Estakhr

After Alexander, the Shahnameh hurries through the age of the Ashkanians, the Parthian kings, whom it calls the "petty kings", in a few dozen lines. Then it slows down. In Pars, Babak, the ruler of Estakhr, employs a shepherd named Sasan, who is secretly a descendant of the old kings. Babak dreams of Sasan riding a great elephant, with the sacred fires of Iran blazing before him. He calls the shepherd in, learns his lineage, and gives him his daughter in marriage. Their son is Ardashir.

Ardashir grows up to be summoned to the court of the Ashkanian king Ardavan, where he falls in love with Golnar, the king's favourite servant. They flee together towards Pars, and Ardashir raises an army, defeats Ardavan and founds a new dynasty. The poem treats him as a restorer, bringing back a line that went back to Dara.

The city today

Estakhr was real and important. It lies about five kilometres north of Persepolis and was the centre of Persis under the Parthians and the dynastic home of the Sasanians, whose ancestor Sasan was associated, according to the historian al-Tabari, with its temple of Anahita. It remained a leading city of Fars into the early Islamic centuries before declining, overtaken by Shiraz. Today little stands above ground but a single column and scattered foundations in the fields, beside the road from Persepolis to Pasargadae. Close by, at Naqsh-e Rostam, the Sasanian kings carved their reliefs beneath the tombs of the Achaemenids, as if to claim a place in the same line.