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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesAkvān-e Dīv is the shape-changing demon who carries Rostam into the sky and offers him a fatal choice between mountain and sea.
Also recorded as Akvan, Akwan, The demon Akvān
Rostam wakes on a piece of ground held above the earth by a demon. Akvān offers him a choice: be thrown onto the mountains or into the sea. The hero’s answer will have to persuade his captor to do the opposite of what he asks. [1]
Read the manuscriptAkvān-e Dīv is a demon in Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāmeh, the Persian Book of Kings. He first confronts the hero Rostam as a destructive wild ass. When pursued, he vanishes; when the exhausted hero sleeps, he carries away the ground beneath him. The adversary can deny Rostam a target and then deny him a footing. His offer of a choice is another way of exercising power, but it also gives his captive something to work with. [1][2]
Helen Zimmern’s English retelling spells the names Akwan, Rustem and Rakush. Rostam and his horse Rakhsh are the same pair under different spellings. Her condensed prose version supplies the continuous adventure below. It includes the pursuit, escape, recovery of the horse and a final encounter with the demon; its ending differs from the one summarized by the Shāhnāmeh scholar Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh. [1][2]
A shepherd arrives at the court of King Kai Khosrau with a complaint. A wild ass has broken in among the horses and is doing great harm; its breath, he says, is like a lion’s. The king recognizes the disguised demon and sends for Rostam, who has returned home to Zaboulistan. In Zimmern’s telling, the hero rides out on Rakhsh, carrying a mace and a long cord wound around his wrist. [1]
Rostam finds the ass and throws his cord around it. The creature disappears under his hands. When it returns, he tries again, with the same result. Three days and nights pass in this fruitless pursuit. At last the hero chooses a place to sleep and leaves Rakhsh grazing nearby. Akvān approaches the sleeper, loosens the earth beneath him and lifts it onto his own head. Rostam wakes while he is being carried away. [1]
The demon asks which death Rostam would prefer: a fall upon the mountains or a plunge into the sea. Rostam understands that Akvān means to deny him whatever he wants. He therefore claims to fear drowning because those who die in water cannot look upon Serosch, the angelic guardian, or find rest after death. The demon welcomes that prospect and throws him into water where hungry crocodiles wait. His wish to hurt the captive has delivered the chance of survival the captive needed. [1]
Rostam draws his sword. With his right hand he fights the crocodiles; with his left he swims for shore. The struggle lasts until nightfall, when he reaches dry ground. He gives thanks to God and rests, then returns to look for Rakhsh. The horse is gone. The hero searches until he finds him among the horses of Afrasiab, an enemy ruler whose keepers have caught the wandering animal. [1]
Rakhsh hears Rostam’s voice, neighs and breaks free. Rostam saddles and mounts him, kills the keepers and takes their herds. Afrasiab comes out of his mountain hiding place to look at his horses and discovers his enemy among them. Believing Rostam has come in pursuit of him, he offers battle with his accompanying men. Although alone, Rostam defeats them. Zimmern counts sixty killed with the sword and forty with the mace before Afrasiab flees.
Khaleghi-Motlagh’s account describes the first form as a powerful yellow wild ass, or onager, marked with a black stripe along its back. The revealed demon has an elephant-like head, long hair, tusks, blue eyes and black lips. This is a more elaborate bodily description than Zimmern’s prose provides. Her pursuit depends chiefly on the quarry’s disappearance: Rostam knows it is magical because the cord cannot hold it. [2][1]
Mu’in Musavvir gives the demon a different presence in a seventeenth-century painting: an orange, horned body, with raised arms beneath the slab of earth. The Metropolitan Museum of Art identifies the fiery eyelids as characteristic of the painter. The image makes the burden and the carrier immediately visible. Its colour and form belong to that particular painted rendition of the scene. [4]
Vanishing frustrates the mounted hunter’s familiar method: approach, cast the noose and hold the quarry. Carrying away the ground exploits a different weakness, the need to sleep. Akvān waits until Rostam’s strength is unavailable, then puts him somewhere that strength cannot immediately help him. The hero has not lost his weapons, but neither a sword nor a mace gives him control over where the demon will throw him. [1]
The adventure belongs to the epic world of Iranian kings, heroes and enemies. Zimmern places it inside The Vengeance of Kai Khosrau, after Rostam’s earlier campaigning against Afrasiab. The shepherd’s loss calls the hero away from home, and the missing horse brings him back into the human conflict. Thus Akvān’s extraordinary intervention interrupts a war already under way. The encounter with the herds is not merely a pause between two fights with the demon. [1]
The folklorist Mahmoud Omidsalar describes dīvs across Persian epic and oral storytelling as adversaries, servants and builders, among other roles. Contrariness is a recurring trait in his discussion, and Akvān’s encounter is a notable example. The name dīv therefore places the creature within a larger tradition while leaving each story’s particular actions and relationships important. [3]
The episode survives through retelling, scholarship and painted manuscripts. The Met dates one illustrated folio to about 1330–40, probably in Isfahan, and Mu’in Musavvir’s manuscript to the 1660s, also probably in Isfahan. The earlier painting selects the struggle in the water; the later manuscript includes the carrying scene on folio 158v. These dates belong to particular works of art. They show the story being given form in different centuries. [4][5]
There is also a consequential difference in the recorded endings. Khaleghi-Motlagh, summarizing the poem with reference to Jules Mohl’s edition, has Rostam catch Akvān with a lasso and behead him. Zimmern has Rostam spring upon and crush him. In one telling the once-ineffective cord finally holds; in the other, the killing is direct bodily force. The shared escape does not erase that difference. [2][1]
