The Epic Adventures of Rustam and his Family

The purpose of this study is to deal with the epic adventures of Rustam and his family. Research indicates that the story of Rustam has Sokai origins. Rustam and Zāl do not appear in Avestā and their very sporadic existence in Pahlavid literature approves that they have Sokāi origins. When Sokaies arrived the eastern parts of Iran, they changed the name of "Zarank" into Sistān. This tribe brought a combination of the culture of the states of central Asia. This culture which was made of a combination of the Iranian, Greek and Indian themes, was also affected by the kushāni culture and its artistic proliferations. Based on the oral traditions and the written legacy of the eastern parts of Iran and the Great khurāsan, which were propagated by Gusāns (troubadours), and were written at his time, Ferdowsi changed the prose texts into a very brilliant poetic work. Ferdowsi, having set aside the ancient heroes, made Rustam the central hero of all the stories of the Shāhnāmeh and by starting from Manuchehr Pishdādi to the Kianid Goshtasp, he covered a period of almost 700 years, Ferdowsi’s main intention was to maintain the unity of Iran’s epic, the Shāhnāmeh. The consideration of other dynastic works belonging to the same genre as the Shāhnāmeh intensifies this supposition that they all have been formed out of the same text and the same form. Some of these works are Bahmannāmeh, Farāmarz nāmeh, Borzūnameh, Jahāngirnāmeh, etc. Most of the names in this heroic family also exist in Bahmannāmeh. The names belonging to women are fewer than those belonging to men.