The Cup of Jamshid
The cup of the legendary shah Jamshid, in which, according to Persian tradition, the whole world could be seen as in a mirror, so that nothing on earth or in the seven climes was hidden from the king, who used it in divination. Despite a common modern assumption, the cup does not appear in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh; it belongs to later literature, where it is also given to the Kayanid king Kay Khosrow, and it became a byword for far-seeing wisdom in the verses of Hafez and Attar. In later elaborations the cup was said to hold an elixir of immortality and to carry the seven rings of the heavens, and