Siyovush
Siyovush is the innocent prince of Iranian legend whose cult struck deep roots in the Central Asian homeland of the Tajiks. Slandered by his stepmother, he proves his purity by riding unscathed through a mountain of fire, then exiles himself to Turan, where he is murdered on the order of Afrasiyab; from the ground where his blood falls a plant is said to spring. Firdawsi's Shahnama gives the classical narrative, but the figure long predates it: Narshakhi's tenth-century History of Bukhara reports that the Bukharans kept his grave, sang laments on his death, and mourned him each year in a rite the historian judged more than three thousand years old, and Sogdian art depicts scenes of his funeral. Scholars read him as a dying-and-rising vegetation hero, and his mourning cult is a key survival of the pre-Islamic Sogdian religion within the later Tajik cultural sphere.
Children
Domains
- dying and rising vegetation
- innocence martyrdom
Powers
- ride unharmed through the ordeal fire
Epithets
- Сиёвуш
Relations
- child: Kay Khusraw
- ally: Rustam
Sources
- Narshakhi, Abu Bakr Muhammad. The History of Bukhara. Trans. R.N. Frye, 22-23. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1954.
- Grenet, Frantz. 'Zoroastrianism in Central Asia.' In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism, ed. M. Stausberg and Y. Vevaina, 129-146. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015.