Kayumars: The First King and the First Man
- Dala Sarkis
- 3 days ago
- 11 min read
Introduction
At the very beginning of the Iranic story, before all the kings and heroes, stands a single towering figure who is at once the first king of the world and the first human being. He is Kayumars, known in the old religion as Gayomard, the primordial sovereign from whom the whole long tradition flows. With him the world of humankind begins.
In the great epic he is the first shah, the mountain-dwelling king clad with his people in leopard-skins, under whom the arts of civilized life first appeared, and in whose peaceful reign humans and animals lived together in harmony. But that golden dawn was broken by the first death, when his beloved son Siamak was slain by the demons of Ahriman, and the first grief and the first vengeance entered the world, carried out by his grandson Hushang.
In the older sacred tradition, Kayumars is something deeper still: Gayomard, the first man, one of the primordial creations of the Wise Lord, who endured the onslaught of evil and from whose very body the metals of the earth were formed and from whose seed the whole human race sprang. He is the threshold of the world, the figure in whom the Iranic imagination placed the beginning of humanity itself, in both its civilization and its mortality.
Contents
Who Is Kayumars?
Kayumars (in the Avestan language Gaya Maretan, in the old religion Gayomard) is the first king of the world and the first human being in Iranic mythology. The name means something like the living mortal. In the Shahnameh he is the first shah, the mountain-dwelling sovereign clad in leopard-skins under whom civilization began, the father of Siamak and grandfather of Hushang. In Zoroastrian cosmology he is Gayomard, the first man and one of the primordial creations, from whose body came the earth's metals and from whose seed the first human couple, Mashya and Mashyana, arose.
Key Takeaways
Kayumars is the first king of the world and the first man of Iranic myth.
In the Shahnameh he is the mountain king under whom civilization began.
His son Siamak was slain by the demons, the first death in the world.
His grandson Hushang avenged Siamak and succeeded him as king.
In Zoroastrian myth he is Gayomard, one of the primordial creations.
From his body came metals, and from his seed the first human couple.
Quick Facts
Names: Kayumars (Persian); Avestan Gaya Maretan; Pahlavi Gayomard
Meaning: The living mortal, from words for life and mortal
Type: The first king of the world and, in religion, the first man
Titles: Garshah, King of the Mountains; Pishdad, the first lawgiver
In the Shahnameh: First king; dwelt in the mountains clad in leopard-skins
In Zoroastrian myth: The sixth of the seven primordial creations
His son: Siamak, slain by the Black Demon, the first death
His grandson: Hushang, who avenged Siamak and succeeded him
His legacy in religion: Metals from his body; humankind from his seed
Attestation: The Avesta and the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi
The First King of the World
The Book of Kings opens with Kayumars, the first sovereign of the world. He and his people dwelt in the mountains and clothed themselves in the skins of leopards, and he bore the title Garshah, the King of the Mountains. Under his rule, the tradition says, the arts of settled life first began: he taught humankind how to prepare food, established the ceremonies and customs of kingship, and brought the first order and justice to the world, for which he was remembered as a lawgiver, a Pishdad. The Wise Lord, Ahura Mazda, granted him the farr, the divine radiance reserved for true kings.
His reign of thirty years was a golden dawn, a time of peace and civility in which, the tradition tells, humankind and the animals lived together in harmony and all the beasts of the world paid homage to him. It is the epic's image of the world in its first innocence, before evil had fully entered it, with the first king as a kind of benevolent father to all living things. But such innocence could not last, and the shadow of the destroyer was already gathering.
The First Death: Siamak and the Black Demon
Kayumars had a son, the handsome prince Siamak, who was beloved of all the world, with a single terrible exception. The evil spirit Ahriman, who hated the harmony and happiness of the first king's reign, looked upon Siamak with envy and malice, and resolved to destroy him. He raised an army of demons under the command of his own monstrous son, the Black Demon, and sent them against the unsuspecting world of humankind.
In the clash that followed, the noble Siamak was slain by the Black Demon. It was the first death, the moment when mortality and grief entered the young world, and the first open war between humankind and the powers of darkness. The first king, who had ruled over a world of peace, was plunged into the first sorrow, mourning the beloved son who had been taken from him by evil. The golden age was ended, and the long struggle of light against dark had begun.
