1. Abu al-Qasem Ferdowsi, The Shahnameh, ed. J. Khalighi-Motlaqh (Costa Mesa, CA, and New York: Mazda Publishers, 1990), 2:118–99. For English translation see The Tragedy of Sohrab and Rostam, trans. J. W. Clinton, rev. ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), and D. Davis’s excellent prose and verse translation, The Lion and the Throne (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 1998), 209–36. In reading of Sohrab’s story as an identity quest, I was inspired by A. D. Smith’s interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos in his National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991; and Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1993), 1–4.
2. Ibid., 127. For Faridun’s division of the world in the Shahnameh and origins of enmity between Iran and Turan, see A. Amanat, “Divided Patrimony, Tree of Royal Power, and Fruit of Vengeance: Political Paradigms and Iranian Self-Image in the Story of Faridun in the Shahnameh,” in Shahnameh Studies I, ed. C. Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Center for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, 2006), 49–70. See also Encyclopedia Iranica, ed. E. Yarshater (New York, Columbia University, 1981–) henceforth EIr: “Aneran” (Ph. Gignoux).
3. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 10.
4. For Iran’s historical nomenclature, see G. Gnoli, The Idea of Iran: An Essay on Its Origin (Rome: ISMO, 1989),
5. and his entry in EIr: “Iranian Identity: pre-Islamic period.” A. S. Shahbazi, “The History of Idea of Iran,” in Birth of the Persian Empire, ed. V. Sarkhosh-Curtis and S. Stewart (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 100–111,