Fereydun Divides the World
بخش جهان
He tested his three sons, gave each a third of the earth, and got the test right and the outcome wrong.
No openly licensed painting of this scene sourced yet.
Fereydun, old and secure, splits the world between his sons: Rome and the west to Salm, Turan and China to Tur, and Iran, the centre and the best of it, to the youngest, Iraj.
The two older brothers wait, and resent, and finally send for Iraj to talk. He comes to them unarmed and offers to give up Iran entirely rather than fight over it. They kill him anyway, and send his head back to his father in a box.
Fereydun does not die of it. He waits, raises Iraj's grandson, and sends him after them. That vengeance becomes the war between Iran and Turan, which is still being fought four hundred pages later, by people who no longer remember it started with three brothers and a piece of land.
Why it matters
The engine of the entire epic. Nearly every war in the Shahnameh is downstream of this one murder, which is Ferdowsi's real subject: inherited grievance, and how long it outlives everyone who had a reason for it.