The Shahnameh
PeopleMap

Most of this is a real place

Rostam rides out of Sistan, which is a basin on the Iran–Afghanistan border you could drive to tomorrow. Sohrab is raised in Samangan, about eight hundred kilometres away in northern Afghanistan. When they meet in the middle and fight for three days without exchanging names, they are fighting over ground that exists.

The river running through the middle of the map is the Oxus, today the Amu Darya. It is the border between Iran and Turan, and nearly every war in the poem is fought across it.

The world of the poem

Real coastlines and real rivers. No modern borders, because there were none. Hover a place.

Mount DamavandMazandaranReyEstakhrThe AlborzCtesiphonQadisiyyaMervSistanBukharaThe OxusSamarkandBalkhSamanganKabulRumHind
  • Iran
  • Turan
  • approximate point
  • scholars disagree

What the map is not sure about

The Shahnameh mixes places you can visit with places nobody has ever found, and a map that draws them identically is lying to you. Every point above carries its confidence, and these are the ones that need saying out loud.

Scholars disagree

  • Mazandaran

    Where Kay Kavus is captured by demons and Rostam performs the Seven Trials. The obvious reading is the Caspian province, but the poem's Mazandaran is a land of demons and sorcery that several scholars have argued lies somewhere else entirely, possibly much further east. This dot is the conventional answer, not a settled one.

Not on any map

  • Mount Qaf

    The mountain at the edge of the world, encircling the earth. Not a place anyone has ever stood.

  • Kang Dez

    Siyavash's fortress in Turan, built during his exile. Described in detail, placed nowhere that can be found.

Every place