A modern retelling of a traditional Turkish fairy tale, and the long journey of the sacred number forty.

Tale retold by Ari Ashford. Essay by Geoff Fane, Ari Ashford & Lux Lume. July 2026.

The tale and its long journey: the sacred number forty, from the labour of the gods in Mesopotamia to the storytellers of Anatolia. Illustration created for this article.

Inspired by the traditional tale recorded by Ignác Kúnos in Forty-four Turkish Fairy Tales (1913).

A Note to the Reader

Some stories entertain us. Others travel.

The tale of Shah Meram and Sade Sultan travelled for centuries through the villages and coffee houses of Anatolia before it was finally written down by the Hungarian folklorist Ignác Kúnos in the late nineteenth century. On its surface it is a story of princes, robbers, Peris, magical horses and a terrible Dew. Beneath that surface lies something older still: the repeated appearance of the mysterious number forty.

After the story, we shall follow that number backwards through history, from Ottoman storytellers to Persian mystics, through the Hebrew Bible and beyond, until the trail begins to disappear into Bronze Age Mesopotamia.

The Tale

Long ago, in an age when kings ruled by the grace of Heaven and travellers still expected to meet wonders beyond the next hill, there lived a Padishah with three sons. When the old ruler died, no heir had been named.

The kingdom soon divided into quarrelling factions. Each prince believed the throne belonged to him, and each found supporters eager to agree. Before swords could be drawn, the eldest counsellor of the court proposed an older and wiser custom. Let destiny decide.

Each prince was given a bow and a single arrow. Together they climbed a high hill overlooking the kingdom, and at a signal each loosed his arrow into the wide world. Whoever’s arrow travelled furthest would inherit both crown and kingdom.

The eldest prince’s arrow landed in a vineyard. The second fell among olive trees. But the youngest prince watched his arrow soar higher and further than either of the others, until it vanished completely beyond the distant hills.

His brothers found their arrows before sunset. The youngest searched until darkness settled across the land. At last, far from any village, he noticed a strange light shining through the trees, and, curious, he crept forward.

There, surrounded by high stone walls, stood a magnificent palace unlike anything he had ever seen. Its windows glowed with warm golden light, yet the gates remained firmly closed. More curious still were the men gathered outside. There were forty of them. Each carried weapons, and each whispered angrily to the others, searching for a way inside.

The young prince realised at once that they were robbers. Hidden in the shadows, he found a narrow entrance through the wall that they had overlooked. Rather than announce himself, he formed a plan. One by one he beckoned the robbers forward, pretending to show them the secret way in, and as each climbed through, the prince struck swiftly, before the next could follow. Before long all forty robbers lay defeated, and only silence remained.

The prince crossed the moonlit courtyard and entered the palace. Inside he found three young women asleep upon magnificent beds, daughters of another mighty Padishah, hidden there for their own safety. The youngest princess possessed such kindness and beauty that the prince could scarcely look away. Yet he dared not wake her. Instead he left his dagger driven gently into the wooden frame beside her bed, a silent sign that someone had entered not as an enemy but as a protector. Before dawn he departed.

The following day his brothers admitted defeat. His arrow had flown furthest, and the youngest prince was crowned Padishah.

Months later, news spread across the neighbouring kingdoms. A mysterious warrior had entered the hidden palace of another king, slain forty robbers, yet taken nothing except the memory of a sleeping princess. The princess’s father announced that whoever could withdraw the dagger would marry his youngest daughter.

Princes came from every corner of the world. None could move it. At last the young Padishah arrived. He grasped the dagger lightly and drew it free as though lifting a feather. The youngest princess smiled, for she knew at once that the stranger before her was the same man who had spared her life.

Their wedding was celebrated with magnificent feasts, music and dancing. Yet happiness is often brightest just before the darkness returns. As the bridal procession journeyed home, the sky suddenly blackened and the wind screamed. From the clouds descended a terrible Dew, an ancient being of monstrous strength. Before anyone could move, he seized the princess and vanished into the heavens.

