Jamshid and his cup

Of all the early kings, Jamshid shines brightest. In Ferdowsi's Shahnameh he reigns for centuries, and under him the world fills with useful things. He forges weapons and armour, teaches spinning and weaving, divides people into classes by occupation, and sets the divs to work making bricks and building houses. He discovers perfumes, medicine and the jewels in rock, and he builds ships. Then comes his most famous act. Jamshid has a jewelled throne made and commands the divs to lift it into the air. He sits in the sky, blazing like the sun, and the people gather in wonder. Ferdowsi tells us they called that day the new day: Nowruz. It is the poem's explanation for the Iranian new year, still celebrated at the spring equinox across Iran, Central Asia, Afghanistan, the Caucasus and the diaspora.

Brilliance curdles into pride. Jamshid comes to believe he alone is the source of all this good, and claims divinity. In that moment the farr, the divine glory that marks a rightful king, leaves him. His nobles desert him, and the way opens for Zahhak. Jamshid flees and wanders for years; in the Shahnameh, Zahhak eventually captures him and has him sawn in two. The Avesta knows him as Yima, a king of a golden age without heat, cold, sickness or death. In the Vendidad, Ahura Mazda warns Yima of a terrible winter, and he builds a var, an enclosure, to shelter the best of people, animals and plants. The two sources share a hero but tell rather different stories.

Persian poetry is full of the jam-e jam, the cup of Jam, in which the whole world can be seen. Hafez returns to it again and again. But in the Shahnameh itself, the world-showing cup belongs to a later king, Kay Khosrow, who looks into it to find the captive hero Bizhan. Over time the cup migrated to Jamshid, the more glittering name, and that is how most Iranians know it now.

Why it still matters

The ruins of Persepolis are called Takht-e Jamshid, the Throne of Jamshid, in Persian, though the city was built by Achaemenid kings. Jamshid and its feminine echo Jam are common names. And every Nowruz, the old story is retold around the haft-sin table.