Evil Mind, and a Very Old Joke

Two separate things meet in this tale and neither is obvious. Akvan appears nowhere in the ancient Iranian scriptures — but scholars since the nineteenth century have noticed that his name is very close to that of a Zoroastrian arch-demon meaning Evil Mind, and have argued that a copyist's slip turned one into the other. On that reading his perverse, back-to-front behaviour is not a quirk; it is the abstraction made into a character. The second thing is older and much wider: the trick Rostam plays on him is a folktale type found all over the world, the one where the creature begs not to be thrown exactly where it wants to go.