After Rud the Second and her husband Tam went to the city of Giyan (near present-day Nahavand), a chronic and unprecedented ailment appeared in Sialk: severe intestinal pain accompanied by diarrhea and fever. Rud could not understand what the illness was or how it should be treated. Those who contracted it would recover, and only rarely did anyone die; but they would become afflicted with the same illness again and suffer intensely from abdominal pain. However, after some time had passed, the disease grew more severe, and a number of the afflicted perished; their bodies were taken to the hill called “Gom” and placed there until the corpses decayed and disappeared.
In other cities of Iran people also sometimes caught the disease and died, but in Sialk the number of cases was higher and the death rate greater. The dangerous illness spread in Sialk to such a degree that some inhabitants, fearing it, abandoned their homes and emigrated. Yet those same people, after migrating, would still contract the same disease and either recover or die. No one knew that what caused the illness was food cooked in copper vessels. Although the advance of civilization had made life easier for the Iranians, it also produced that deadly consequence.
The Iranians’ copper pots would rust, and they did not know that cooking food in copper vessels—since copper rusts—was dangerous. And because Sialk was Iran’s industrial center and copper was produced only in that city, its inhabitants used copper for cooking more than the people of other regions of Iran; hence the death toll from the rust of copper utensils there was higher than elsewhere.
The mighty empire of ancient Rome was undone by lead vessels. The Romans were accustomed to cook and eat their food in lead containers, and we know the Roman nation comprised two classes: free Romans and slaves. The great Roman Empire was founded by the free Romans, who used lead vessels; all of them gradually fell victim to lead poisoning (a disease that still threatens those who work with lead today) and died. But the slaves, who could not afford costly lead vessels and cooked in earthenware and ate from wooden bowls, survived; and since they lacked the aptitude and experience to govern, they were unable to preserve the Roman Empire, and that great empire fell.
Thousands of years before the Roman Empire was ruined by metal vessels, copper utensils in the city of Sialk laid the groundwork for the decline of that city’s brilliant civilization. People who until then had been healthy, strong, and beautiful, like the children of Adam, after eating a single meal from rusted vessels suffered severe intestinal pain, then developed a fever that soon felled them. If they were young, they might resist and be cured; otherwise they departed this world. Even those who were young, after recovering from the first illness, would fall ill again, until the vigor of their constitutions was spent and they died. Because of cooking food in rusted copper vessels, the population of Sialk dwindled so greatly that it nearly vanished.
Rud, the Iran-ban, and her husband Zab fell ill multiple times from copper rust. In the end, once again, the admirable intelligence of Iran’s queen saved the remaining inhabitants of Sialk from annihilation: Rud realized that every time she cooked in earthenware she remained well, but when she cooked food in a copper vessel she became sick. Thus she resolved never again to cook food in copperware, and instructed the city’s survivors to cook only in earthenware. The people accepted her counsel, and they no longer cooked food in copper vessels.
