The Shahnameh atlas · The heroic age
Mount Alborz
البرز کوهThe Simorgh's mountain; the point in the Alborz range is approximate
- Traditionally placed here · Alborz in the Atlas
- Zal, Sam, Simorgh, Faranak, Fereydun
The Alborz appears in the Shahnameh more than once. In the mythical age, Fereydun's mother Faranak carries her infant son there to hide him from Zahhak. In the heroic age it is the home of the Simorgh. When the hero Sam rejects his newborn son Zal because the boy's hair is white, the child is left on the mountain. The Simorgh carries him to her nest, raises him with her own young, and years later returns him to his repentant father, with a feather to burn if he ever needs her.
The poem's mountain is not quite the range on the modern map. Its name descends from the Avestan Hara Berezaiti, the "High Hara", a cosmic mountain that encircles the earth and around which the sun and stars turn. Over time the name settled on the great range that walls the Iranian plateau off from the Caspian, and readers came to picture the Simorgh's nest there. The name of Elbrus in the Caucasus is thought to come from the same word, a reminder that the poem's geography is older and wider than any one place.
The poem's mountain is not quite the range on the modern map.
The mountains today
The Alborz runs for some 900 kilometres from the borders of Azerbaijan to Khorasan, with Damavand as its highest point and Alam-Kuh as its second. Alborz province, around Karaj, takes its name from it, and the Chalus road winds through its gorges to the Caspian. No peak claims the Simorgh's nest, and the point here is only a marker in the central range. The bird herself is everywhere in Iranian art, and the mountain where she raised a rejected child remains one of the epic's most tender settings.
In Mythologyاسطوره
The Simorgh
The great bird who raised an abandoned prince in her nest, delivered Rostam into the world, and later became Persian poetry's image of the divine.
More from the heroic ageشاهنامه
Kabulکابل
Kabul frames the life of Rostam. His mother Rudabeh is a princess of Kabul, and it is in the hunting grounds of a later king of Kabul that Rostam is betrayed and killed.
Zabulistanزابلستان
Zabulistan is the realm of the house of Sam: the court where Zal rules, Rostam is raised, and Esfandiyar comes to put Rostam in chains. Tradition places it in Sistan, around today's Zabol.
Kuh-e Khwajaکوه خواجه
A flat-topped black hill rising from the Hamun wetlands, crowned with the ruins of a Parthian and Sasanian palace that local people call Rostam's castle. It is the closest thing Rostam has to a home on the map.
Amol and Arash's shotآمل
Amol appears in the Shahnameh as a seat of the early kings. The highlands around it, the old Tabaristan, are where medieval writers set the story of Arash the archer, whose arrow fixed the border between Iran and Turan.