A Great Catastrophe in Iran’s Paradise (Part II)

The earth kept trembling, the birds and the forest animals fled, and the lake churned as great, towering waves crashed against the hills. The Iran-ban shouted for everyone to reach the hilltops and lift their children upward.

When the people of Sialk gathered atop the hill, they were so terrified they nearly collapsed. The ground had stilled, but the darkness was like night, and the lake’s waves assaulted the shores with such force that their roar nearly deafened the inhabitants of Sialk. Until that day, no one had seen such a tempest on the lake, and the waves destroyed a number of houses with everything in them.

People asked Rud what had happened and why the lake and sky had turned their wrath upon them, but she could not give her followers a convincing answer.

When the sun set and absolute darkness took hold everywhere, the hills began to quake. Rud, Zab, their children, and the other townspeople could not stand upon the hills; they were forced to sit so the violent motions of the earth would not hurl them down.

Ancient trees in the forest toppled under the earth’s violent shaking, the lake continued to batter the shores, and the air was so saturated with smoke that the people of Sialk could scarcely breathe.

It was dark on every side; Rud, Zab, and the others could not see the ground before them. Like the animals, they too turned southward and moved away. The mass flight of birds and forest creatures showed them that the danger came from the north and that the safe region lay in the south. But because of the deep darkness of night, they could not travel and did not know where they were going.

Rud told her followers, “If we remain alive until morning and the day grows light, we will set out and go south by land.” Everyone knew that, given the state of the lake, it was impossible to go south by boat; they would have to reach a safe region overland. No one knew what had befallen the inhabitants of other towns, including the people of Giyan—whether they still lived or whether the lake’s waves had drowned and destroyed them all.

That dreadful night—one we people of this age can scarcely even imagine—came to an end, dawn broke, and the air grew somewhat lighter. Rud said, “We must not delay any longer; we must set out and make for the south.”

People took their small children in their arms and began to move, putting distance between themselves and the lake. After they had gone some way, the sound of the waves diminished and then fell silent. That day the people of Sialk marched on without pause until night. At nightfall they stopped at a place Rud deemed suitable for rest, ate what they had brought from Sialk, and slept. The next day they continued on, and by midday they reached a place where the air was not so smoky and they could breathe easily.

Rud said, “Let us stop here and see what happens.” The people of Sialk halted and again ate the remnants of the provisions they had brought. They had no immediate worry about food, for the land around them was green and they knew they could hunt animals. But after hunting, they would have to eat the meat raw, and their fire-house in Sialk had gone out because there had been no one to feed it with wood.

People asked the Iran-ban what they should do for fire. Rud replied, “Just as the Iran-bans of old obtained fire, I will obtain fire for you as well.”

For ten days the people of Sialk ate raw meat there. Then, since the sky had cleared and the sun shone as before, they turned back toward Sialk; when they reached their city, they were astonished to see that the lake had receded so far that never in any age had its waters sunk so low.¹

When Rud reached Sialk, she was not overly concerned with the lake’s receding; she was thinking about fire. For when she went to the fire-house, she saw nothing there but ashes. The fire-house stood atop a hill, and during the storm the lake’s waters had not reached it to destroy it; but because there had been no one to lay wood upon the fire, it had gone out.

It had been one of the earlier Iran-bans—also a woman—who had brought fire from the forest and preserved it in Sialk; to keep it, she had a house built by her followers and placed the fire within it. From then on, the people of Sialk laid pieces of firewood upon the coals and kept the flame from dying.

After Rud saw that the fire had gone out, she told her followers, “From now on we must eat raw food and pass the cold season without fire.”

“Tir,” the boatwoman mentioned earlier, pointed north with her finger and said, “That smoke shows there is fire there.” Indeed, smoke could be seen to the north, and Rud sent a number of men to go there and bring back fire if they found it, while the others made the fire-house ready to receive the new flame.

Contrary to Rud’s fears, fire proved not to be a grave problem, for volcanic materials had set the northern forests ablaze; when the people of Sialk returned to their city, those forests were still burning. Those who had gone to fetch fire found it easily, brought it back to Sialk, and placed it in the fire-house. Once again the inhabitants of that city could cook their food. Rud’s father, a potter, began making pots and at the same time commenced smelting copper; one may say with confidence that Rud’s father was the first to smelt copper as described, and that the first furnace for smelting that metal was built in Sialk, near present-day Kashan.

The lowering of the lake did not seem significant to Rud or to the others; only Tir, the young woman, and Zab, Rud’s husband—who used to travel back and forth across the lake by boat—were saddened by the water’s decline. Tir said, “I can no longer travel to Giyan, nor can I go to the northeast to bring fowl from there.”

In the days that followed, the lake’s waters fell still further, and one morning, when the people of Sialk awoke and looked out toward the lake, they saw that nothing remained at its bottom but mud.

1- Attributing the drying of the “Central Iranian Sea” to a sudden event such as an earthquake or volcanic eruption is largely narrative in nature—likely a simplification used to compress Sialk’s ecological phases into a single storyline. In the period relevant to Sialk, the process was not a one-day, catastrophic event; it was the outcome of gradual climatic change and water-budget dynamics within an endorheic basin, a trajectory that unfolded over centuries and millennia with intermittent fluctuations and shifting habitability margins.