A bird large enough to carry off an elephant or a whale, with peacock feathers, the head of a dog and the claws of a lion, that nurses its young like a mammal: this episode traces the Simurgh from its origins as a plain bird of prey in Avestan Zoroastrian texts to its role shaking the seeds of every plant loose from the Tree of Life in the sea Vourukasha. It explains how bearded vultures rubbing iron-rich mud into their feathers may lie behind the copper-colored descriptions, and how a folk etymology hearing the name as ‘thirty birds’ physically enlarged the creature over time.

The conversation then follows the bird into Sasanian royal propaganda on coins and textiles as a marker of divine glory, into Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh where it raises the albino prince Zal, teaches him to deliver Rostam by cesarean section, and later hands Rostam the tamarisk arrow that dooms Esfandiyar, and into Attar’s 12th-century Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds, where thirty exhausted birds find their own reflection in a lake. It ends with the Simurgh’s later lives in Kurdish folklore, the Arabic roc, video games and manga, and a 2009 anti-censorship proxy tool built for Iranian internet users.

• The linguistic path from the Avestan ‘bird Saena’ through Middle Persian to modern Persian
• Why the Shahnameh contains both a benevolent Simurgh and a demonic one slain by Esfandiyar
• The golden feathers Zal burns to summon help in moments of crisis
• The Simurgh’s warning that killing Esfandiyar will cost Rostam his prosperity and life
• How the myth shifted from explaining nature outward to describing the soul inward