An Investigation of Gonabad Typical Pottery Motifs and Their Symbolic Meanings

Sometime replete with sense of life, Gonabad pottery and its motifs have gradually lost their original meanings and concepts in the course of time and now those meaningful motifs reduced to just some decorative motifs without their initiative notions for most of potters making pottery and applying those motifs on the works. Therefore, it seems necessary to authors to determine the basic, essential concepts of motifs on the pottery forgotten as a result of transmission by oral history as well as time passage. The aim of this study is to introduce and reexamine the concealed thoughts, ideas and philosophies these motifs have maintained within them during thousands of years. The research is based on descriptive-analytical methodology and the data collection method on library review. According to the concept of study, the main sources for related data, articles and so forth in the research were scientific databases.The results indicate that there are generally three types of motifs on Gonagad pottery, including zoomorphic, vegetal and geometric. In the zoomorphic group, peacock, sparrow (little bird) and pigeon (big bird) are so prominent that those like peacock and sparrow have appeared on Gonabad Great Mosque’s portal as well. In the vegetal motifs the tree and in geometric ones the sun motif is of significance. In fact, the basic concepts of such motifs are embedded in popular stories as well as in folk beliefs, manifested symbolically in the form of single images on the pottery. Furthermore, the motifs had strong and close relations with the religious beliefs of that period as well as the subsequent eras. Specifically, peacock motif on the one hand was prominent in Islamic Art and on the other it carried Zoroastrian connotations.