Metamorphose of Demons in Lithograph Illustrations of Iskandarn?ma Naghali (1856-57 AD)

Since the curios and creative mind of the human always attracts to unknowns and wonders, issues of this kind are interesting all the time. Thus, the footprint of the supernatural creatures and humans can be found in the beliefs, legends and folk tales abound worldwide. With the arrival of the Lithographic Printing Industry in Iran and the widespread availability of books for ordinary people, particularly those legends, folk tales with strange and wonderful events became so popular and brought great prosperity. One of them is Iskandarnāma Naghali. The story of Iskandar has got a special place among folkloric literature due to the various versions of its in prose and poetry and numerous narratives of it in Greek, Pahlavi, Farsi and so on. Thus, the vast and combined flavor of this book, which reflects the Islamic and Shiite thoughts of the late Safavid dynasty and, on the other hand, the Iranian and pre-Islamic myths, is a good platform for studying the visual art and changing culture of this era of Iranian history. The tumultuous story line of the book is full of historical, heroic and magical motifs. Although it has historical and epical content, it is also full of strange people, creatures and supernatural events. In describing some creatures such as demons and giants in this book, mythological term Metamorphoses can be used. This means that the appearance and capabilities of such phenomena has been changed especially by supernatural means. The aim of this study, in addition to introducing Iskandarnāma Naghali manuscripts to date1856-57 AD, is describing and analyzing the transformed samples and study their mythological roots. The research questions are as follows. What are the characteristics of these phenomenons in appearance and ability? What are the similarities and differentiating of such beings with their counterparts? How to describe and categorize them according to the mythological term of Metamorphoses?
The method of this research using library resources is descriptive-analytiacal and the images are analysed by Panoffsky’s iconography. The results of this study shows that the demons portrayed in this manuscript are classified into three different types of Metamorphoses which are partial, complete and healing. More over, comparative study of the three copies showed the similarity between two versions which revealed the influence of prior manuscript on later one, whereas the last copy is completely different.