Children: Demons or Human Beings? (A Study of the Identity of Children Based on Shahnameh's Miniatures)

Different kinds of sources such as historical, mythological, epical sources and dictionaries have been used for solving the textual ambiguities of Shahnameh. However, little attention has been paid to the visual sources i.e. Persian painting, as important sources in the study of Shahnameh. Pervious researches mostly studied the artistic and decorative aspects of these paintings. This article attempts to consider pictorial sources as a source for textual studies in solving textual ambiguities of Shahnameh. One of these ambiguities is the identity of a child. The identity of a child is not clarified exactly in Shahnameh. Some researchers suggest that a child may be a Div (Demon); others however consider him as human. This article tries to discover the identity of children on the basis of Shahnameh's paintings; the oldest illustrated manuscripts, the quantity of the paintings, the relationship between text and image, and the origin of paintings have been studied in order to ascribe human identity to a child. Miniatures portraying a child as Div can be found almost entirely in the "Indian Manuscripts", however those portraying a child as a human have Iranian origins.