---
title: The speaking tree
type: Legend
description: The oracular two-trunked tree in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh that foretold Alexander's death, descended from the Trees of the Sun and Moon.
resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh
tags: [alexander, shahnameh, prophecy, persian]
timestamp: 2026-06-01T00:00:00Z
---

# The speaking tree

In Ferdowsi's *Shahnameh*, completed about 1010 CE, Eskandar (Alexander the Great) travels to the edge of the world and finds a tree with two trunks whose branches end in talking heads. The male trunk spoke by day and the female by night. When Alexander questioned it, the tree foretold that he would die soon in a foreign land, far from his mother and his home, with strangers standing by. The prophecy is borne out later in the poem, when he dies in Babylon.

The episode descends from the Trees of the Sun and Moon in the Greek Alexander Romance attributed to Pseudo-Callisthenes, in which Alexander consults a pair of oracular trees in India. In Persian retelling the motif merged with the [[waqwaq-tree|Waq-Waq tree]] of talking fruit, so that the tree of prophecy and the tree of crying fruit became, in many paintings, the same tree hung with human and animal heads.

The scene grew into one of the most often illustrated moments of the *Shahnameh*. A celebrated example is the painting in the Timurid manuscript made for Ebrahim Soltan, a grandson of Timur, about 1430, in which Alexander stands before the tree with his finger to his lips. The subject is treated further under [[in-art|the tree in art]].
