Zal

Summary

Zal is the father of Rostam and prince of Sistan in the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi's epic, and he has a second name, Dastan. He was born to Sam, the greatest hero of Iran in his day, who had no other child, with a face like the sun and hair entirely white. For a week no one dared tell Sam, until the nurse came in and said: a pure son has been born to you with no blemish except that his hair is white. When Sam saw him he despaired, looked up to heaven and asked: if I have sinned a grievous sin or followed the faith of Ahriman, forgive me. Then he said: when the nobles come and ask about this child, what shall I say? That he is the brat of a div, a fairy, a spotted leopard? People will laugh at me in public and in private until shame drives me out of Iran. He had the child carried far away and left on Mount Alborz, near the sun and far from men, where the Simurgh had her nest.

The baby lay on the hot rock, sucking his finger-ends and wailing, until the Simurgh's young grew hungry and she flew out to find them food. She saw him, took him in her talons and carried him to her nest for her brood to tear. But when the young ones saw his face they were moved, and the Simurgh chose the tenderest prey for him and gave him blood to suck instead of milk, until he grew up like a cypress. A caravan passed and saw him, and the rumour reached Sam. Sam dreamed that a rider came from India with news of his son; he asked the archimages, and they reproached him: lions and leopards on the rocks and fish in the water rear their young, and you cast away an innocent child because his hair was white. In a second dream a man told him: if a bird is nurse enough for your son, what use is it to be a paladin? If white hair is a blemish in a man, your own head and beard have grown like willow leaves. You despised your son, who is the fosterling of God, the kindliest of nurses; as for you, there is no love in you. Sam went to the mountain and found no way to its summit, and he prayed: if this youth is from my loins and not from the seed of Ahriman, help me climb.

The Simurgh told the youth: I am the nurse who reared you, and I have named you Dastan-e Zand, because your father dealt with you treacherously; let the one who takes you home call you so. The youth answered: are you weary of me? Your nest is my throne and your wings my crown. She said: once you see the crown and the throne this nest will seem small to you; try the world. She gave him a feather from her wing: if hardship comes, throw my feather into the fire and you will see my power at once. Then she carried him to his father. Sam dressed him as a paladin and named him Zal-e Zar, "Zal the old", for his white hair. Later Zal loved Rudaba, daughter of Mehrab king of Kabul; when he came to her by night she let her black tresses down from the roof of her palace to the ground and said: climb by them. He kissed them and would not hurt her, threw his own lasso over the battlement and climbed. King Manuchehr's archimages tested him with riddles, about twelve cypresses each with thirty boughs and about a white horse and a black one that chase each other and never meet, and he answered: the twelve months and their days, and day and night. The king consented to the marriage. When Rudaba was in labour and fainted, Zal burned some of the feather, and the Simurgh came and taught him how to bring the child out through her side, and Rostam was born.

The idea the story turns on is that the child his father threw away for a blemish on the surface becomes the one who carries the glory of the house. The blemish turns back on the father: the white hair he was ashamed of in the newborn, the dream shows him in his own beard. The bird that carried him off to feed to her young becomes his nurse, and she gives the castaway a name that keeps the wrong done to him and a feather that keeps the bond. The whole house comes out of this story: the Simurgh, who returns with the feather at a birth and then in war; Rostam, born from his mother's side by her teaching; and Sohrab, his grandson, killed by his own father.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the Persian essay reads the Simurgh as "Sam's bird" and Rostam from rasm but does not read Zal. Persian zāl is a grey-headed old man, and zar, his epithet in the poem, means the same. In Arabic dhariʾa shaʿruhu is said when a man's hair turns white, and dhurʾa is whiteness of the hair or the first hoariness; Arabic dh answers z in Hebrew and Akkadian, as in dhahab and zāhāḇ, gold. On this reading Zar is dhurʾa, the white hair he was born with. Zāl itself is, letter for letter, Arabic zāla of the root z-w-l, and Lane gives zawl as a wonder, a light and clever youth at whose sharpness people wonder, brave, generous. That is what the story makes him: the wonder child the caravans saw and spoke of, who solved the archimages' riddles. Dastān is read from Arabic dassa, to hide a thing and bury it in the dust, the verb the Qur'an uses of the father ashamed of his newborn: "he hides himself from the people because of the evil of what he was told: shall he keep it in contempt, or bury it in the dust?" Lane, dh-r-ʾ, z-w-l, d-s-s, Qur'an 16:58–59.

Linguistic Root

The three names

Warner's notes make Zāl-e Zar "Zal the old", for his white hair, and Dastān-e Zand "much defrauded", for what his father did to him. The Encyclopaedia Iranica says the names Zāl and Zar occur together and apart, refers to Bailey's dictionary for zar "old", and records Skjærvø's attempt to take Dastān from a Middle Persian word for "capable" or as a family name.

White hair and dhurʾa

Lane: dhariʾa shaʿruhu, also dharaʾa and dharuʾa, his hair became white in the fore part of his head, or white mixed with black, or simply white; the epithet is adhraʾ, feminine dharʾāʾ; dhurʾa is whiteness of the hair or the first hoariness. From the same root dharaʾa is to create and multiply, and dhurriyya is offspring. Arabic dh answers z in Hebrew and Akkadian, as the project's sound-change file sets Arabic dhahab against Hebrew zāhāḇ, and Persians still pronounce Arabic dh as z. Zar and Zāl, two names of one man in the poem, thus meet dhurʾa in sense, the white hair he was born with, with r and l alternating between the two attested names themselves. The final glottal stop of dh-r-ʾ does not appear in Persian.