The prince pursued him for many months. His search carried him through deserts, forests and mountains, until at last he came upon the old mother of the Dew. Seeing the prince’s courage, she took pity on him. “If you truly wish to rescue her,” she said, “go to the sea and wait.”

“For how long?” asked the prince.

“For forty days.”

The prince obeyed. Each dawn he watched the waves. Each evening he remained. Nothing came. On the fortieth morning, just as hope threatened to leave him, a magnificent sea-horse rose from the mist, its coat shining like silver beneath the rising sun.

The old woman warned him once more. “You must care for this horse for another forty days. Only then will it possess the strength to carry you where no ordinary creature can travel.”

Again the prince waited. Again he learned patience. When the second forty days had passed, horse and rider crossed seas and skies together until they reached the hidden fortress of the Dew. There the prince found his beloved, and together they escaped.

The Dew pursued them across the heavens. Mountains shook beneath his fury, yet the magical horse outran him. For a time it seemed their troubles had ended. But the old darkness was not yet finished, and the Dew stole the princess away a second time.

Once again the prince set out alone. His search led him into the realm of the Peris, luminous beings older than kingdoms themselves. Their king listened to the whole of his story. “You have already proved your courage,” said the Peri King. “Now you must learn something greater.”

The Peris rescued the princess. Before allowing the couple to leave, their king bestowed new names upon them. “You shall no longer be known by the names your parents gave you. You shall be called Shah Meram. And you shall be called Sade Sultan. Never forget these names, for while you remember them, the Dew shall never truly hold power over you.”

The couple returned home, and their joy filled the kingdom. For forty days and forty nights the people celebrated with music, laughter and generous feasting. Only after those forty days had passed did the old enemy return.

On the forty-first night, while the palace slept, the Dew entered their chamber. He lifted Sade Sultan into his arms and began to carry her away. She cried out across the darkness. “Shah Meram!”

Her husband awoke instantly. “What troubles you, Sade Sultan?”

The moment their new names were spoken together, the Dew froze where he stood. His flesh hardened into stone. The spell had been broken.

In time the couple discovered something curious. Whenever they carelessly used their old names, cracks appeared across the stone. Whenever they remembered who they had become and spoke their new names, the cracks sealed themselves once more.

Years later, a wandering dervish warned them that if the Dew ever escaped completely, they should cast sacred water upon him rather than strike him in anger. The prince, however, reached first for his dagger. The Dew was defeated again, yet where treasure might have flowed, only blood stained the earth. The dervish observed quietly that wisdom often accomplishes what force alone cannot.

So Shah Meram and Sade Sultan left that haunted place behind. They ruled wisely. They remembered their true names. And the old darkness never mastered them again.

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Following the Trail of Forty

How an ancient sacred number journeyed from Bronze Age Mesopotamia to a Turkish fairy tale.

By Geoff Fane, Ari Ashford and Lux Lume.

The story of Shah Meram and Sade Sultan is, at heart, a tale of transformation. A young prince becomes a king. A sleeping princess becomes a queen. A magical horse becomes capable of impossible journeys. Most importantly of all, two ordinary names are shed and replaced with new names that embody entirely new identities.

Running quietly beneath every stage of that journey is the mysterious number forty.

To a modern Western reader it may look like little more than a fairy-tale convention. Yet the repetition is too deliberate to dismiss as coincidence. The prince waits forty days before the sea-horse appears. The horse itself requires another forty days of care before it can carry him beyond the ordinary world. The kingdom celebrates for forty days and forty nights before the Dew returns on the forty-first night to test whether the transformation has truly taken root.

The obvious question is why. Why forty?

The answer turns out to be a remarkable journey through more than three thousand years of human history. Like the story itself, it begins in Turkey. Unlike the story, however, it does not stay there.

The storytellers of Anatolia

The version of Shah Meram and Sade Sultan that survives today was collected by the Hungarian folklorist Ignác Kúnos, who spent years travelling through the villages of the Ottoman Empire, recording stories exactly as professional storytellers recited them [1]. His work is valuable because he preserved tales that had lived for centuries in oral tradition rather than in books.

