The Simorgh

In Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, the hero Sam longs for a son. When one is finally born, the child is perfect in every way except one: his hair is white as an old man's. Sam is ashamed, fearing people will call the boy a demon's child, and has the infant left on the slopes of Mount Alborz. High on that mountain lives the Simorgh. She finds the crying baby and carries him to her nest, meaning to feed him to her chicks. Instead, Ferdowsi tells us, she is moved to pity, and raises him with them. The boy, Zal, grows up strong and beautiful among the rocks, and caravans begin to talk of a young man living with a giant bird.

Years later Sam has a dream that shames him, and he goes to the mountain to beg forgiveness. The Simorgh gives Zal back. Before he leaves, she gives him one of her feathers: if he is ever in danger, he should burn it, and she will come. He does, twice in the poem. When his wife Rudabeh cannot survive the birth of their enormous child, the Simorgh tells Zal how a skilled man should cut the baby from her side after dulling her pain with wine, then heal the wound with herbs and a stroke of the feather. The child is Rostam. Much later she heals Rostam and his horse after their battle with Esfandiyar, and shows Rostam the tamarisk branch that will become the arrow to defeat him.

The bird is older than Ferdowsi. In the Avesta, a great bird called Saena perches on a tree in the cosmic sea, and the name Simorgh descends from it. And she is reinvented after him. In Attar's Conference of the Birds, written in the twelfth century, the birds of the world set out to find the Simorgh, their king. Only thirty survive the journey, and they discover that what they sought is themselves: si morgh, in Persian, means "thirty birds".

Why it still matters

The Simorgh is everywhere in Iranian design: on carpets, tiles, manuscripts, and the backs of modern book covers. She is the guardian, the healer, the wise outsider who sees further than kings. That she began by rescuing a child his own father had rejected is the part Iranians tend to remember.