Zāl and zawl

Zāl is, letter for letter, Arabic zāla, of the root z-w-l. Lane: zāla is to go away, depart, be removed; zawl is a light youth of quick wit at whose sharpness people wonder, a courageous man before whose courage men are abashed, a generous man, and a wonder: "this is a wonder of wonders". The reading meets the story in the child taken away by his father and returned, and in the wonderful youth who solved the riddles. But Persian zāl means a grey-headed old man and Arabic zawl has nothing of grey hair, so here the letters agree with the story and part from the sense of the Persian word.

Dastān and dass

Persian dastān is a trick or fraud, and in that sense the Simurgh gave him the name. Lane: dassahu is "he hid it, concealed it in the earth or dust, or beneath a thing; he buried it"; dasīsa is something slipped in secretly; indassa ilā fulān is to come to someone secretly with slanders. In the verse of the Bees the father buries his newborn in the dust. The Persian word dast itself entered Arabic, and Lane gives among its senses an artifice, guile, deceit. The d and s of Dastān are the letters of dass; the t stands outside them.

Other readings

The Encyclopaedia Iranica reports two Iranists' readings: Shahbazi takes Zāl or Zar to be named after Zarang, the old capital of Sistan, and Wikander and Scarcia see him as a form of Zurvan, Time, because his riddles are Zurvanite and his life is very long.

Key Mythic Narratives

Zal after Rostam's birth

The Encyclopaedia Iranica says Zal's life spans the whole Kayanid period, and that he leads armies and advises kings more than he fights: he drives two Turanian lords away from Mehrab at Kabul, clashes with Afrasiab after Nowzar's murder, chooses Zaw as king, and sends Rostam to Mount Alborz to fetch Kay Qobad and crown him, founding the Kayanid house. He tries to dissuade Rostam from fighting Esfandiyar, and when he sees his son badly wounded he calls the Simurgh again. Later Bahman son of Esfandiyar invades Sistan, imprisons Zal and takes his treasures, and releases him at the intercession of his uncle Pashotan; Thaʿalibi quotes Masʿudi of Marv for an account in which Bahman kills Zal and slaughters his family. The Iranian Bundahishn says Sam divided his realm among six sons and gave Sistan and the south to the eldest, Dastan.

The archimages' riddles

Not all the riddles were about months and days. The archimages asked about two tall cypresses where a bird nests on one at morning and on the other at evening; when it leaves, the leaves turn pale, and when it returns they breathe musk. Zal answered: they are the bright and the dark halves of the sky, and the bird is the sun. They asked about a fierce man who comes with a sharp scythe to a meadow full of streams and grass and cuts the green and the dry and does not hear anyone cry out, and his answer was Time. They asked about a strong city on a mountain whose people preferred a thornbrake in the waste, and he said: the thornbrake is this world, and the city is the house of the reckoning.

Symbolic Reading

The essay rereading the Persian myths does not read Zal; it reads the Simurgh who raised him as a network of knowledge and her feathers, from which healing is made, as knowledge that heals, and it reads his son Rostam and grandson Sohrab as a conflict between generations.

The Encyclopaedia Iranica says white hair at birth was seen as a sign of future greatness, as Pabag, father of Ardashir, was born with long hair that his mother took as an omen of glory, and that being nursed by a mighty bird was another sign, as an eagle was said to have reared Achaemenes, ancestor of the Achaemenid kings. These stories belong to the type of "the feared child", who is cast away and returns to take his father's place. In Zal's story the child returns and does not take his father's place, so the house stays whole, and the feather binds him to the bird that reared him. The mountain where he was left is Alborz, the mountain near the sun in the poem, from which Kay Qobad was also brought to be crowned, a place from which kings and heroes come, as on the sacred mountain. Encyclopaedia Iranica, "Zāl".

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The closest story to Zal's birth is Noah's birth in the Book of Enoch: Lamech's wife bore a son whose body was white as snow and red as a rose, the hair of his head white as wool, his eyes like the rays of the sun; Lamech was afraid and said that the child was not from him but like the sons of the angels, and went to his father Methuselah and then to Enoch, who told him the child was truly his son and should be called Noah. In both stories the father sees in the white newborn a sign that the child is not of his own seed, a child of angels for Lamech, of a div or of Ahriman's seed for Sam, and then learns through a dream or a sage that the child is his. The Encyclopaedia Iranica records that Scarcia compared Zal with the white-born Noah.

In the epic of Etana the king has no heir, and an eagle carries him up to heaven to seek the plant of birth, as Rudaba's labour fails and the Simurgh brings the knowledge of the birth: in both stories the great bird opens the way to the child who keeps the house. In Mesopotamia too Lugalbanda is left alone in the mountains and wins the favour of the Anzud bird. At Troy Paris is exposed as a baby on Mount Ida because of his mother's dream and suckled by a bear, and at Rome Romulus and his brother are exposed and suckled by a she-wolf. But Paris and Romulus are thrown away for fear of what they will become, Zal for shame at how he looks.