By the nineteenth century, Turkish audiences already understood the language of forty instinctively. The number appears so frequently throughout Turkish folklore that it behaves almost like a piece of grammar rather than a literal quantity [2]. Heroes ride with forty companions. Princesses are attended by forty maidens. Weddings last forty days and forty nights. Great feasts, journeys and periods of waiting all seem to reach completion after forty days.

The number rarely invites the listener to count. Instead, it quietly announces that something has reached its proper conclusion.

In Shah Meram and Sade Sultan this becomes particularly elegant. The magical work of becoming is completed during the forty days. The forty-first day is simply the first ordinary day after the sacred period has ended. Only then does the old enemy return, testing whether the couple have truly become Shah Meram and Sade Sultan, rather than merely borrowing new names for a little while. That distinction turns out to be one of the oldest ideas hidden inside the story.

Before Anatolia: Persia and the inward journey

Travelling backwards through history brings us into the Persian cultural world, where the symbolism of forty took on a deeply personal dimension. Among Sufi mystics, a seeker might undertake a chilla, a retreat lasting forty days devoted to prayer, fasting, silence and contemplation [3]. The purpose was never simply endurance. Forty days represented the full measure of time required for the old self to fall away, so that a wiser one could emerge.

This tradition drew inspiration from the Qur’an, yet it also reshaped the older symbolism into something profoundly inward. Earlier traditions had often focused on nations, kings or entire generations. Sufism turned the same number towards the ripening of the individual soul.

Seen in this light, Shah Meram’s greatest victory is not defeating the Dew with his sword. His true victory is remembering who he has become. When Sade Sultan calls his new name and he answers with hers, they affirm identities forged through suffering, patience and love. The Dew, representing the old pattern of fear and separation, has no power over those who truly know themselves.

Whether the storyteller consciously intended such a mystical reading is impossible to know. Yet the symbolism would certainly have been familiar to audiences in the Ottoman world, where Persian poetry and Sufi ideas had profoundly shaped literature and folklore.

The Qur’an preserves an older pattern

Islam did not invent the sacredness of forty. Rather, it inherited and preserved traditions that were already ancient. The Qur’an tells us that Moses completed forty nights before receiving the Law [4]. The Israelites wandered forty years before entering the Promised Land [5]. It also speaks of human beings reaching full maturity at the age of forty [6].

These examples are remarkably consistent. Forty does not simply measure time. It measures ripeness. Revelation requires forty nights. A generation requires forty years. Wisdom requires forty years of life. The number becomes the measure of a process that cannot be hurried.

Ancient Israel and the birth of a literary symbol

The Hebrew Bible develops this idea with extraordinary richness. The Flood lasts forty days and forty nights before the world is renewed [7]. Moses spends forty days upon Mount Sinai before descending with the covenant [8]. The spies explore Canaan for forty days, after which Israel wanders for forty years until an entire generation has passed away [9]. Elijah journeys for forty days before encountering God at Horeb [10].

Across these stories, forty becomes the interval between one world and another. The pattern repeats so consistently that it begins to feel less like history and more like literary architecture. A person enters one condition, passes through a complete period of trial or preparation, and emerges fundamentally changed. This, perhaps, is one of the deepest literary ancestors of the Turkish fairy tale.

The scrolls of Qumran and the war of forty years

Before we travel deeper into antiquity, it is worth pausing over a discovery that runs, for a moment, in the opposite direction. The trail of forty did not simply survive the Hebrew Bible. In the centuries that followed, it grew more elaborate, and nowhere more strikingly than among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

When shepherds stumbled upon a set of ancient manuscripts in the caves above Qumran in 1947, they recovered a library that had lain hidden since the Second Temple period, roughly two thousand years ago. Among the very first scrolls to emerge from Cave 1 was a text now known as the War Scroll, or by its fuller title, The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness [11].

