Abstract

The story of Kāwa al-Haddād with King al-Dahhāk is one of the most important Iranian tales that originally belongs to the legendary era and bears many heroic characteristics and symbols and was mentioned by most of the Arab and Persian Islamic sources that talked about the history of the kings of Persia before Islam. Perhaps these sources are very similar in presenting the story of Kawa, with minor differences that do not affect its basic structure and narrative, and the reason is that they drew on the ancient history of the kings of Persia and their heroes, among them is the story of the hero Kawa, from one source likely to be the book "Khadaynamah", which was written in the Sassanid era in the Pahlavi Persian language, then translated into Arabic and from there into New Persian, and became a source of Persian history and the biographies of its kings. This article presents the imagination of this enthusiastic hero in the Arabic and Persian sources of history and literature and focuses on the two narrations of Gharar Akhbar al-Kuluk al-Persian by al-Thaalibi and the Shahnameh of al-Firdawsi. We also dealt with the story of the festival and its connection with the fall of al-Dahhak, and finally, we dealt with the imagination of the hero Kawa and his story in examples of modern Persian literature.