Kayanids

The Kayanids (also Kayanian, Kaianids or Kays ) are a semi-mythological dynasty of the Greater Iranian tradition. Generally speaking, the Kayanid kings are the heroes of the Avesta , the holy books of Zoroastrianism , and the Shahnameh , the national epic of the Iranian world. Some scholars, such as Biruni , equated the Kayanids with the Persian Achaemenid dynasty .

The epithet Kai is derived from the Middle and Neo-Persian Kay (an) from the Avestian Kavi or Kauui , which can mean king and also poet-sacrifice or poet-priest . The word is also etymologically related to the avestic term kavaēm kharēno ( divine royal splendor ), which the kayanid kings are said to have had. The Kiani crown was the manifestation of this belief.

In the scriptures

A first indication of the great legends of kayanidischen Kings found in the Yaschts of Avesta, where the dynasty offereth to the gods, so their support and strength for their neverending struggle against their enemies, the Anaryas, sometimes called Turanian referred to gain.

In the Yasht 5, 9, 25 and 17; 45-46, Haosravah, later known as Kai Chosrau , worshiped with Zarathustra and Jamasp, the premier of the patron Zarathustras Wishtaspa in Airyanem Vaejah . King Haosravah is said to have united the various Aryan tribes into one nation ( Yasht 5, 49; 9, 21; 15, 32; 17, 41).

In tradition and poetry

The Sassanid king Chosrau II Parwez (590-628) ordered a collection of legends about the Kayanids. The result was the Khwaday-Namag , "The Book of Lords", a long historiography of the Iranian nation from the primeval Gayomarth to the reign of Chosraus II, with events arranged in the order of the fifty kings and queens.

The collection may well have been ordered because of the decline or fading of national spirit or self-confidence. There were disastrous global climate changes in 535-536 and the Justinian Plague , and the Iranians would find the solace they needed in the collected legends of their past.

After the collapse of the Sassanid Empire and the rise of Islam, the legends of the Kayanids were increasingly forgotten until the Samanids revived Iranian culture. Together with the information from the Avesta, the Khwaday-Namag served as the basis for other epic prose collections such as that of Abu Mansur Abd al-Razzaq, but which are lost. The revival also led to the resurgence of Zoroastrian literature, such as the work Denkard ( Acts of Religion ), which also contains a history of the Kayanids in book 7, 1. The most famous work of this type was Firdausi's Shāhnāme , which is written entirely in verse.

Some Kayanid rulers and princes

• Kai Kobad
• Kai Kawus
• Kai Chosrau
• Lohrāsp
• Goštāsp
• Esfandiyar
• Bahman
• Kai Darab
• Siyawasch

literature

• Friedrich Rückert : Firdosi's Book of Kings (Schahname) Sage I-XIII. Edited from the estate by EA Bayer . Reimer, Berlin 1890 (reprint: epubli GmbH, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86931-356-6 ).
• Friedrich Rückert: Firdosi's Book of Kings (Schahname) Sage XX-XXVI. Edited from the estate by EA Bayer. Reimer, Berlin 1895 (reprint: epubli, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86931-555-3 ) ( full text ).
• Maneckji N. Dhalla: Zoroastrian Civilization . Oxford University Press, New York 1922
• Kayanids . In: Ehsan Yarshater (Ed.): Encyclopædia Iranica (English, including references)
• Ilya Gershevitch: The Avestan Hymn to Mithra , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1959, pp. 185-186