Sultan Muhammad’s The Court of Kayumars

1500 CE

A large part of the poem focuses on prehistoric, legendary kings, some of whom ruled for hundreds of years and established man’s knowledge of everything from fire to weaving. According to Firdausi, the very idea of kingship originated with King Kayumars, who ruled for thirty years, overseeing a peaceable kingdom in which men wore leopard-skin robes and wild animals grew tame. In this utopia Kayumars had one secret enemy, the evil Ahriman, whose envy drove him to incite his own son, the Black Div, to murder Siyamak, the son of Kayumars. Before the assassination took place, the angel Surush warned Kayumars of Ahriman’s plot.[1]