In Persian myth, the first human couple sprouted from a rhubarb plant
Iranian mythology frames the whole of time as a 12,000-year contest between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, light against darkness. Along the way it gives us a tyrant with serpents growing from his shoulders, a blacksmith who overthrows him, the giant bird Simurgh, and a first man and woman who grew as twin rhubarb stalks.
The myths come from ancient Persians and other Iranian peoples across a wide cultural zone that the Encyclopaedia Iranica calls the Iranian cultural continent, stretching into Central Asia, South Asia and the Caucasus. The oldest traces sit in the Avesta's hymns, especially the Yashts, which allude to stories only briefly. Fuller versions appear in Middle Persian Zoroastrian works such as the Bundahishn and Denkard, compiled in the early Islamic era from late Sasanian material, and above all in Ferdowsi's epic Shahnameh, the Book of Kings; Ferdowsi lived from 940 to 1020 CE.
A curious mirror links Iran and India, whose mythologies share roots, names and a reverence for fire. Both inherited two classes of divine beings, ahuras and daevas, but swapped their moral signs: in India the ahuras turned wicked and the devas good, while in Iran the ahuras became good and the daevas demons. Characters are mostly sharply good or evil. Ahriman's helpers, the divs and druj, come in male and female forms, and Zoroastrian texts promise that Ahura Mazda will finally destroy him.
Creation unfolds in four ages of 3,000 years. Ahura Mazda and Ahriman are born from Zurvan; after a pact to fight their last battle nine thousand years later, Ahura Mazda recites a sacred prayer that leaves Ahriman senseless in hell for three millennia. In that interval the sky, water, earth, plants, animals and humans are made in one year, remembered in six festivals called Gahambars. When Ahriman returns, a rhubarb stalk grows forty years later from the seed of Keyumars, producing Mashya and Mashyana, the parents of humankind, whose first lie comes when Ahriman invades their minds.
Heroes and creatures fill the canvas. Zahhak, the emblem of despotism, has two snakes growing from his shoulders that regrow whenever they are cut off, until Kaveh leads a popular revolt against him. Birds usually signal good fortune: the mighty Simurgh, and the Huma, whose plume decorated Persian crowns as a sign of victory. The peri began as a beautiful but wicked woman and softened over time into something lovelier and less dangerous. Early cosmology pictured a flat, plate-like world under a sky of stone hard as diamond, divided into seven regions.
Source: Persian mythology
