Kay Khosrow

Summary

Kay Khosrow is a king of Iran in the Shahnameh, son of Siyavash, who was murdered in Turan, and of Farangis, daughter of Afrasiab, so that he is grandson both of Kay Kavus, king of Iran, and of Afrasiab, king of Turan. The Avesta knows him earlier as Kauui Haosrauuah, the gallant king "who united the Aryan nations into one kingdom", and tells how he sacrificed by the deep salt lake Chaechasta that he might kill the Turanian Franghrasyan in vengeance for his father.

He was born after his father's murder; Afrasiab had ordered his mother beaten until she miscarried, but Piran, Turan's counsellor, saved her. When the child was born Piran called shepherds from Mount Kalur and gave him to them to raise in the mountains, his birth unknown. At seven he made himself a bow of wood with a string of gut and a blunt, featherless arrow and went hunting; at ten he was fighting boars and wolves, then lions and leopards, with that weapon alone, until the shepherd came to Piran to complain. Then Afrasiab asked about him, and Piran told him to talk like a madman; when the king asked about his flock he said there is no game, and I have no bow or string; when he asked about his parents he said the rending lion is not overpowered by a dog. Afrasiab laughed: I ask of heads, he answers of feet; and he sent him with his mother to Siyavushgird.

Then Iran suffered seven years of drought, and Gudarz dreamed that Sorush, seated on a rain cloud, told him: in Turan there is a prince of Siyavash's seed named Kay Khosrow; when his feet reach Iran he will avenge his father, and none will find him except Giv. Giv searched seven years until he found him in a wood, and knew him by a black mark on his arm, the sign of the Kayanid house since Kay Kubad; he took him and his mother and they fled to Iran. When Kay Khosrow became king he led the great war on Turan: Piran was killed, and Afrasiab fled from stronghold to stronghold until he hid in a cave, where the hermit Hum caught him by the lake, and Kay Khosrow struck his neck with an Indian sword, saying: you killed my father when I was not yet born.

When the vengeance was done and the earth was empty of enemies he grew sad and said: I have gained from God all I desired; let me not grow arrogant like Zahhak and Jamshid, or like Kay Kavus and Afrasiab from whom I come, lose the divine Grace and leave a bad name. He shut his court and prayed until Sorush told him in a dream that the time to depart had come. Zal rebuked him and then begged his pardon; Kay Khosrow divided his realm, gave the crown to Lohrasp, and went into the mountains with Zal, Rostam, Gudarz, Giv, Bizhan, Gustaham, Fariburz and Tus. At the summit he sent the three elders back and walked with the five a day and a night to a spring, where he said: nobody will see me after tonight; when the sun rises do not stay here, for a wind will blow from the mountains and snow will fall, and you will not find the road to Iran. He bathed in the spring reciting the Avesta, and when the sun rose he was gone. The five stayed by the spring talking of him, and the snow came down and buried them.

The idea his story turns on is that the king who joins two bloods knows where to stop. He is of the house of Iran and of the house of Turan; he was raised among shepherds in the mountains like a stranger, survived by pretending madness, and avenged his father to the end. When no enemy was left before him he feared himself: both his grandfathers were kings who grew proud, and he would not be the third, so he left the throne at the height of his power and vanished alive.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method: the Persian essay does not read his name, only that of Rostam, who goes with him to the mountain. "Kay" is the title of this dynasty's kings, Avestan kauui, and we leave it as a title. That leaves Haosrauuah, which scholars derive from hu-srauuah, "he who has good fame". We leave hu- as the prefix for "good", which leaves srauuah, with the consonants s, r and w: the letters of Arabic sarw. Lane gives sarw as liberality joined with manliness, high rank, nobility, honour and glory; sarī, a noble chief, plural surāh. That is what his companions mourned at the spring: none will hear of one like him for manliness, justice, generosity, fame and birth. And the Arabs took the name from Persian Khusraw and made it Kisrā, the title of the kings of Persia.

Linguistic Root

Forms of the name

Skjærvø writes in the Encyclopaedia Iranica that Haosrauuah is a vriddhi formation of *husrauuah, "he who has good fame", and that the later forms seem to descend from *hu-srauuah.

Sarw

The reading covers srauuah, leaving the title kauui and the prefix hu-. The consonants in order: s is s, r is r, Avestan v is w. Lane: saruwa, he was possessed of liberality with manliness, or of high rank, nobility, honour and glory; tasarrā, he affected sarw; asrāhum suʾdadan, the best of them in chiefdom. The Arabic word is the honour a man is known by; the Avestan is good fame.

What remains is that srauuah comes from the Iranian root sru-, to hear: fame in Avestan is what is heard of a man. The same root gives the name of Sraosha, which the wiki reads as surā, travelling by night. Arabic sarw does not carry the sense of hearing, so the reading stays open until an s-r-w word for renown or report is found.

Kisrā

Lane says Kisrā is a name of the king of the Persians, arabicized from Khusraw, which some explain as "possessing ample dominion" and others as arabicized from khwash rū, "goodly in countenance"; Ibn Durayd said the kh was made k and the vowel changed so that the word would be Arabic. So Kay Khosrow's name entered Arabic as the title of every Persian king.

Key Mythic Narratives

In the Avesta and the Pahlavi books

The Avesta makes the killing of Franghrasyan Kay Khosrow's great deed: Haoma asks the goddess Drvaspa that he may bind the Turanian and drag him to King Husravah to kill behind Lake Chaechasta, in vengeance for his father Syavarshana. The Pahlavi books say he destroyed the idol temple by Lake Čēčast, and that the fire Ādur Gušnasp mounted a horse and smote darkness until it was torn down; had it not been, the resurrection could not take place. They say he ruled sixty years and then went to the House of Song, and that he will return as the companion of Saoshyant at the final renovation, seizing Wāy, the wind of death, riding him and rousing the sleepers.

Ṭabarī and Balʿamī

Ṭabarī says he disappeared and no one knew where; Balʿamī says nobody knew. Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī reports that the Persians considered him a prophet. In Iran a cave called Ghār-e Kay Khosrow on a mountain pass in Kohgiluya is where local tradition says he vanished.

Symbolic Reading

The Persian reread essay reads the war of Iran and Turan as a civil war, one Aryan people divided, and reads in Sohrab, son of a Turanian mother and an Iranian father, the tragedy of someone between two cultures whom neither side accepts. Kay Khosrow too is the son of both bloods, with Iran and Turan in him, but his story ends otherwise than Sohrab's: he is accepted in Iran and rules it, avenges his father, and then refuses to inherit his grandfathers' pride. The war that began with the killing of an innocent ends with a king who walks out of kingship of his own accord.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

At Rome Romulus is raised among shepherds after his great-uncle ordered him killed, becomes king, and at the end vanishes: reviewing the army on the Field of Mars, he is wrapped in a storm cloud and never seen on earth again, and the people say he was taken up to the gods. Kay Khosrow is like him: raised among shepherds, a king, and gone alive in the storm and snow, said to have gone to his God.

In Herodotus the infant Cyrus, grandson of the Median king Astyages through his daughter, is handed to a herdsman to be killed; the herdsman raises him, and the boy plays king among the village children and is recognized. Warner says that Kay Khosrow's story is Cyrus's. Herodotus 1.107–121; see Afrasiab.

In Genesis: "And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him." The man who disappears alive because his God took him is a figure the Hebrew Bible knows as the Persians do.