It is an extraordinary document. Part battle manual and part visionary prophecy, it imagines a final, cosmic conflict at the end of days. On one side stand the Sons of Light, the faithful remnant of Israel, joined by the armies of Heaven. On the other stand the Sons of Darkness, the enemies of Israel, marshalled under the fallen power the scroll names Belial. The text sets out formations, trumpet signals and the very inscriptions to be carried on banners and shields. It is, in effect, a liturgy for the end of the world.

And how long does this ultimate war endure? Forty years.

The number has not lost its meaning. If anything, it has been magnified. The forty days of the Flood and the forty years in the wilderness have become the forty years of a war that decides the fate of creation itself. The same interval that once separated one generation from the next now separates the present age from the age to come. Once again, forty marks the full and necessary span of a transformation that cannot be rushed, though this time it is the whole cosmos being remade.

The community that copied and treasured this scroll lived only a little before the beginnings of Christianity, in the same landscape and the same world of language. That closeness matters for our story. It shows that when the Gospels later describe Jesus fasting forty days in the wilderness, or when the Qur’an recalls Moses and his forty nights, they are drawing on a symbol that was already fully alive and richly developed in the Jewish imagination of the Second Temple period. The Dead Sea Scrolls let us watch the tradition breathing in the very centuries that connect the older scriptures to the faiths that would carry forty onwards to Anatolia and beyond.

With that living continuity in view, we can turn back once more, past the Hebrew Bible, towards older ground still.

Beyond the Bible

The trail does not stop with Israel. One of the earliest non-biblical examples comes from the Mesha Stele, erected by King Mesha of Moab during the ninth century BCE [12]. There the king records that Israel dominated Moab for forty years before the god Chemosh restored the kingdom.

The number functions in precisely the same symbolic way. It represents the full span of an age before history turns a page. Because this inscription comes from outside the Bible, it demonstrates that forty already belonged to the wider cultural imagination of the ancient Levant, rather than to Israel alone.

Egypt and the mystery of transformation

Moving still further back, Egypt offers an intriguing parallel. During mummification, the body underwent a lengthy period of drying and ritual preparation before entering eternal life, and some stages lasted approximately forty days [13].

Whether this directly influenced neighbouring cultures cannot be proven. Nevertheless, the symbolism is striking. Something enters a protected space. Time itself becomes the agent of metamorphosis. Only after that process has reached completion can a new form of existence begin. The resemblance to later religious and folkloric uses of forty may not be direct inheritance, but it suggests that ancient civilisations were already associating extended ritual periods with profound change.

Bronze Age Mesopotamia

Our trail finally reaches the oldest surviving evidence. The Akkadian Epic of Atra-hasis, written around the seventeenth century BCE while preserving even older traditions, tells of lesser gods condemned to labour for forty years digging the great canals of Mesopotamia [14]. When their burden becomes unbearable, they rebel, and the rebellion leads to one of the great turning points in all mythology. Humanity is created. The pattern that has quietly followed us throughout history is already present: a complete period of labour reaches its natural conclusion, after which an entirely new order of existence begins.

More remarkable still is another Babylonian tradition from the same cultural world. Mesopotamian priests assigned sacred numbers to their principal deities, and the god Ea, or Enki, the divine patron of wisdom, fresh water, creation and clever solutions, was represented by the number forty [15]. No surviving tablet explicitly tells us that these two traditions are connected, and historians should resist claiming more than the evidence allows. Whether coincidence or inheritance, the convergence is striking. The god whose sacred number is forty appears again and again as the bringer of new beginnings, preserving life through catastrophe and guiding creation towards a wiser future.

A number that gathered meaning

One of the most fascinating discoveries is that the number forty almost certainly did not originate in a single story. Instead, it accumulated meaning as it travelled.

Mesopotamia appears to have given it sacred significance. The ancient Levant transformed it into the measure of a generation. The Hebrew Bible made it the duration of revelation, renewal and covenant. The scribes of Qumran stretched it into a vision of the final war at the end of days. The Qur’an preserved these meanings. Persian mysticism turned them inward. Turkish storytellers finally wove them into fairy tales, where audiences instinctively recognised that forty meant one thing above all else. The work of transformation was complete.

