From Surf Wiki (app.surf) — the open knowledge base

Fereydun

Iranian mythical king and hero from the Pishdadian dynasty

Summary

Iranian mythical king and hero from the Pishdadian dynasty

Field	Value
honorific_prefix	PishdadianShah
name	Fereydun
honorific_suffix	A hero of Iranian myths and legends
image	King Faridun, Qajar Persia, mid-19th Century (cropped).jpg
alt
caption	Oil painting of Fereydun. Made in Qajar Iran during the mid-19th-century.
native_name	فریدون
birth_name
birth_date
birth_place	Tammisha
death_date

Fereydun (; New Persian: فریدون, Fereydūn/Farīdūn), also known as Thraētaona (), is a hero from Iranian mythical history and king from the Pishdadian dynasty. He is known as an emblem of victory, justice, and generosity in Persian literature.

According to Abolala Soudavar, Fereydun is partially a reflection of Cyrus the Great (), the first Achaemenid King of Kings.

Etymology

All of the forms of the name shown above derive, by regular sound laws, from Proto-Iranian *Θraitauna- (Avestan Θraētaona-) and Proto-Indo-Iranian *Traitaunas.

Traitaunas is a derivative (with augmentative suffix -una/-auna) of Tritas, the name of a deity or hero reflected in the Vedic Trita and the Avestan Θrita. Both names are identical to the adjective meaning "the third", a term used of a minor deity associated with two other deities to form a triad. In the Indian Vedas, Trita is associated with thunder gods and wind gods. Trita is also called Āptya, a name that is probably cognate with Āθβiya, the name of Thraetaona's father in the Avestā, Zoroastrian texts collated in the third century. Traitaunas may therefore be interpreted as "the great son of Tritas". The name was borrowed from Parthian into Classical Armenian as Hrudēn.

In Zoroastrian literature

In the Avesta, Thraetaona is the son of Aθβiya, and so is called Āθβiyāni, meaning "from the family of Aθβiya". He was recorded as the killer of the dragon Zahhak (Aži Dahāk). In Middle Persian texts, Dahāka/Dahāg was instead imprisoned on Mount Damavand in Amol.

In the ''Shahnameh''

According to Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, Fereydun was the son of Ābtin, one of the descendants of Jamšid. Fereydun, together with Kāve, revolted against the tyrannical king, Zahāk, defeated and arrested him in the Alborz Mountains. Afterwards, Fereydun became the king, married Arnavāz and, according to the myth, ruled the country for about 500 years. At the end of his life, he allocated his kingdom to his three sons, Salm, Tur, and Iraj.

Iraj was Fereydun's youngest and favored son, and inherited the best part of the kingdom, namely Iran. Salm inherited Anatolia ("Rûm", more generally meaning the Roman Empire, the Greco-Roman world, or just "the West"), and Tur inherited Central Asia ("Turān", all the lands north and east of the Amu Darya, as far as China), respectively. This aroused Iraj's brothers' envy, and encouraged them to murder him. After the murder of Iraj, Fereydun enthroned Iraj's grandson, Manučehr. Manučehr's attempt to avenge his grandfather's murder initiated the Iranian-Turanian wars.

References

Sources

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

longevity-myths mythological-kings pishdadian-dynasty cyrus-the-great dragonslayers shahnameh-characters persian-mythology legendary-iranian-people iranian-folklore

Want to explore this topic further?

Ask Mako anything about Fereydun — get instant answers, deeper analysis, and related topics.

Research with Mako

Free with your Surf account

Content sourced from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This content may have been generated or modified by AI. CloudSurf Software LLC is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of AI-generated content. Always verify important information from primary sources.

Report