The Seven Labours of Rostam: Each Trial in Persian Painting

Updated By VanArtHub Curatorial Team

The seven labours of Rostam are seven dangers that the hero of the Shahnameh, the Persian "Book of Kings", passes on his ride to free King Kay Kavus from the White Div. He meets a lion, a desert, a dragon, a witch, a border lord named Ulad, the div Arzhang and last the White Div himself, with his horse Rakhsh beside him. We are VanArtHub, a Vancouver gallery that sells original paintings. Below are the seven labours in order, the signs by which you can find each one in a miniature, and paintings to look up in named museums.

Who are Rostam, Rakhsh and Kay Kavus?

The Aga Khan Museum says the poet Ferdowsi completed the Shahnameh ca. 1010. Rostam (also written Rustam) is its best-known hero: the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art calls him "the most celebrated and complex character in the Shahnama". Rakhsh is his horse. For the whole poem, see our page on the Shahnameh in art.

Kay Kavus is the king of Iran in this part of the poem, and the Smithsonian calls him "foolhardy and impetuous". Two later stories of his reign have their own posts here: Rostam and Sohrab, and Siyavash and the fire.

A div is a demon, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica's entry on divs says that the most important land of demons in the poem is called Mazandaran. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) calls the White Div (Div-e Sepid) "a monstrous demon chief".

The Persian name of the story is Haft Khan, and haft means seven. Olga M. Davidson explains in the Iranica that khan means "a stage or station" and that the rhyming word khwan means a feast. The English verse translation hosted by the Packard Humanities Institute takes the second reading and speaks of "a meal with seven courses". Museum labels vary in the same way. The Metropolitan Museum of Art numbers the scenes as courses, the Fitzwilliam Museum calls the last one the "seventh and final Peril", and Harvard Art Museums uses both labors and courses on one page. We write labours. Inside a quotation or the title of a painting we keep the source's own spelling of each name.

Why Rostam rides to Mazandaran

The trouble starts with a song. Prods Oktor Skjærvø writes in the Iranica that Kay Kavus was tempted "by a div masquerading as a minstrel" and marched on Mazandaran against the advice of his counselors, Zal among them. The White Div, he writes, "showers the Iranian army with stones and darts from the sky, which blind them all". In the verse translation the div calls the king "fruitless as a willow".

Museum texts vary on who holds the king. The Smithsonian says the White Div "blinds and enchains the king and his advisors in a dark, bottomless cave". Harvard Art Museums names another captor: the king "had been captured by the evil Ahriman".

Rostam is the son of Zal, and it is Zal who describes the road. There are two ways to Mazandaran, he says: the long one the king took, and a short one full of "lions, ogres and darkness", in the Iranica's translation. His advice: "Choose the short cut; witness marvels". The length of the short road depends on the edition. The Iranica's translation gives "seven days and nights". The Packard translation gives two weeks, and its translators explain that Rostam rode two days' distance in each day and so "made seven stages of it".

Rostam leaves without an army. Davidson stresses that he passes all seven ordeals "completely alone, with the exception of his horse".

Labours one and two: the lion and the desert

Rostam lies down to sleep in a bed of reeds, and the reeds hide a lion's den. The lion returns and decides, in the verse translation, "I must maim the steed, then I can take the rider when I please". Rakhsh "lashed out at the lion's head, then fixed his sharp teeth in its back", and the lion dies.

Rostam wakes and is angry with his horse. "O foolish Rakhsh! who bade thee fight a lion?" he asks.

The second labour has no enemy. Rostam crosses a desert in a heat "that dried the birds to powder" and comes close to death. Davidson writes that he is shown the way to water by "a divine guide in the shape of a wild ram". In the verse translation he reaches the spring and then sees that the animal "hath left no tracks".

In both labours, Davidson notes, "Rostam is the one saved". We like that the poem opens the list this way. Its foremost champion sleeps through the first labour, and in the second he is helped by a ram.

Riding Through Dreams by Nahira is an oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cm. A lone rider in a wide-brimmed hat sits on a light brown horse, seen from behind, and crosses open ground under a large sky of pink, light blue and cream clouds. Its title and description make no mention of the poem. We show it here as a contemporary work that shares the subject of these two labours: a rider alone with his horse on a long road.