The most disorienting change comes before the throw. A patch of earth chosen for rest becomes something the enemy can carry. Ground that supported the sleeping hero now suspends him above the world. The mountains and sea cease to be destinations he might reach by riding: they are possible places of impact, selected by the being beneath him. [1]
Water leaves a possibility that the mountains do not. It is full of danger, and the hero reaches shore only after a prolonged struggle, but movement remains possible. The tale’s physical detail gives that difference weight: a sword occupies one hand, swimming the other. The surface he cannot stand upon is nevertheless the one from which he can return. [1]
Akvān’s name also attaches to a stone in the story of Bijan and Manija. Khaleghi-Motlagh connects this brief reference with otherwise lost material about the demon. Omidsalar reports oral-epic relationships that Zimmern’s adventure does not include: a brother, Owrang-e Dīv, and a son assigned to guard the well holding Bijan. Both, in that reported tradition, are killed by Rostam. These surviving references give the adversary a family and a history beyond the famous throw. [2][3]
Koschei offers a useful difference in how an enemy is overcome. Some of his tales make survival depend on a death concealed elsewhere; the hero must find and destroy it. Akvān’s vulnerability here lies in a decision Rostam can manipulate, followed by combat. Simurgh, by contrast, belongs to the Persian epic as a helper of heroes. Shared epic surroundings can accommodate very different kinds of relationship. [1]
The reversed request is satisfying because the hero’s defeat appears so complete. Akvān has possession of Rostam, the ground beneath him and the choice of destination. He still needs an answer. Rostam makes that small opening count, turning the demon’s desire to deny him into the means of escape. Cunning matters precisely because it is used under conditions the hero did not choose. [1]
Rakhsh’s return prevents the episode from ending as a puzzle solved by words alone. The horse hears, recognizes and breaks free; Rostam’s voice reaches a companion after his voice has deceived an enemy. Their reunion restores his mobility, but also leads into the killing of the keepers and another battle. The relationship that helps him survive carries him back into the epic’s violence. [1]
Mu’in’s seventeenth-century painting places the reclining hero on the lifted ground above the orange demon. Raised arms and a nearly upright body make the act of carrying immediately legible. The surrounding manuscript page keeps columns of writing above, below and beside the illustration. The episode has become a picture inside a book, with one suspended moment standing for the choices and reversals that extend beyond it. The museum dates the codex to the 1660s and probably Isfahan. [4]
The earlier Met folio chooses the consequence instead. Blue, curling water patterns surround the hero, who faces a lion-like sea creature while the div watches from shore. The museum calls that selection unusual compared with the common lifted-ground scene. The two paintings consequently emphasize different tests: the later one shows the demon’s hold over the hero; the earlier one shows the hero acting after the throw. Zimmern’s crocodiles and the painted lion-like creature remain distinguishable representations of peril in the water. [5][1]
The name’s history remains a scholarly question. Khaleghi-Motlagh discusses a proposed connection between Akvān and Akoman, including the possibility of a transformed or altered name. The proposal offers an interpretation of the adversary’s perverse mind; it does not establish a secure chain of transmission for the whole adventure. [2]
The paintings leave Rostam at different moments of uncertainty. Mu’in holds him above the earth; the earlier painter shows him already struggling in the sea. Zimmern carries him beyond both scenes to the sound of Rakhsh answering his voice. Survival brings the horse and rider together again, with a defeated demon behind them and unfinished vengeance ahead. [1][4][5]
Zimmern supplies the complete condensed English adventure. Khaleghi-Motlagh gives an edition-based summary, a different ending and proposals concerning the name. Omidsalar discusses the wider dīv tradition and oral variants. The Met records identify two paintings that choose different moments of the story. None of these consultations substitutes for an independent collation of the Persian editions. [1][2][3][4][5]
Ferdowsi; Helen Zimmern, English reteller · Internet Classics Archive, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Vengeance of Kai Khosrau; plain-text lines 5121–5191
The complete Akvān episode was consulted in Zimmern’s condensed English retelling, rather than a critical Persian edition. Her ending is distinguished from the edition-based summary.
Checked 2026-10-11
Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh · Encyclopaedia Iranica
Vol. I, Fasc. 7, p. 740; 15 December 1984, updated 18 June 2018
Mohl’s edition and the older name studies are consulted through Khaleghi-Motlagh’s article; they were not independently collated.
Checked 2026-10-11
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-11. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑Akvān returns, expecting the weary hero to be vulnerable after the fighting. Instead, Rostam springs upon him and crushes him to death. He rides back to Kai Khosrau with the captured animals and receives the king’s praise. The king would keep him at court, but Rostam asks to leave again and prepare an army. The murder of Saiawush still calls for vengeance. The demon has been defeated; the human war continues. [1]
Mahmoud Omidsalar · Encyclopaedia Iranica
Vol. VII, Fasc. 4, pp. 428–431; epic contrariness and Akvān oral-variant paragraphs
The oral variants are reported through this article. The underlying oral-epic collections were not independently consulted.
Checked 2026-10-11
Mu’in Musavvir, painter; Metropolitan Museum of Art cataloguers · Metropolitan Museum of Art
1974.290.43; 1660s, probably Isfahan; folio 158v
The catalogue and folio 158v were consulted. Other images in the manuscript and the physical volume were not independently examined.
Checked 2026-10-11
Unidentified Persian manuscript painter; Metropolitan Museum of Art cataloguers · Metropolitan Museum of Art
1974.290.17; ca. 1330–40, Iran, probably Isfahan
The discussion follows the museum catalogue and its image; the physical folio was not independently examined.
Checked 2026-10-11