The Shahnameh atlas · The mythical age
Takht-e Jamshid (Persepolis)
تخت جمشیدAn Achaemenid palace city that later Iranians named after a legendary king
- Traditionally placed here · Fars in the Atlas
- Jamshid
In the Shahnameh, Jamshid is the king under whom the world fills with crafts and comforts. He sets the divs to work making bricks and raising buildings of stone, and on the day his jewelled throne is lifted into the sky his people call it the new day, Nowruz. Then pride undoes him, his royal glory leaves him, and Zahhak takes his throne. Ferdowsi does not say where any of this happens.
The ruins themselves are real and well dated. Darius I began the terrace of Persepolis around 518 BCE, and his successors added the great halls, the Apadana and the Hall of a Hundred Columns, with stairways carved with figures bringing gifts from across the empire. Alexander's army burned the palaces in 330 BCE. Over the following centuries the Achaemenid kings faded from memory, and their names were replaced by those of the epic. Medieval Persian writers called the site Takht-e Jamshid, the Throne of Jamshid, or Chehel Minar, the Forty Columns, and believed it to be the work of the legendary king.
Over the following centuries the Achaemenid kings faded from memory, and their names were replaced by those of the epic.
The ruins today
Persepolis, about 60 kilometres north-east of Shiraz, has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1979, and the name Takht-e Jamshid is still the one Iranians use. Some scholars have read the procession reliefs as a scene from a spring festival, and many visitors connect them with Nowruz; that reading is debated, but it shows how naturally the stones and the story have merged. Jamshid's name is attached to other ancient places too, which is part of the same habit of mind: the epic became the way Iranians explained the monuments around them.
In Mythologyاسطوره
Jamshid and his cup
The brilliant king who gave his people Nowruz, then lost everything to pride. Plus the famous world-revealing cup, which belonged to someone else first.
More from the mythical ageشاهنامه
The Arvand (Tigris)اروند
On his way to overthrow Zahhak, Fereydun reaches the Arvand, which Ferdowsi explains is the river the Arabs call the Dejla, the Tigris. When the ferryman refuses him, he rides straight into the water.
Kang Dezhhukhtکنگ دژهوخت
Zahhak rules the world from a palace city that the poem calls Kang Dezhhukht, adding that in Ferdowsi's own day it was known as Beyt al-Moqaddas, Jerusalem. Here Fereydun frees Jamshid's daughters and confronts the tyrant.
Mount Damavandکوه دماوند
Iran's highest mountain is the prison of the serpent-shouldered tyrant Zahhak. Fereydun chains him in a cave inside it, and folk tradition still hears him in the mountain's rumbles.
Tamishehتمیشه
After his victory, Fereydun moves his court from Amol to Tamisheh, at the eastern end of the Caspian forests. The name survives in a long Sasanian defensive wall near the coast of Golestan.