Tahmina is a Persian name meaning strong or brave and is known from Persian epic tradition.
Tahmina steps out of one of the world's great literary epics: the Shahnameh (Book of Kings), composed by the Persian poet Ferdowsi around 1000 CE. In that monumental work, Tahmina is a princess of Samangan — courageous, beautiful, and decisively self-directed — who seeks out the legendary hero Rostam herself, proposing marriage and bearing him a son, Sohrab.
Their son's unknowing death at his father's hands forms the tragedy at the heart of the Sohrab and Rostam cycle, a story later adapted by Matthew Arnold and compared in emotional scope to Greek tragedy. The name itself is believed to derive from Old Persian for "strong-bodied" or "powerful." The name has endured across the Persian-speaking world — Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan — and among diaspora communities for over a millennium, its literary pedigree giving it a cultural weight rarely matched by any single text.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, it has been carried by notable women in Central Asian literature, politics, and academia, gradually expanding into broader naming traditions. For families who value Persian literary heritage, naming a daughter Tahmina is an act of cultural memory — connecting a child to a heroine who chose her own destiny in a story a thousand years old.