Amol and Arash's shot

Amol is one of the oldest cities on the Caspian shore, and the Shahnameh knows it as a royal seat in the age of Fereydun and his successors. It also sits near the setting of a story that the Shahnameh barely tells: that of Arash the archer. In the reign of Manuchehr, Iran and Turan, worn out by war, agree on a strange settlement. The border will be drawn wherever an arrow shot by an Iranian archer comes to earth.

The fullest early versions come from writers other than Ferdowsi, among them al-Biruni in the eleventh century and the historian al-Tabari before him. In these, the archer climbs a mountain in Tabaristan, the highlands around Amol, and looses his arrow at dawn. It flies until noon and falls far to the east; many versions say on the banks of the Oxus, others in the lands near Balkh or Ferghana. The details change with the teller, and the starting point moves too. Many modern retellings, including Siavash Kasraei's famous poem of 1959, set the shot on Damavand, whose peak looks down on Amol.

The city today

Amol, on the Haraz river below Damavand, was a capital of Tabaristan in the early Islamic centuries and is still a busy market town of Mazandaran, surrounded by rice fields. The historian al-Tabari, who recorded one version of Arash's story, was born here. The point marks the city as the traditional starting place of the shot. It is a reminder that the Iranian imagination of borders begins not with surveyors but with a single human effort.