Farat (Euphrates)

Queen Homay, who has come to love the throne, gives birth in secret and lets it be said that the child has died. When he is eight months old she has him laid in a small wooden box, sealed with pitch and musk, lined with silk and strewn with pearls and gold, a jewel tied to his arm. At midnight her servants set the box on the Euphrates, and two men follow along the bank. At dawn it catches among the stones of a washing-place, where a washerman who has just lost a child of his own lifts it out. He and his wife name the boy Darab, because they found him in running water.

The poem names the river twice in this story: when the box is put on the water, and years later when Homay, reading her general's letter, weeps that God gave her a son and she threw him into the Farat. The Euphrates comes back later in the Shahnameh as a frontier of war, where the armies of Dara and of later kings gather. The poem does not say where Homay held court, so the point on this map is simply on the river's middle course.

The Euphrates is real, the longest river of western Asia. It rises in the mountains of eastern Anatolia and flows through Syria and Iraq to join the Tigris, the Arvand of the Shahnameh, before reaching the Persian Gulf. Stories of a child set adrift on a river are old in this part of the world. In their notes the Warners compare Darab's with the legend of Sargon of Akkad, whose mother sealed him in a basket with bitumen and set him on the river, and with the story of Moses.