Nahira's oil painting depicts a lone cowboy riding through misty pastel landscapes with flying birds.
Riding Through Dreams One-of-a-kind original$1,084.00 Free insured shipping. 14-day returns. See this original

Labours three and four: the dragon and the witch

That night a dragon comes. The Fitzwilliam tells what follows: Rakhsh "had woken his owner twice during the night when he saw the dragon approaching, but as soon as Rostam opened his eyes, the dragon disappeared". In the verse translation Rostam is angry with the horse and makes a threat: "If thou disturb me more I will behead thee".

Rakhsh wakes him a third time anyway, and now "the Maker willed that the dragon should be seen". Rakhsh joins the fight. The Aga Khan Museum quotes the line: he "bit [the dragon] between the shoulder blades, he tore his flesh with his teeth like a lion". Rostam then cuts off the dragon's head.

Painters chose this labour more often than any other except the last. The Aga Khan Museum's text counts "over 120 other illustrations" of it.

The fourth labour begins pleasantly. Beside a spring Rostam finds a meal laid out, with a lute beside it. The translation calls it "a sorcerers' meal", and its owners have vanished at the sound of his voice. He picks up the lute and sings about his own hard life: "Oh! Rustam is an outcast still and hath no days of pleasure". A witch hears him and joins him in a changed shape. The Met calls her "the beautiful maiden who had beguiled him".

What defeats her is the name of God. When Rostam speaks it, she "blackened at God's name", and he catches her in his lasso. The Met says that she then turned back into a witch, and that he killed her with his sword. Davidson notes that "the mention of God's name is sufficient to destroy the witch's schemes". As we read the seven, it is the only labour that Rostam wins with a word.

Labours five and six: Ulad and the div Arzhang

The fifth labour begins in a field of grain. Rostam lets Rakhsh eat there, and the watchman of the field asks him why his horse is eating what other people worked to grow. Rostam says nothing and tears off the man's ears.

The watchman's lord is Ulad (written Owlad, Awlad or Aulad on museum pages), whom Davidson calls "the local lord of the marches", the border country. Rostam captures him and makes an offer. Show me where the White Div lives and where the king is held, and you will rule this land. Lie to me, and "I will make thine eyes run blood". Ulad becomes the guide for the rest of the ride.

The sixth labour is the fight with the div Arzhang. At dawn Rostam ties Ulad to a tree and rides out. The fight takes one sentence in the verse translation: Rostam takes hold of "his head and ears and neck", tears the head off and throws it at the div's own troops.

Rostam now reaches the king. Rakhsh neighs as they arrive, and the blind king knows the sound: "I heard the neigh of Rakhsh". Kay Kavus tells Rostam what a physician has named as the cure for blind eyes: "three drops of his blood", the blood of the White Div.

The Monster (Div)Command by Amir Fazelian is an acrylic on canvas, 139.7 x 139.7 cm. A horned, red-skinned figure with a long white beard wears a crown set with green jewels, holds three white dice in its left hand, and reaches toward the viewer with a clawed right hand. Its title names a div, the being that Rostam fights in the sixth and seventh labours. The product page names no episode of the poem, so we show it as a contemporary painting of a div and give it no name from the story.

Amir Fazelian acrylic painting: Vibrant horned monster with white beard, crown, claws, holding dice, psychedelic landscape.
The Monster (Div)Command One-of-a-kind original$2,349.00 Free insured shipping. 14-day returns. See this original

The seventh labour: the White Div in his cave

Ulad gives one more piece of advice, which Harvard Art Museums sums up: attack by day, "since demons prefer to sleep when the sun is hot". Rostam ties Ulad up and kills the guards at the cave. In the dark he makes out a body like a mountain, "with sable face and hair like lion's mane". Sable means black, so the translation gives the White Div a dark face.

Rostam wakes the div with a roar, and the div comes at him with a millstone. Rostam's sword cuts off a hand and a foot, and the div fights on. "If I survive this day I ne'er shall die," Rostam tells himself. At last he lifts the div as high as his neck, throws him down, stabs him in the heart and pulls out the liver. The blood is put on the eyes of Kay Kavus, "which grew as bright as Sol".

The sources give several answers to what cures the king. Davidson writes of "bathing his eyes in the Div's blood". The Fitzwilliam says "he needed the White Div's liver", and the Cleveland Museum of Art writes of "liver blood". LACMA says Rostam killed the div "by grasping one of his horns and stabbing him in the heart", and then used "the blood of his heart". Marianna Shreve Simpson explains the variety in the Iranica's entry on Shahnameh illustration: Ferdowsi describes "in a single verse" how Rostam stabbed the div, cut out his heart and tore out his liver.

