Zahhak is Told His Fate

A king has collapsed. Courtiers lunge to catch him as his eyes close and his strength drains — a moment ago enthroned above them, now fainting into their arms. The fainting man is Zahhak, a monstrous tyrant with two serpents growing from his shoulders, fed daily on the brains of young men. He has just forced his wise men to interpret a nightmare, and they have told him the truth: a child named Faridun will destroy him. ### A palace built on the page This is a leaf from the Shahnameh made for Shah Tahmasp at Tabriz around 1524, with the painting attributed to the master Sultan Muhammad. The throne Zahhak falls from is gold, jewelled, crowned with a little tiled dome — the seat of a thousand-year rule he seized by murdering the good king Jamshid. The architecture behind him — a soaring tiled arch and ordered chambers — is inherited from the great Herat school far to the east, a whole court laid out like a diagram of power. ### Two worlds fused in one leaf On the right, the world opens into a garden of blossoming branches and a dark cypress under a gold sky, painted in the looser Turkmen manner of Tabriz. Up in the blue, curling ribbons of silk — 'snail-clouds' — are a Turkmen signature borrowed in turn from Chinese art carried west along the Silk Road. Look closely at the courtiers' headgear: - A white turban wound around a tall scarlet baton - Called the taj-i Haydari - The badge of the Safavid dynasty ruling Persia when Shah Tahmasp's own circle was quietly painted into this mythical court Around the image runs Ferdowsi's verse in elegant nasta'liq script — a thousand-year-old epic of some fifty thousand couplets, set panel by panel so that word and picture are made as one object. Step back and this is the moment a tyrant learns he cannot outrun justice: a blacksmith named Kaveh will raise his leather apron as a banner, and the child Faridun will strike Zahhak down and chain him forever beneath Mount Damavand. The leaf now rests at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For another painting where a doomed ruler meets his reckoning, see The Death of Sardanapalus, or explore more narrated art shorts.