Before Siyavush ever married, he walked through fire. In Firdausi's Shahnama, the Persian Book of Kings finished around 1010, the young prince is falsely accused by his stepmother Sudaba after he refuses her advances. To prove his innocence he rides his black horse into a huge blazing pyre, and comes out the other side untouched. It is one of the great ordeal scenes in world literature, and it sets up everything that follows: Siyavush is the purest hero in the epic, and purity, in the Shahnama, is no protection at all.
Disgusted with his father's court, Siyavush crosses into Turan, the land of Iran's old enemy, and is welcomed by its king, Afrasiyab. He marries the king's daughter, Farangis, in a union meant to bring the two peoples together. This page shows the wedding, a moment of perfect peace, and every Persian reader knew it would not last. Jealous courtiers turn Afrasiyab against his son-in-law, and Siyavush is murdered while Farangis is pregnant with his son.
His death became a myth of its own. Firdausi writes that a plant grew from the ground where his blood was spilled, and Persian tradition calls a red plant resin khun-e Siyavushan, "the blood of Siyavush." Scholars have long connected the mourning for Siyavush, lamented in rituals in Central Asia well before Islam, with ancient cults of a dying and returning hero. His son, Kay Khosrow, grows up to avenge him, and the cycle of revenge between Iran and Turan runs on for generations.
The manuscript this page comes from is legendary in its own right. The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp was produced at the Safavid court in Tabriz around 1525 to 1530 and contained 258 paintings by the best artists of the age, making it arguably the most lavish illustrated book ever made in Iran. In 1568 the shah sent it as a diplomatic gift to the Ottoman sultan Selim II. In the 20th century the collector Arthur Houghton acquired it, and he later broke it up, giving pages to the Metropolitan Museum in 1970 and dispersing others. The breakup is still controversial among scholars.
Joy fills the frame, and the tragedy is in what the viewer knows and the couple don't, which is exactly how Firdausi tells it.
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