The poem later gives a second hero seven labours of his own. The Aga Khan Museum says Rostam's trials "were mirrored, later in the Shahnameh, by similar ordeals undergone by Isfandiyar", the prince Esfandiyar. Our post on Zal and the Simorgh describes the fifth of them, in which he kills a great bird.

How painters show the seven labours

Start with the coat. The Iranica's entry on it says that babr-e bayan is "the name of the coat which Rostam wore in combat", and that the Shahnameh has it made from the skin of a leopard. Museums describe two animals. On Harvard's page Rostam wears "his famous tiger-skin coat and leopard helmet". Find that coat and that helmet, and you have found Rostam.

Next, the horse and the guide. The Smithsonian quotes the poem on the colt's skin, "bright and dappled as though flecked with petals of red roses on saffron". From the fifth labour on, look for a man tied to a tree. In the Herat painting of c. 1444 that the Fitzwilliam describes, he "looks exceedingly anxious". The Cleveland Museum of Art owns a page that shows him alone, and its painter, Sadiqi Bek, "signed his name in tiny script on the brown rock" below him.

Last, the cave and the div. The Fitzwilliam says the Herat painter drew "the cave shown in section", cut open so that we see the fight inside. The div has often lost a limb already: "Rustam has just cut off one of the powerful div's legs," says the Met of its painting of ca. 1300 to 1330. The Iranica's entry on divs lists how the epics describe them: often black, with long teeth, claws on their hands and large bodies covered with thick hair.

These signs are old. The Met says the scene's "basic iconography" was "developed by the fourteenth century and continues essentially unchanged".

Shahnameh stories were also painted outside books. The Iranica says that storytellers in coffeehouses set up painted screens whose pictures "were usually of episodes from" the Shahnameh, and our page on coffeehouse painting in Iran covers that tradition. In our view the second labour is the hardest of the seven to paint, because it has no enemy and its subject is thirst. The Met calls the subject "rarely depicted".

Paintings of the seven labours to look up

The Met's witch page is folio 120v of the Shahnameh made for Shah Tahmasp, a manuscript that our page on famous Persian paintings covers in more detail.

The seven labours of Rostam and a painting of each. Sources: the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Aga Khan Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Harvard Art Museums, read October 2026.
Labour Painting to look up Where it is held
First: the lion Rostam sleeping while Rakhsh fights a lion, attributed to Sultan Muhammad, Tabriz, 1515 to 1522 British Museum, 1948,1211,0.23
Second: the desert "How Rustam Found a Spring", ca. 1300 to 1330 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 69.74.8
Third: the dragon Rostam slays a dragon, Shiraz, c. 1430 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Ouseley Add. 176, fol. 68v
Third: the dragon Rustam kills the dragon, attributed to Sadiqi Beg, Qazvin, 1576 to 1577 Aga Khan Museum, AKM100
Fourth: the witch "Rustam's Fourth Course, He Cleaves a Witch", attributed to Qadimi, ca. 1525 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970.301.17
Fifth: Ulad Aulad Tied to a Plane Tree, Sadiqi Bek, 1575 to 1600 Cleveland Museum of Art, 1988.101
Sixth: Arzhang We found no museum page for a painting of this labour None found
Seventh: the White Div Rostam slays the White Div, Herat, c. 1444 Royal Asiatic Society, London, Persian MS 239, fol. 44r
Seventh: the White Div "Rustam Kills the White Div", ca. 1300 to 1330 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Seventh: the White Div Rustam's Seventh Course: He Slays the White Demon, Shiraz, 1562 Harvard Art Museums, 2002.50.42

We would open the British Museum's lion page first. Its text points out a change the painter made: the story sets the scene in a meadow, and Sultan Muhammad "chose to depict it as a forest". Then open the Fitzwilliam's page on the Herat White Div, where the coat, the bound guide and the cave are all in one picture. When we read the museum pages in October 2026, the Met listed its spring painting as on view in Gallery 455 and the witch folio as on view in Gallery 462.