The First Vengeance
Kayumars mourned his son for a year, until, the tradition tells, the angel-messenger Soroush, the voice of the divine, came to him and counselled him to dry his tears and make war upon the demons who had brought death into the world. By now Siamak's own son, Kayumars's grandson Hushang, had grown to manhood, and it was he who would carry out the first vengeance.
Hushang gathered a great host, and the tradition paints it as an army not only of warriors but of the creatures of the world: fairies and leopards, lions and wolves, tigers and birds, all marching behind the young prince. They fell upon the Black Demon and his host and destroyed them, and the slayer of Siamak was himself laid low. The first death was avenged, the powers of darkness were thrown back, and Kayumars, his grief at last answered, died in peace, leaving the throne of the world to his grandson Hushang, who would go on to discover fire and found the arts of civilization.
Gayomard: The First Man
Beneath the epic's first king lies a far older and deeper figure: Gayomard, the first man of the Zoroastrian creation, whose Avestan name, Gaya Maretan, means the living mortal. In the sacred cosmology he is not merely the first king but the very first human being, the ancestor from whom all humankind descends, and one of the primordial creations of Ahura Mazda at the dawn of the world. He was the first to accept the Wise Lord's teaching, the forefather of the people.
In the great sequence of creation, the Wise Lord fashioned the world in stages, the sky, the waters, the earth, the plants, the primordial Ox, and then Gayomard the first man, and finally fire distributed through all things. Gayomard and the primeval Ox were the two great living prototypes, created in the middle of the earth in the pure first land, and from this pair, after the coming of death, the animal and human worlds would be born. He stands at the head of the human race as the Ox stands at the head of the animals.
The Cosmic Combat and the Birth of Humankind
The myth tells that Gayomard and the Ox first existed for three thousand years in a purely spiritual state, motionless and serene, and that the mere existence of the radiant first man held the evil spirit stunned and powerless. Then the Wise Lord brought Gayomard into bodily form, white and brilliant and shining like the sun, in the shape of a youth of fifteen, with a seed whose origin was in fire. But the time of the great assault came, and Ahriman broke upon the good creation, bringing sickness and death. Gayomard endured the onslaught for thirty years before at last he fell, and with his death, death itself entered the world.
Yet from that first death came life. The tradition tells that from Gayomard's body came the metals and minerals of the earth, the gold and silver and iron hidden in the rock, and that from his seed, purified and received by the earth, there grew after forty years a rhubarb plant, from which arose the first human couple, Mashya and Mashyana, the man and woman from whom all humankind is descended. So the first man's death was not an ending but a beginning, the source of the human race and the riches of the earth, an image that looks forward across the whole of cosmic time to its mirror at the world's end in the great renewal, the Frashokereti.
Symbolism
Kayumars is the great threshold figure of the Iranic imagination, the point at which humanity begins. As the first king he embodies the origin of civilization itself, the first ordering of human life into kingship, law, food and society, and the first innocent harmony of the world before evil. As the first man, Gayomard, he embodies the origin of the human race and even of the substance of the earth, the dignity of the mortal being from whose death life and the metals are born. He is, in both faces, the dawn.
His story carries one of the deepest of all the tradition's themes: that of life arising out of death. The first king's reign is broken by the first death, but that death is avenged and gives way to the long unfolding of human history; the first man falls under the assault of evil, but from his fallen body and seed come the metals of the earth and the whole of humankind. In Kayumars the Iranic mind contemplated the price and the promise of mortality itself, the truth that the living mortal, as his very name declares, is the one who must die, and yet whose death becomes the seedbed of all that follows.
From Kayumars to the Kings
Kayumars stands at the very head of the long line of Iranic kings, the founder of the dynasty that tradition calls the Pishdadian. After him came his grandson Hushang, the discoverer of fire, and then Hushang's son Tahmuras the demon-binder, and after them the dazzling figure of Jamshid, under whom the world reached its golden age before pride brought him low.
From this beginning the whole great river of the epic flows: the tyranny of the serpent-king Zahhak, the rebellion of the blacksmith and the triumph of the hero-king Faridun, the long wars of Iran and Turan, the tragedies of the heroes. All of it begins with the first king in his leopard-skins upon the mountain, the figure in whom the tradition placed the very first morning of the human world. To begin the Book of Kings with Kayumars is to begin with the birth of humanity itself.
