Iran doubted that the king ruled by divine right. He was young, ambitious, and capable, and the world was raw enough that a capable king could reshape it.

He started with iron.

The Forge and the Loom

Before Jamshid, men fought with stone and hide. He taught them to smelt ore, to draw iron from rock, to hammer it into blades and helmets and coats of ring-mail. The warriors of Iran, who had been brave but poorly armed, became something else - armored riders, cavalry that could hold a line. Jamshid divided them into ranks: priests, warriors, farmers, artisans. Each peesheh - each craft and station - had its place, and the kingdom organized itself like a body learning to use its limbs.

He turned next to cloth. Linen, silk, the weaving of wool - these arts he either discovered or commanded others to discover, and the court at his capital gleamed with dyed fabrics. He taught men to build with brick and stone, to raise walls and palaces, to cut channels for water. He found gems in the earth and showed his people how to extract perfume from flowers, how to sail rivers, how to cure disease with herbs. Three hundred years passed in this work, and in those three centuries not a single person in Iran died. Death itself seemed to have withdrawn from the kingdom, cowed by the farr on the king’s brow.

The Throne on the Backs of Divs

At the height of his power, Jamshid commanded the divs - the demons his father Tahmuras had subdued - to carry his throne into the sky. They lifted it. The jeweled seat rose above the mountains, above the Alborz range, and Jamshid sat in it as the sun struck the gems and scattered light across the land below. The people of Iran looked up and saw their king blazing in the air like a second sun on the first day of spring, and they named that day Nowruz - the New Day - and feasted, and poured wine, and declared it the start of the year.

For a time the image held. The king in the sky, radiant, untouchable. The kingdom prosperous, deathless, ordered. Everything Jamshid touched succeeded. He built the underground city of Var, a refuge against a prophesied winter that would destroy the world - a vast enclosure stocked with the seeds of every plant, the pairs of every animal, the finest men and women of each craft. He thought of everything. He provided for everything.

He began to believe that he was the source of everything.

The Claim

It happened in the throne room, before the assembled nobles and priests of Iran. Jamshid stood and spoke. The exact words vary in the telling, but the substance does not: he told them that every good thing they possessed - iron, cloth, medicine, order, life itself - had come from him. He told them he had conquered death. He told them to worship him.

Worship me, he said, for I am your creator. All that you have, I made.

The farr left him. It did not leave slowly. The light went out of his face like a flame blown sideways, and the nobles saw it go, and the room changed. A king with the farr commands obedience by his nature. A king without it is just a man giving orders.

The Fracture

The nobles did not rebel immediately. But the lie had entered the king, and once the lie enters, Ahriman works fast. Whispers spread through the provinces. The priests withdrew their blessing. Regional lords stopped sending tribute. The kingdom that had been a single body began to pull apart at the joints.

Word of Iran’s fracture crossed the Oxus and reached Zahhak.

Zahhak was an Arab prince - or had been, before Ahriman appeared to him in the form of a young cook, kissed his shoulders, and from each shoulder grew a black serpent that could not be removed and could only be fed on human brains. Zahhak had already murdered his own father at Ahriman’s urging. He was a vessel for the lie, and when he heard that Jamshid’s farr had departed, he marched on Iran.

The nobles opened the gates. They had no reason not to. A king without the farr is no king, and Zahhak, for all his monstrous shoulders, promised order. Jamshid fled.

A Hundred Years in Hiding

He ran for a hundred years. The number is in the Shahnameh and it is meant to be understood literally - Jamshid, who had reigned seven hundred years in glory, spent a hundred more as a fugitive, moving through the edges of the world, recognized by no one, stripped of every attribute that had made him Jamshid. No throne, no gems, no armies, no light on his face.

Zahhak’s men found him at last by the Sea of China - the far eastern edge of the known world. They brought him back. Zahhak ordered him sawn in half, and the saw was drawn through him, and the king who had once ridden the sky on the backs of demons died on the ground like an animal being butchered.

What Remained

The throne shattered. The golden age ended. Zahhak ruled Iran for a thousand years of serpent-terror, feeding his shoulder-snakes on the brains of young men until Kaveh the blacksmith rose against him.

But every spring, on the equinox, the people of Iran still set their tables and poured wine and called the day Nowruz - the New Day - because they remembered the morning when the jeweled throne had risen above the Alborz and the sun had struck it and the whole kingdom had been lit from above. The king was gone. The light was gone. The day remained.