The new capital of Iran was preferable to Sialk in every respect, except that it lay on the path of the Turanians.
The inhabitants by Lake “Hamun,” when they realized that the Iran-ban was moving the capital to their land, were very pleased and regarded that event as one of the sun’s blessings, and they gained confidence that once the Iran-ban had moved to the shores of Lake Hamun, he would prevent Turanian incursions.
When the capital of Iran was transferred to the shore of Lake Hamun, the Iranians’ civilization had solidified, and the nation of Iran, in the true sense of the word, counted as a civilized nation; for in addition to living in cities, they smelted metal, farmed, raised domestic animals, and wove cloth.
But to the east of Iran’s capital lived the Turanians, who were neither inclined to agriculture and animal husbandry, nor did they work metal, nor could they weave cloth; they merely made use of fire, a usage they had learned from the Iranians.
A few months after the Iran-ban moved to the shores of Lake Hamun, the greatest Turanian attack—what can be considered the first large-scale incursion by the people of Turan—began against Iran, and thousands of hungry Turanian men and women, to fill their bellies and plunder whatever they could carry off, attacked Iran’s capital, which, by virtue of the name “Zab,” later came to be called the country of Zab and “Zabolestan.”1
“Rud II,” the Iran-ban’s daughter, popularized in Zabolestan the craft she had established in the city of “Giyan,” and we know that craft was weaving.
“Tem,” the husband of Rud II, who—as we said—was a strapping young man, could not keep still owing to youthful strength and vigor; and after he moved with his wife and children to the shores of Lake Hamun—since his time was no longer taken up with smithing (for the Iranians made their implements out of copper)—he would roam and hunt across the plains around Lake Hamun and, in the course of roaming and hunting, reached the northern regions that had mountains.
It should be known that Iran’s lands in antiquity differed from today; even over the last hundred years noticeable changes have appeared in Iran’s terrain. Part of these changes was due to nature, and part due to people.
Nature, through the process known in English as “erosion,” altered a vast portion of Iran’s soil; the land lost its moisture, and forested and pasture-covered areas turned into desert. People, too, by being unable to foresee what would become of their lands in the future, abetted the transformation of the land: they destroyed forests and dried up pastures, and as a result, vast arid deserts came into being in Iran.
When Tem set out to roam and hunt across the surrounding plains, including the northern plains, Iran’s lands were wooded, and wooded knolls existed in the regions that today are in southern Khorasan(A province in Iran).
There Tem saw an animal he had not seen in Sialk or Giyan. The animal had long ears and hooves, and at times a deep, terrifying sound could be heard from it.
Tem observed that this animal, which lived on the mountain slopes, had two kinds: one kind had long ears and was white or gray; the other had smaller ears but was striped, with parallel lines.
Tem managed to capture two striped animals and bring them to Zabolestan, and from then on the region where hoofed, striped animals lived was named by Tem “Kuhestan” (“the mountains”), a name that has endured to this day, albeit in the form “Qohestan.”
The animals Tem brought, called “gur,”(“Zebra“) were domesticated, and when the people of Zabolestan realized they could use this handsome animal for pack-carrying and riding, they went to the mountains, captured gurs, brought them to Zabolestan, and domesticated them.
With Tem’s help, the inhabitants of Zabolestan realized that a kind of that animal with longer ears could be domesticated more quickly and used for riding and pack-carrying. Thus they turned their attention to keeping the “long-ear (donkey),” and transferred many of those animals from the regions of today’s southern Khorasan to Zabolestan.2
During Tem’s excursions in the mountains south of today’s Khorasan, a kind of stone caught his eye, and he took it back to the shores of Lake Hamun. Since the Iranians knew the practice of smelting metal, they smelted that stone and, to their amazement and delight, saw a metal like copper flow. At first they thought the metal was copper and wanted to make vessels, knives, and axes from it. Then they realized that metal was very soft and unsuitable for making vessels and tools. So, to make it workable, they smelted it with copper, and then, with elation, saw they could make things from the mixture of the two metals that were sturdier than copper vessels and tools; thus “mofragh (bronze)” came into being. After a time the Iranians learned that if they coated copper with the soft metal (which we now know is tin), copper would no longer rust; and once they safeguarded copper from rusting with tin, the danger of copper vessels disappeared and no one fell ill from cooking in copper pots. Tem and other young men, who spent much of their time roaming and hunting, also found lead in addition to tin.
They were strong men with good constitutions, and, like all people of old, were curious about the phenomena of nature. When their eyes fell in the mountains upon a stone of an unprecedented color—one they had not seen before—they would pick it up, carry it to town, and show it to others; and since they knew metallic stones could be smelted, they would place it in the furnace to be smelted.
The Iranians were the first nation to recognize iron, to find its ore, and to put it in a furnace to smelt—yet they could not smelt it, because iron would not melt in the primitive furnaces of the Iranians, and those furnaces’ heat could not smelt iron.
The Iranians knew well that what they had put in the furnace was a metal that would not liquefy and flow, and for that reason they called it “ā-han” or “ā-gan,” meaning “non-meltable” or “something that does not melt.” But in the end they smelted iron too and were able to make all kinds of things from it.