Key Takeaways

  • The seven labours of Rostam (Haft Khan) are the dangers he passes on the short road to Mazandaran, where the White Div holds King Kay Kavus blind and captive.
  • In order, they are the lion that Rakhsh kills, the desert and the ram, the dragon, the witch, the capture of Ulad, the div Arzhang, and the White Div in his cave.
  • Sources differ on the cure for the king's eyes: the Encyclopaedia Iranica writes of the div's blood, the Fitzwilliam Museum of his liver, and LACMA of the blood of his heart.
  • To find Rostam in a miniature, look for a tiger-skin coat and a leopard helmet, the horse Rakhsh, and from the fifth labour on a guide tied to a tree.
  • The Aga Khan Museum says the dragon is the labour illustrated most often after the White Div, with over 120 other pictures known.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the seven labours of Rostam, in order?

The seven labours of Rostam are, in order: his horse Rakhsh kills a lion, Rostam crosses a desert and is led to water by a ram, he kills a dragon, he kills a witch, he captures the border lord Ulad, he kills the div Arzhang, and he kills the White Div. The Persian name for the set is Haft Khan.

Why did Rostam go to Mazandaran?

Rostam went to Mazandaran to free King Kay Kavus. The Encyclopaedia Iranica says the king, tempted by a div disguised as a minstrel, invaded the land of the divs against the advice of his counselors, and the White Div blinded his army. Rostam, the son of Zal, set off alone to free the king, by the shortest and most dangerous road.

What does Rakhsh do in the seven labours?

Rakhsh fights in two of the seven labours. In the first he kills a lion while Rostam sleeps. In the third he wakes his master as a dragon comes near, and then bites the dragon during the fight. Later, the blind king hears Rakhsh neigh and knows from the sound that Rostam has come.

How does Rostam kill the White Div?

Rostam kills the White Div in a dark cave by day, when divs sleep. In the English verse translation he wakes the div, cuts off a hand and a foot, lifts him up and throws him to the ground, stabs him in the heart and pulls out the liver. The blood is then put on the eyes of the blind king, and his sight returns.

What does Haft Khan mean?

Haft Khan is the Persian name for the seven labours, and haft means seven. Olga M. Davidson explains in the Encyclopaedia Iranica that khan means a stage or station, and that the rhyming word khwan means a feast. One English verse translation takes the second meaning and calls the labours the Seven Courses, as in a meal, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art uses that word too.

How do I recognise Rostam in a Persian miniature?

Rostam is recognised by his clothes: a coat of tiger skin and a leopard helmet. Harvard Art Museums describes him this way on its page for a painting of 1562. In the seven labours, look also for his horse Rakhsh close by and, from the fifth labour on, a guide tied to a tree.

Where can I see a painting of Rostam and the White Div?

Paintings of Rostam and the White Div are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Harvard Art Museums and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and each has a page online. The Fitzwilliam Museum's Shahnameh site describes one made in Herat, c. 1444, which belongs to the Royal Asiatic Society in London.

Does The Monster (Div)Command show the White Div, and will I receive the original canvas?

The Monster (Div)Command is a contemporary painting of a div by Amir Fazelian, and its product page names no episode of the Shahnameh, so we give the figure no name from the poem. You receive the original canvas, an acrylic of 139.7 x 139.7 cm (55 x 55 in), signed, with a Certificate of Authenticity. Our guide to choosing a Shahnameh painting explains how to pick a scene.

Is delivery free and insured for a painting sent to Canada or the USA?

Yes, delivery is free and fully insured for every painting we send to Canada and the USA. A work reaches a Canadian address in 3 to 7 business days and an address in the USA in 5 to 10 business days. We are based in Vancouver, Canada. If a carrier asks you for a customs or brokerage fee, contact us before you pay it.

Can I send a painting back after hanging it at home for a week?

Yes, you can send it back on any of the first 14 days after delivery, and a week on your wall is inside that time. Every work comes with a 14-day trial: return it within 14 days of delivery for a full refund, and we pay the return shipping. The terms are on our Buy with Confidence page.

Sources

Sources read in October 2026. If you spot something out of date, tell us and we will correct this post.

About VanArtHub

VanArtHub is a gallery based in Vancouver, Canada. Every painting we ship is an original, signed and one of a kind, and it comes with a Certificate of Authenticity, free insured shipping and a 14-day trial. Persian art is also called Iranian art, and our guide to contemporary Persian painting is a good first page to read. You can also browse every original we have for sale, or read our guide on how to buy Persian art.

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