Kayumars and the Kurds
As the first king and first man of the Iranic tradition, Kayumars belongs to the shared heritage of all the Iranic peoples, the Kurds among them. The whole story of the first sovereign and the dawn of humankind is part of the common Iranic inheritance that the Kurds carry alongside their own beloved legends, and the image of a mountain-dwelling first king, clad in the skins of beasts and ruling from the high places, speaks with a special closeness to a people whose life and freedom have always been bound up with the mountains.
As always with this heritage, it would be wrong to claim Kayumars as a uniquely Kurdish figure. He is the common inheritance of a whole family of peoples, and his fullest forms are in the Persian epic of Ferdowsi and in the Zoroastrian scriptures. But the Kurds may rightly count this first of all kings among the legends of their wider world, the figure of the very beginning, in whom the long story that they too inherit first opens upon the mountains at the dawn of time.
Debates and Misconceptions
Is Kayumars the first king or the first man? He is both, in two different but related traditions. In the Shahnameh he is chiefly the first king of the world, the founder of human society; in the older Zoroastrian cosmology he is Gayomard, the first human being and a primordial creation. The two pictures were blended over time, the epic keeping the royal first king and the religion preserving the cosmic first man, and both belong to the one great figure.
Is Kayumars simply the Iranic Adam? The parallel is real but not exact. In the cosmology it is the couple Mashya and Mashyana, sprung from Gayomard's seed, who are closest to the biblical first pair, while Gayomard himself is the primordial ancestor who comes before them. The Iranic creation is its own ancient tradition, with a likely cousin in the first-man figures of the related Indian myths, rather than a borrowing from the book of Genesis, even where the themes rhyme. The death of the first man giving rise to the metals and to humankind is a distinctively Iranic vision.
Was Kayumars a historical king? No, he is a purely mythological and cosmological figure, belonging to the world of creation-myth and legend rather than to history. He appears in the ancient Avesta as Gaya Maretan, the first man of the sacred tradition, and in the epic as the first king of the legendary age. His story is the poetry of beginnings, not a record of any real reign.
Related Topics
Hushang and Tahmuras: the grandson who avenged Siamak, and the culture-hero kings who followed
Jamshid: the splendid later king of the golden age
Ahriman: the evil spirit who brought the first death
The Divs: the demons whose Black Demon slew Siamak
Ahura Mazda: the Wise Lord who created Gayomard the first man
The Shahnameh: the Book of Kings, which opens with Kayumars
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Kayumars?
Kayumars is the first king of the world and the first human being in Iranic mythology, known in the old religion as Gayomard. In the Shahnameh he is the mountain-dwelling first shah under whom civilization began; in Zoroastrian cosmology he is the first man and a primordial creation, ancestor of all humankind.
What does the name Kayumars mean?
The Avestan name, Gaya Maretan, means something like the living mortal or the mortal life, from words meaning life and mortal. It captures his nature exactly: he is the first of the mortals, the living being who must die, and whose death becomes the source of the human race.
How did the first death come into the world?
Kayumars's beloved son Siamak was slain by the Black Demon, a monstrous son of the evil spirit Ahriman, who envied the harmony of the first king's reign. This was the first death and the first war between humankind and the powers of darkness, ending the golden innocence of the first age.
Who avenged Siamak?
Siamak's son Hushang, the grandson of Kayumars, avenged him. Counselled by the angel Soroush, Hushang led a great army, including the beasts of the world, against the Black Demon and destroyed him. Kayumars then died in peace, leaving the throne to Hushang.
How did humankind arise from Gayomard?
In the Zoroastrian creation myth, when the first man Gayomard was slain by the assault of evil, the metals of the earth formed from his body, and from his seed there grew after forty years a rhubarb plant, from which arose the first human couple, Mashya and Mashyana, the ancestors of all people.
Was Kayumars a real king?
No, he is a mythological and cosmological figure, not a historical monarch. He belongs to the world of creation-myth and legend, appearing in the ancient Avesta as the first man and in the Shahnameh as the first king of the legendary age, rather than to any recorded history.
References and Further Reading
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