Simurgh and Kurdish Sîmir: Epic Guardian, Folktale Helper and Mystical Bird

The Simurgh appears in Iranian religious writing, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, Kurdish folktales and Attar’s mystical poetry. These sources give the bird different roles: foster parent, healer, traveller between worlds and the goal of a spiritual journey.

An old name and a tree of seeds

Hanns-Peter Schmidt traces Simurgh through Middle Persian Sēnmurw to the Avestan bird Saēna. In the Avesta, its tree stands in the cosmic sea and holds medicinal plants and their seeds. Later Pahlavi accounts describe the bird shaking seeds loose, with another bird helping their dispersal through rain. These passages connect the creature with the renewal of vegetation. The surviving texts preserve variations in its nature and actions. [1]

The bird who raises Zal

In Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, Sam abandons his white-haired infant Zal in the mountains. The Simurgh takes the child to her nest and raises him with her chicks. When travellers see Zal as a young man, news reaches Sam, who returns in remorse. Zal is reluctant to leave the bird that has cared for him. Before their separation she gives him feathers to burn when he needs her help. The Smithsonian’s account emphasises this difficult parting, making foster care and reconciliation central to the episode. [2] Later, the bird’s instructions help save Rudabeh during Rostam’s extraordinary birth. [1]

Healing and the cost of victory

The primary text of the Rostam–Esfandiyar episode shows Zal summoning the Simurgh after Rostam and his horse Rakhsh are wounded. She removes arrows and tends their injuries. Her guidance also leads Rostam to the tamarisk branch used for his fatal shot at Esfandiyar. Before doing so, she warns that the person responsible for Esfandiyar’s death will suffer. Healing and foresight therefore lead into the epic’s tragedy: survival carries consequences for the family she protects. [3]

Sîmir in recorded Kurdish tales

Schmidt describes Kurdish Sīmīr stories in which a hero saves the bird’s young from a snake and receives help, including flight to a distant place or escape from the underworld. [1] Alexey Lyavdansky’s comparative study gives these traditions a more specific documentary setting. It identifies a tale of Mîrzâ Mehmud and Teyrê Sîmîr recorded in Tbilisi by Hejiyê Cindî from Têliyê Esedê Biro, and another bird tale preserved in German translation in the Yas collection. The study compares Kurmanji and Christian Neo-Aramaic narratives of Mîrza Mihemed/Mirza Pamat. Named collectors, narrators and versions show how a widely circulating helper-bird motif takes form in particular storytelling communities. [4]

Attar’s thirty birds

In Attar’s Conference of the Birds, a hoopoe guides the birds towards the Simurgh. The journey passes through seven valleys and ends with thirty survivors confronting the mystery of their own reflection in the bird they sought. Yumiko Kamada interprets the poem through Sufi teaching: the hoopoe as spiritual guide, the journey as the path and the Simurgh as the Divine. The Persian expression sī murgh, thirty birds, supplies the poem’s famous wordplay; the name’s older linguistic history lies in Saēna. [5] [1]

Looking at a manuscript image

The illustration above belongs to a Shahnameh folio dated about 1300–1330 by the Metropolitan Museum. At the bottom of the page the large bird stands beside white-haired Zal, while Sam kneels before him; attendants and a horse occupy the right side. Painted in ink, opaque watercolour, silver and gold, the small scene turns reunion into a visible arrangement of gestures and figures. It is one historical artist’s interpretation of the story within the manuscript tradition. [6]

Sources and further reading

1. Hanns-Peter Schmidt, Simorḡ, Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2002: religious texts, epic and Kurdish tale parallels.
2. Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, Zal and the Simurgh: the abandonment, upbringing and reunion episode.
3. Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, Rostam and Esfandiyar, part 26: Persian primary text on Ganjoor.
4. Alexey Lyavdansky, Mîrza Mihemed / Mirza Pamat: The Tales of the Fabled Hero in Kurdish and Neo-Aramaic Oral Sources, Oral Tradition 35/2, 2022, pp. 419–440, especially the comparison of recorded Kurdish versions.
5. Yumiko Kamada, The Mantiq al-tair (Language of the Birds) of 1487, Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 2010.
6. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Zal is Restored to his Father Sam by the Simurgh, ca. 1300–1330, object 69.74.1.