According to the Persian Book of Kings, the discovery of fire was an accident. The legendary king Hushang was out hunting in the mountains when he saw a huge dark creature that looked like a serpent. He hurled a stone at it. The stone missed and struck a rock, and a spark flew out and lit the dry brush. Hushang understood the gift at once. He declared the light sacred and ordered that his people celebrate it every year.
The festival that began that night is called Sada, a midwinter fire festival that is still remembered in Iran. The word is often explained as meaning one hundred, and the feast is traditionally held in the cold weeks before spring arrives. In the picture, the king sits at the center with his court around a large blaze, all set in a landscape of fantastical rocks and flowering trees.
This painting is a folio from the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, made at the Safavid court around 1525 to 1530. It was among the most lavish books ever produced in Iran, with 258 paintings by the best artists of the age, and this page is attributed to Sultan Muhammad, the master who directed the royal workshop. The landscape, with its pink, green and gold rocks that hide faces if you look closely, is his signature style.
The Shahnama is a poem of some fifty thousand couplets, completed around the year 1010 by Firdausi. Its first kings are mythical, and the stories of Hushang, the inventor of fire, and of his successors, who bring metal-working, weaving and agriculture, are a poetic history of civilization.
Like the other pages that came to the Metropolitan Museum from the dismembered manuscript, it shows how fire, art and storytelling all began together.
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