Cruelty and Torture in Iranian Myths and Epics (With Emphasis on Shāhnāmeh)

Torture is one of the oldest phenomena in human social and political life .The history of nations has witnessed the heinous acts of humans, atrocious acts such as mutilation, deflagrate, skinning and so on, which often led to a painful death of the others. It is very wonderful that, aligning with the powerful rulers, sometimes the men of religion have also approved these acts. By using descriptive and analytical method, the author of the present article tries to allude briefly to the quality and quantity of torture in ancient Iran and to investigate it in some Persian epics in general and in the Shāhnāmeh in particular. The results, as the Shāhnāmeh testifies, show that types of torture, with different motives, were used in pre-Islamic Iran, and Ferdowsi, with all his attachment to Iranian culture, has reported these obscure points of the Iranian history. After the unification of the powerful and religious men and to suppress the oppositions and to gain legitimacy and power, the hardest tortures were used to apply.