Two Brains a Night

A thousand years of it, the Shahnameh says, in which wise custom lapsed and nobody spoke of good except in private. Two young people were taken each night and their brains fed to the serpents. Then two pious men learned cookery and got themselves appointed to the royal kitchen, and thereafter killed only one of each pair, mixing a sheep's brains in to make up the weight and sending the other out into the waste with instructions to go near no dwelling. Thirty a month. When the saved reached two hundred they were given sheep and goats and sent off into the desert, and the poem says that this is where the Kurds came from.