The Discourse of Archaism in Persian Pictorial Rugs during Qajar Era

Iranian hand-woven carpet is a national art rooted in the ancient civilization, culture and history of Iran. In history, carpet designs have been transformed, due to changes in society and at times subjects, designs, shapes and combinations are brought in or taken out. For example, during Qajar Era, new social transformations resulted in the invention of new motifs in rugs in contrast to former abstract motifs; with simulated or imagined images of kings.
This paper studies pictorial rugs of Qajar period with a sociological approach and with Laclau and Mouffe discourse analysis beside the semantic structure of Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic axes of Ferdinand de Saussure. It aims at finding the answer for the question of what discourse signifiers were affecting those rugs and the reason behind the popularity of the images of mythical ancient Iranian kings at that era.
Descriptive-analytic approach is used in this study and library documents were applied as data source. Ten samples of pictorial rugs, with Iranian kings as their subject, were selected randomly as the sample. The findings of this study reveal that since a willingness to find an Iranian identity right against other nations was to emerge at that era, people who travelled to Europe tended to find the reason behind Iran’s underdevelopment. As a result, they introduced mythical kings and the pre-Islamic era as the ideal kings and the golden age, which was being reflected in the rugs of that period. The structure of motifs’ companionship seem to be replaced by images of kings in order to emphasize the hegemony of their divinely spiritual legitimacy and political power in the world.