CivilWar’s Reviews > Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings > Status Update

with one another by wisdom. Religion cannot do without the king, and the king will not be respected without religion; they are guardians of one another, and you could say that they live together beneath one tent. The former cannot function without the latter, nor the latter without the former; we see them as two companions united in doing good...." like damn not even Dumézil is this clear abt it in Mitra-Varuna lmao

lol in Ardašir I's long ass and BORING ASS Wisdom Literature-ass deathbed speech to his son there is an entire paragraph which can be summed up as Ferdowsi fr just looks you straight in the face and says "I'm going to explain Indo-European bipartite sovereignty" now lmao. I mean look at it: "religion has no stability without the royal throne, royalty cannot survive without religion", "They are two brocades interwoven

An etiological legend for the practice of castration to make (as it were) a royal eunuch! The only other I know of in the Indo-European world (there IS a Sumerian one in Inanna's Descent To The Underworld, and the rather different Akkadian version; these are both quite different from their IE counterparts here) is the various myths of Attis from Phrygia. A thematic comparison is no doubt to be interesting here.

theological motifs that Ferdowsi himself calls "obscure", like the tale of Haftvād's worm, all proves without doubt that Ferdowsi's sources, whatever they may have been, were from Zoroastrian priests: one is the sole surviving bit of Sasanian epic, the [i]Kār-Nāmag ī Ardašīr ī Pāpagān[/i], which is full of Zoroastrian themes and symbolism.

The sheer consistency of the Ardešir I epos with other epos of the "Solar Hero" in the Indo-European world, specially as it relates to the notions of "re-founding the nation" after some apocalyptic, existential-level threat (e.g. Camillus with the Gauls in Rome, Odysseus with the suitors, the Ossetian Soslan...), themes of continuity (in this case, the re-establishment of fire temples etc) and the prevalence of

I remember when I first read the Šāhnāma I was so disappointed bc it had none of the nuance, detail or psychological depth of Homer, but then I learned Avestan & Iranian theologies, Zoroastrian & of the Scythians and co, as well as how epic transpositions works and the countless ways IE storytellers went abt it so when I returned I went "holy shit Ferdowsi is a genius actually just in a different way than Homer lmao"

anyway with the Sekandar arc done, we are out of the realm of legend (the Sekandar anime arc being only 1% history, 99% a mix of more epic transposition as everything that preceded it (sans Darius III as the hapless opponent of Alexander) + Ferdowsi's rewrite of the the Alexander Romance lmao), reaching the Parthian Period, I will brush up on Parthian history before continuing or there'd be no point

Sekandar (=Alexander The Great) is literally just a transposed Freyr (yes, from Germanic mythology), it's actually crazy how Freyr-like Ferdowsi has made him - from the Zoroastrian texts he was using as a source, the natural conclusion is that he is a transposition of Haᵘrvatāt, the structural equivalent to Freyr's place in the Germanic pantheon (it adds up because Homay = Freyja and Dārāb = Njördr too, all in order)