Correlation Between the Yugh Cus toms and Mourning Episodes in the Paintings form the Great Mongol Shahnama; A Cultural Semiotic Approach

The s tudy and analysis of the paintings of the Great Mongol Shahnama has often been done with emphasis on the literary text of the Shahnameh and related narratives.In mos t of the s tudies and researches conducted in this field,researchers, both domes tic and foreign,have paid less attention to the signs outside the narration of Shahnama However, it seems that the signs in the literary text of Ferdowsi’s Shahnama are very different from the visual signs the Great Mongol Shahnama in many cases.Because the text of Ferdowsi’s Shahnama is a text belonging to the Iranian discourse and focusing on poetic language but the Great Mongol Shahnama is a text centered on visual language and belongs to the Mongol discourse,the discourse that has been formed with the presence of the Mongols in Iran And as a larger semiosphere, two other semiosphere, namely the Iranian semiosphere and the Turkish-Mongol semiosphere,are placed inside it.Therefore, it is thought that if the reading of the paintings of the Great Mongol Shahnama is based on the semiosphere of “Ilkhani Painting” And in analyzing the visual signs,pay attention to the signs outside the narrative of Ferdowsi (Iranian semiosphere),means that the mythical signs and Shamanis tic beliefs related to the Turkish-Mongol culture (Turkish-Mongol semiosphere); In this case, perhaps very valuable and thought-provoking results will be available to researchers and audiences in the field of Ilkhanid painting(Miniature) and so new perspectives for future researchers emerge. In this research,it is assumed that the bigges t and original semiosphere (Ilkhanid painting), the narrations of Shahnama as “non- texts” are in the “text” of the image with two ways: 1. it has taken the narration directly from the Iranian semiosphere (Ferdowsi’s Shahnama) and with the mechanism of intermediate translation, it has entered the images of Ilkhani’s Shahnama. 2.The painter has indirectly incorporated the narratives of Ferdowsi’s Shahnama into the pictorial signs of the Great Mongol Shahnama by passing them through the filter of Turkish-Mongolian culture and by the mechanism of interdisciplinary translation.The purpose of this s tudy is to show the relationship between “Yugh” ceremony – the funeral cus toms of Turks and Mongols in conveying heroes and famous leaders - with funeral cus toms pictures in the Great Mongol Shahnama.This research has been done in a descriptive-analytical way. And it uses library s tudies.The aim of this s tudy is fundamental and uses the methodology of semiotics and the cultural semiotics approach of Yuri Lutman.The main findings of the present s tudy indicate that there are significant indications of the Yugh ceremony as well as the Yuğçus - special performers of the Yugh ceremony - in the four the funeral cus toms pictures of the Great Mongol Shahnama.Thus,in one of the paintings, the exis tence of two different and dis tinct groups reminds of the possibility of the connection between the two groups with two different happy and sad parts of the “Yugh” ceremony.these two gropus are: People carrying musical ins truments and Crying people.And the exis tence of only one group of “crying and wailing people” in the other three paintings sugges ts the possibility of a connection with the second and sad part of the Yugh ceremony.