Introduction
Keyumars is the first king in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, the legendary history of Iran, and, in the epic's own telling, the first man as well as the first ruler, combining these two roles into a single founding figure. In the wider Zoroastrian tradition, a closely related figure, Gayomard, fills an equivalent role as the primordial human from whom all later humanity descends.
Family
- Son: Siyamak
First king of the world
Ferdowsi describes Keyumars as living in the mountains, clothed in leopard skin, the first to establish the concept of kingship (farr-e shahi, royal glory) and to teach his people the beginnings of civilisation, ruling over a golden-age world of harmony between humans and animals.
Conflict with Angra Mainyu
Keyumars's reign is troubled by the hostility of Angra Mainyu (Ahriman), whose son, the Black Div, kills Keyumars's own son Siyamak before he can succeed his father, an early sign of the cosmic struggle between good and evil that runs throughout the Shahnameh's legendary history.
Gayomard in Zoroastrian tradition
In the Zoroastrian Bundahishn and related Pahlavi texts, Gayomard (a name closely related to Keyumars) is described in more explicitly cosmogonic terms as the first human, created by Ahura Mazda alongside the primordial bull, and killed by Angra Mainyu's assault on creation; from Gayomard's seed, in this tradition, springs the first human couple, Mashya and Mashyana, and through them all of later humanity. The relationship between the Shahnameh's more historicised, legendary Keyumars and the Zoroastrian tradition's more cosmogonic Gayomard reflects the way Ferdowsi's epic, composed centuries after the Arab conquest of Iran, drew on and reshaped older Zoroastrian material into a continuous royal history.