The main page tells the story. This page is where the digressions live — naming research, mistakes we caught and fixed in the open, and the reasoning behind creative choices that needed more room than a caption allows.
During production we got a suggestion to change the wife's name to منیژه (Manijeh). We first checked whether that would collide internally — it doesn't, Rostam's wife is Tahmineh in this project — but found something more important: Manijeh is already a major, established Shahnameh character (Bijan's beloved in the tale of Bijan and Manijeh), and reusing her name would be a worse collision than the one we were trying to avoid.
So we did the actual work: searched Ferdowsi's own verses for a name that could genuinely be recovered. Two passages are read by scholars as being about her — neither names her.
The message we got said "add this spear/lance to the Rostam weapon collection," with a link attached. When we opened the file, it turned out to be something else entirely: a five-angle bow turnaround with quiver and fletching details — no spear or lance anywhere in the image.
The same pattern had shown up more than once earlier in production — links pointing at the wrong file, likely mixed up while copying. The fix is always the same: we catalog what the image actually shows, not what the message said it would be, and flag the mismatch openly in the production log instead of pretending nothing happened. The bow became a real and valuable part of the collection anyway — just not the spear that was asked for.
What's actually documented: Ferdowsi's son — this project calls him Mehrak — died in his late 30s, an event Ferdowsi records himself, grieving, directly inside the Shahnameh. That elegy sits at essentially the same point in the text as the Rostam & Sohrab tragedy — a father losing a son, right next to a poet who had just lost his own. Shahnameh scholars and translators have long noted this juxtaposition as one of the most affecting moments in the whole work; it's a documented feature of the text's structure, not a theory we invented.
What's interpretation, not fact: whether Ferdowsi was actually composing or revising the Sohrab episode itself around the time of his son's death is not something anyone can date verse-by-verse across a 30-year project — that's a widely repeated, resonant literary reading of the placement, not a documented compositional fact. We're treating it the way the rest of this page treats "popular legend": real, worth building on, honestly labeled as an inference rather than a certainty.
The project's own choice: building the scene as a deliberate cross-cut between the two griefs — Ferdowsi's biography and his own text — is ours. Khabat's direction, shot by shot:
The armband's new studio reference (see the main page) already proves the second shot is buildable as-is — the onyx cabochon photographs like a real mirror, a face genuinely visible in it. That wasn't originally shot for this purpose; it just turned out to double as the exact reference this scene needed.