Today we cannot specify precisely the date of iron smelting in Iran, but we know that iron was smelted in southern Khorasan and Zabolestan, though we cannot say whether the iron ore was found there or brought from elsewhere. And just as the Iranians were the first industrial nation in the world, they were the first people to make copper and bronze and to whiten copper vessels with tin so they would not rust. The Iranians were the first nation to introduce iron, in the form of molten metal, to the world; and although later other peoples (especially those living in what is now Turkey) became skilled at making iron tools and implements, ironworking is an industry the Iranians taught to other peoples.3
If the nation of Iran had not smelted iron and made various implements from it, industrial civilization might have been delayed a thousand years.
At that time, the Iranians had not yet succeeded in smelting iron (though they made bronze) when a dreadful event occurred in Zabolestan.
Rud, the Iran-ban, and his city Zab, and Rud II and her husband Tem, and others were engaged in their usual tasks in Zabolestan—farming, smelting metals, and weaving cloth—when suddenly the great Turanian invasion began.
It should be noted that contrary to the notion of Eastern historians who wrote Iran’s history after Islam, the land of Turan lay to the east of Zabolestan, not north of Khorasan.
Turan was where today lie Pakistan’s Baluchistan, the land of the Pathans, and part of the surrounding regions. The Turanians lived in that vast land without farming or attempting animal husbandry; their means of subsistence was hunting. But game was not always obtainable, and at times desert animals, due to drought and the disappearance of forage, migrated, leaving the Turanians hungry.
Hunger tormented the Turanians so much that, to obtain provisions, they resolved to attack Zabolestan—where they knew provisions were abundant and great numbers of sheep, cattle, fowl, ducks, and donkeys could be found.
They knew the inhabitants of Zabolestan were strong men and women who would not easily surrender their provisions and herds and would kill them; but hunger had made the Turanians ready to die, and they thought they must fill their bellies even if they were killed afterward.
Tens of thousands of hungry Turanian men and women, armed with cudgels, and some with copper knives (taken from the Iranians), attacked Zabolestan.
The Turanians had attacked Zabolestan before, and the Iranians had repelled them many times; but never had it happened that the Turanians launched an assault with such ferocity, intensity, and numbers.
Turanian men and women killed every Iranian they saw and did not spare children either, for they possessed no kind of noble compassion. While hungry, they slaughtered cattle, sheep, fowl, and donkeys to fill their stomachs; and after they were sated, they killed the Iranians’ domestic animals simply to have killed them. They lacked the reason to keep those animals for themselves to benefit from later, and when they came upon fruit on a tree to eat, if they could, they would break the tree.
The effect of the Turanians’ sudden attack on Zabolestan resembled that of a terrifying storm coupled with a flood: those savages killed everyone they could along their path and utterly destroyed the domestic animals.
Tem, Rud II’s husband, knowing there were regions in the mountains where one could live, and realizing the Turanians could not be stopped, advised the Iran-ban to order the Iranians to migrate northward and live in the mountains (Qohestan).
The Iran-ban accepted his son-in-law’s counsel and announced to the Iranians that anyone who wished to save his life must migrate toward the mountains.
Some Iranians mounted oxen and donkeys, others went on foot; they left Zabolestan and set out for the mountains, taking with them whatever they wished, and—as usual—carried “fire” with them so they could use it in the mountains. At that time “fire-strikers” (also an Iranian invention) did not yet exist, and the Iranians had to keep constant watch over the fire so it would not go out; and after reaching the mountains south of present-day Khorasan, the first thing they did was build a house to protect the fire, place the fire in it, and assign people to constantly lay wood on it so it would not die out.
After killing great numbers of Iranians and forcing the rest to migrate, the Turanians became masters of the well-watered, verdant land of Zabolestan.
When the Iranians left Zabolestan, the fields were green, domestic animals lived in town and countryside, the chickens pecked at grain, and the fire burned in the fire-house.
Soon after the Iranians departed, the fire went out, and the Turanians slaughtered all the domestic animals and the poultry. Then the fields—and then the orchards, that is, areas with fruit-bearing trees—dried up, because the Turanians could not farm or raise domestic animals. Farming and animal husbandry, besides requiring insight, demanded hard work, and the Turanians did not wish to toil, being accustomed to filling their bellies without effort. It is clear that after the fields and orchards dried up, the weaving workshops of Zabolestan and the metal smelting furnaces ceased to operate, for there was no one left to weave or to smelt copper, tin, and lead and make bronze.
- The Persian suffix -estān (modern -stan), from Middle Persian -stān < Old Iranian (ultimately PIE steh₂- “to stand, place”), literally means “place/land/abode of …”—roughly “the place of,” “the region of,” or, by extension, “the country of.” Thus Zabol + estān → Zabolestān (“the land/region of Zabol”). The same formation appears widely across Iranian and adjacent geographies: Afghānistān (land of the Afghans), Tājikistān, Uzbəkistān, Qazāqistān/Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistān, Pakistān (“land of the pure,” from pāk “pure” + -stān), Kurdistān, Balūchistān, Sīstān, Nūristān, Wazīristān, Dāġistān, Tatarstan, Rājasthān (“land of kings”), Hindustān (“land of the Hind/Indus”). In English transliteration you’ll often see both -estān and -stan; both reflect the same Persian suffix.
- “Donkey is an animal that still lives in Iran, and likewise the gur(Zebra) had been one of Iran’s native animals, and the donkey’s breed spread from Iran to other countries of the world.” — Franz Altheim, German Iranologist.
- “The first people to make bronze were the Iranians, who created bronze by mixing copper and tin, and the first people to use tin to whiten copper were also the Iranians.” — attributed to Franz Altheim, German Iranologist.
