A Compendium of the Ancient Gods
Thraetaona, plate

Thraetaona, son of Athwya, was the great dragon-slaying hero of the Iranian tradition. After the fall of Yima, the world had passed into the dominion of Aži Dahāka, the three-headed dragon, who reigned as a tyrant for a thousand years and devoured many of the men and women of Iran. Thraetaona, the appointed deliverer, prepared himself for the conquest by long worship of Anahita, of Verethragna, of all the yazatas of war and victory. Bearing a great mace and an arrow that could pierce the dragon's hide, he came at last upon Aži Dahāka and joined battle.

The fight was long and difficult. Thraetaona could not kill the dragon outright — for if Aži Dahāka had been killed, the foul creatures within his body (snakes, scorpions, lizards, frogs) would have been released to pollute the world. Instead, Thraetaona bound the dragon with chains, and imprisoned him beneath Mount Damavand, the great volcano of northern Iran, where Aži Dahāka has remained chained ever since. There he waits, gnawing at his chain, growing slowly weaker; and at the end of the world, when the chain at last breaks, he will burst forth one final time and ravage the earth, until Keresaspa the hero (or, in some versions, the Saoshyant) comes to slay him at the eschatological battle.

Thraetaona was also the great healer of Iranian tradition, the magician of healing-spells. Yasht 13 lists him among the chief practitioners of healing magic; he could expel the demons of disease, drive out the parasites that consumed the body, and restore the dead to life. The medical literature of the early Iranian world (the Pahlavi Madigan i Hazar Dadestan and the medical sections of the Bundahishn) attribute many remedies and procedures to him.

In the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, Thraetaona becomes Faridun, the third king of the Pishdadian dynasty, the deliverer who overthrew the tyrant Zahhāk (= Aži Dahāka in Persianized form). Ferdowsi's account preserves the original mythological core but elaborates it as a heroic narrative in three parts: Faridun's hidden upbringing (he was raised by a magical cow named Birmaya in the mountains), his coming-of-age and gathering of an army, and his great victory over Zahhāk and the binding of him beneath Damavand. Faridun then ruled the world for five hundred years, dividing it before his death among his three sons — Salm, Tur, and Iraj — whose names became the eponyms of the three peoples (the Romans, the Turanians, and the Iranians) and whose murders of one another set in motion the great national-historical narrative of the Shahnameh. So Thraetaona, the dragon-slayer, became also the patriarch of the divided world.

Curator’s note

What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay

Thraetaona is invoked throughout the Avesta, particularly in Yasht 5 (the Aban Yasht) and Yasht 13 (the Fravardin Yasht). The Vendidad (chapter 20) describes his role as healing-magician. The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi gives the great literary form of the legend as Faridun. The Vedic cognate Trita Aptya is the proto-Indo-Iranian figure behind both Thraetaona and a Vedic minor deity; Stig Wikander's various studies and J. P. Mallory's In Search of the Indo-Europeans (1989) treat the comparative case. The motif of the dragon imprisoned beneath the volcano (rather than killed) is unusual and distinctive; it has no exact parallel in other Indo-European traditions, though the Greek Typhon (imprisoned beneath Mount Etna) is structurally similar.

Kin in the sources

Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.

When the sources speak

Dated witnesses for Heroes, Adversaries and the Final Renewal. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline

late 2nd–early 1st millennium BCE, debated
The Old Avestan Gathas and Yasna Haptanghaiti emerge in an eastern Iranian ritual-poetic setting; Zarathustra’s date remains disputed.
1st millennium BCE
Younger Avestan hymns, ritual texts, and legal-purity materials develop over a long period of oral transmission.
c. 550–330 BCE
Achaemenid inscriptions invoke Ahuramazda in imperial royal ideology; their relationship to later Zoroastrian orthodoxy requires care.
330 BCE–224 CE
Hellenistic and Parthian eras preserve Iranian cults through sparse and regionally varied evidence.
224–651 CE
Sasanian institutions sponsor priestly learning and the redactional organization associated with the Avesta and Zand.
7th–10th centuries CE
After the Islamic conquest, Middle Persian books record cosmology, law, exegesis, and summaries of lost material.
c. 9th century CE
The Bundahišn, Dēnkard, Wizīdagīhā ī Zādspram, and related works preserve systematic late antique and early Islamic syntheses.
c. 977–1010 CE
Ferdowsi composes the Shāhnāmeh from epic and royal traditions with both pre-Islamic and Islamic-period mediation.

Floor plan

The rooms follow one another in the order their peoples first appear in the written record.

  1. The Cradle of Citiesc. 3400 BCE to 395 CE. 115 works
  2. The Gift of the Nilec. 4000 BCE to 395 CE. 73 works
  3. The Olympian Orderc. 1600 BCE to 750 CE. 152 works
  4. The Persian Worldc. 2000 BCE to 1010 CE. 30 works
  5. The Levantine Borderlandsc. 1200 BCE to 500 CE. 20 works
  6. The Edges of Empirec. 2000 BCE to 1500 CE. 33 works
  7. The Etruscan Worldc. 900 BCE to 750 CE. 22 works
  8. The Roman Inheritancec. 1200 BCE to 500 CE. 58 works
  9. The Northern Inheritancec. 2000 BCE to 1600 CE. 131 works