Cafcuh

Qaf, also Kaf, Modern Persian Kūh -e Qaf or Kuh-e Kaf ( " mountain coffee ", Persian كوه قاف ), Old Persian Kapkafk, Arabic Ǧabal al - Qaf called, after the Iranian mythology, the world surrounding mountain ring, beyond which the infinite nothingness begins. The same cosmogonic idea there on numerous altaischsprachigen peoples in Central and North Asia. Damavand and Kuh-e Ghor ( Ghwor ) in Iran and Afghanistan, the Caucasus and the Urals are among others as possible localizations of the mountain in question.

Localizations

The name of the Caucasus is not only in the languages ​​of the Islamic peoples of the region - derived Qafqaz Azerbaijani or Turkish Kafka, but also the Christian peoples from the mythological mountain Qaf: Russian Кавказ, Kavkaz or Armenian Kavkaz ( Kapkoh ). The Arabic name for the Caucasus Ǧabal al - Qaf is a transfer from the Middle Persian dar. In the Turkic Qaf is the real mountain range and at the same time for the mythological mountain ring. On Russian-speaking Maps also the Central Asian Tian Shan Mountains is referred to as. The Kyrgyz call a central mountain range in the Tian Shan, whose peak is over 5000 meters high, Köyqap or Qap -too. However, this naming is a recent one, because in the Kyrgyz national epic Manas, which of Epensängern ( Manaschis ) was passed on orally until the 19th century, it is not common. Only in one version of the Manas of 1920 Köyqap is mentioned as a boundary between the human world and the world of elves ( Peris ) and monsters.

In the Middle Persian writings of cosmogonic Bundahischn that in the 8/9 Century was compiled, but go back to its core to the time before Zarathustra, the Alborz Mountains is localized.

The Persian author Hamdullah Mustawfī -i - Qazwini described in the 14th century in his cosmography Nuzhat al - qulūb a long, east -west trending mountain range that extended from Arabia to Turkestan and he felt as a part of the great mountain ring Qaf. To this end, therefore, also included the Alborz Mountains. The Arab geographer Ibn Ḥawqal (second half 10th century ) wrote of a global mountains that stretched from China to the Hindukush, the Alborz and the Caucasus to Syria and North Africa. Both authors considered the Caucasus and Alborz connected to each other.

Koh -e Qaf was considered a spiritual place for Sufi poets. He was mystified in the 19th century and in a recorded in the 1980s with the Pashtuns narrative as forbidden garden with strange beings in it. A reference to the Hindu Kush can be reflected in the naming of Koh-i- Kaf for an " infidel " People in Kafiristan in the north- east of Afghanistan. Their name Kafiri (now Nuristani ), however, mostly derived from Arabic kaafir ( "infidels "). General stood Qaf for the most remote place on earth, where in the medieval Islamic geography, the Central Asian mountains combined with mythological ideas.

Myth of the mountain ring

The myth of a mountain ring around the Earth reaches far back into the pre-Islamic period. In the Old Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero Gilgamesh reaches beyond the wide steppes to mountain Masu, a conceptual forerunner of the mountain ring, beyond which rises the heavens. The north-east of the Ural living Mansi know a mythical first man who saw that did not come as a disk or a loaf of bread floating on the water planet to rest and specific advice to the sky god. This gave the original man a shod with silver belt, with which he was put on the earth. When he had done this, the earth is curved on the edge and there was the ring mountains, in which it is in this case to the Urals.

Similar ideas led to the Russians on the Pechora River to designate the surrounding mountains as zemnoi pojas ( Russian " lifebelts " ), which Siegmund von Herber stone in his travelogues from the 16th century in Latin cingulus mundi ( " world belt " ) calls and connects to the Urals. Presumably, the European Russians have received this world model that can also connect to a central world mountain to the east of living peoples.

A belt with which the world is encompassed, is also found as an "iron mountain Ring" at the Mongols and Tibet; when the Tartars riding a mythical hero until he reached a high mountain at the end of the world.

Qaf in Persian mythology

Qaf serves as a mythical motive for Persian poetry, particularly for epic Shahnameh of Firdausi and for the history of Fariduddin Attar, two great poets of the Persian language and literature. This mountain is known as the Bird's Nest for Simurgh or Cenmurv and as the destination of his self-recognition. Firdausi brings in his Shahnameh the mountain with (Persian باختر ) Bactria (today Afghanistan) in context, so that the great heroes of the Iranian mythology, but also the poet of these mountains come.

The saga of Simurgh (si Morg, "Thirty Birds", also called " Saena Birds "), which is similar to the phoenix history of the West, and actually describes a difficult journey with seven obstacles in the interior of the self, provides an allegory dar. In the story is a difficult one, associated with seven valleys journey of 1000 birds, which coffee went on the road to Kuh-e to come up with an unpronounceable name to find at an unreachable place behind the mountain their king, Simurgh. Only 30 birds reached the goal for which they had to find that the king bird Simurgh - hence its name "Thirty Birds" - already infected actually in their world of thought in them, so that the inner and outer worlds are one.