Kabul

Kabul enters the Shahnameh with a love story. Zal, now a young prince of Zabulistan, visits Mehrab, the king of Kabul, and hears of his daughter Rudabeh. She hears of him. Her maids arrange a meeting, and in the poem's best-known image Rudabeh lets down her long hair from the palace roof for Zal to climb. He kisses it and uses his lasso instead. The match is opposed at first, because Mehrab descends from Zahhak, and King Manuchehr threatens war on Kabul, but the astrologers foresee a great hero from the marriage and it goes ahead. Their son is Rostam.

Shaghad's pit

Kabul also ends Rostam's story. His half-brother Shaghad, raised at the Kabul court, conspires with its king, who resents paying tribute to Zabulistan. They dig pits in the royal hunting ground and line them with spears and swords, covering them with earth. Rostam and Rakhsh ride out to hunt. Rakhsh smells the fresh earth and balks, and Rostam, for once, strikes his horse. Rakhsh leaps forward and falls into a pit, and Rostam with him. Dying, Rostam asks Shaghad for his strung bow, and when his brother hides behind a tree, he shoots an arrow through the trunk and pins him to it.

Kabul is real and very old. It was a crossroads of Buddhist, Hindu and Iranian cultures long before Islam, and became the capital of Afghanistan in the late eighteenth century. Persian, as Dari, is still the city's common language, and the Shahnameh is read and recited there as one of Afghanistan's own classics. The Shahnameh's Kabul is a court, a hunting ground and a landscape rather than a mapped city, but readers on both sides of the border have always pictured it here.