Herat

Herat, Hari in the poem, is one of the cities of Khorasan that the Shahnameh's armies pass through again and again on the road between Iran and the east. Its great moment comes late in the historical age. In the reign of Hormozd IV, son of Anushirvan, a huge army under Saveh Shah, a king from the east, invades Khorasan. An old prophecy points Hormozd to a little-known commander: Bahram Chubin, a tall, dark warrior with a famously lean face.

Bahram sets out with a small, picked force and meets Saveh Shah's vast host, with its war elephants, in the region of Herat. In the poem's account he breaks the elephants with arrows, routs the enemy and kills Saveh Shah with an arrow of his own. It is one of the great battle scenes of the epic, and it makes Bahram's name. But Hormozd, suspicious and ungrateful, insults him, and Bahram rebels, a revolt that leads to Hormozd's fall and a long war against his son Khosrow Parviz.

The city today

Herat, in western Afghanistan on the Hari river, has been one of the great cities of the Persian-speaking world for well over a thousand years. Under the Timurids in the fifteenth century it was a capital of art and poetry, home to the poet Jami and the painter Behzad, and the Baysonghori Shahnameh, one of the finest illustrated manuscripts of the epic, was made there in 1430. Its citadel, Friday Mosque and the minarets of the Musalla still stand. The historical Bahram Chubin's war against invaders from the east, around 588, is also recorded by historians.