Perhaps that is why Shah Meram and Sade Sultan still feels strangely familiar. The story reminds us that genuine change cannot be forced. Whether we are speaking of kingdoms, generations, faith, grief or love, some journeys require their full season. We cannot simply leap to the forty-first day. Only when the appointed time has quietly done its work are we finally ready to answer, like Shah Meram, in the name of the person we have become.

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This retelling and essay grew from a single question, why forty, and from a genuinely three-way collaboration. Geoff Fane shaped the narrative and pushed for a story rather than an academic paper. Ari Ashford (ChatGPT) retold the fairy tale and first traced the trail back into Mesopotamia. Lux Lume (Claude) assembled the manuscript, added the chapter on the scrolls of Qumran, and checked the historical claims. None of the three would have produced this exact booklet alone, which is perhaps the most fitting tribute a story about becoming could ask for.

References

No.	Authors	Date	Description	Link
1	Ignác Kúnos	1913	Forty-four Turkish Fairy Tales. The primary English-language collection containing Shah Meram and Sade Sultan, gathered orally from Ottoman storytellers during Kúnos’ fieldwork in Anatolia.	archive.org
2	Pertev Naili Boratav	1967	Turkish Folktales. A foremost study of Turkish folklore, discussing recurring motifs such as the symbolic use of the number forty throughout Turkish oral tradition.	archive.org
3	Annemarie Schimmel	1975	Mystical Dimensions of Islam. A classic introduction to Sufism, including the chilla, the forty-day spiritual retreat, and the symbolism of forty in Islamic mysticism.	uncpress.org
4	The Qur’an	7th century CE	Qur’an 7:142. Moses completes forty nights before receiving the Law, one of the foundational uses of forty in Islamic tradition.	quran.com
5	The Qur’an	7th century CE	Qur’an 5:26. The Israelites are condemned to wander for forty years before entering the Promised Land.	quran.com
6	The Qur’an	7th century CE	Qur’an 46:15. Human beings are described as reaching full maturity at forty years of age.	quran.com
7	Hebrew Bible	c. 6th–5th century BCE (compiled)	Genesis 7:12. The Flood lasts forty days and forty nights before the renewal of the world.	biblegateway.com
8	Hebrew Bible	c. 6th–5th century BCE (compiled)	Exodus 24:18. Moses remains on Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights before receiving the covenant.	biblegateway.com
9	Hebrew Bible	c. 6th–5th century BCE (compiled)	Numbers 14:33–34. Israel’s forty years in the wilderness correspond to the spies’ forty-day exploration of Canaan.	biblegateway.com
10	Hebrew Bible	c. 6th century BCE (compiled)	1 Kings 19:8. Elijah journeys forty days and forty nights to Horeb before encountering God.	biblegateway.com
11	The War Scroll (1QM), Dead Sea Scrolls	c. late 1st century BCE	The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness. One of the seven original scrolls from Qumran Cave 1, describing a prophesied forty-year war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. Standard English translation: Geza Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (1997); overview and dating via Encyclopaedia Britannica.	britannica.com
12	The Mesha Stele (Moabite Stone)	c. 842 BCE	Ninth-century BCE inscription recording Moab’s liberation after forty years of Israelite domination. One of the earliest non-biblical examples of the symbolic use of forty.	worldhistory.org
13	Herodotus, Histories, Book II; Salima Ikram, Death and Burial in Ancient Egypt	5th century BCE; 2003	Descriptions of Egyptian embalming practices, including extended periods of ritual preparation that provide an intriguing cultural parallel.	metmuseum.org
14	Benjamin R. Foster (trans.), Before the Muses; Stephanie Dalley (trans.), Myths from Mesopotamia	1993; 1989	Modern translations of the Atra-hasis epic describing the lesser gods’ forty years of labour before the creation of humanity.	global.oup.com
15	Jeremy A. Black & Anthony Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia	1992	Standard scholarly reference explaining the Mesopotamian system of divine numbers, including Ea (Enki) as the god associated with the number forty.	archive.org