Arash the archer

Some of the best-loved Iranian myths are barely in the Shahnameh at all. The story of Arash, called kamangir, "the archer", reaches us in fragments. The Avesta, in the hymn to the star Tishtrya known as the Tir Yasht, praises Erekhsha, "the swiftest-arrowed" of the Iranians, whose arrow flew from one mountain to another far away. The fuller story is told later, most famously by the scholar al-Biruni in the eleventh century. In al-Biruni's telling, the long war between Iran and Turan has worn both sides down. The Turanian king Afrasiyab has the Iranian king Manuchehr hemmed in, and the two agree to make peace on a single condition: the border will lie wherever an arrow shot from Iran comes to earth. Arash is chosen to shoot it.

He climbs a mountain, draws his bow, and looses the arrow, and it flies from dawn until noon, coming to earth far to the east. Where it landed varies with the teller; many later versions place it on the banks of the Oxus. In some tellings, Arash poured his whole life into the shot, and his body could not survive it.

Al-Biruni connects the story with Tirgan, a midsummer festival held on the thirteenth day of the month of Tir, which falls in early July. It is a water festival: people splash one another, and a tradition still kept by some families is to tie a thread of many colours, the tir-o-bad, around the wrist, and later cast it away into the wind or water. Tirgan is also linked with Tishtrya, the star who brings rain, and versions differ on how the two stories came together.

Why it still matters

Arash was given new life in 1959 by the poet Siavash Kasraei, whose long poem Arash-e Kamangir turned him into a symbol of sacrifice for one's land, and generations of Iranians learned it by heart. Later tellings often set the shot on Mount Damavand. Arash is a popular name, and Tirgan has been revived in recent decades as a cultural festival in Iran and the diaspora. It is a myth about how a country's shape might be decided not by conquest, but by one person's effort.