Siyāvosh Iconography: The Material and Pictorial Embodiment of Siyāvosh in Archaeological Evidence from the Eastern Part of Greater Iran

Myths are the human being’s responses to the most fundamental questions he has faced with. As time passes, such narratives would be elaborated, embellished and sometimes even transformed to something different. Myths are narrated and communicated through symbolic devices and parables and are accepted as a part of sacred beliefs in various societies. These mystic narratives throughout history were recorded as both texts and images and it is interesting that both of textual and visual media clearly represent the mystical aspects of myths. The myth of Siyāvosh is considered as one of the most time-honored stories in the Iranian culture, not only because of its heroic character, but also because of the long narrative with its several symbolic climaxes.
Siyāvosh is one the most important characters in Iranian national epics and his story is an integral part of a collection of narratives that came through a movement which compiled the Iranian heritage of epic literature. This movement which happened in the 3rd and 4th AH / 9th and 10th CE centuries gathered and refashioned the scattered stories into compendiums of verses and proses. Many researchers used historical, mythological and linguistic methods of analysis to reveal the seminal myth of Siyāvosh. While most of these researchers focused on the written sources mostly collected after the 4th and 5th centuries AH / 10th and 11th centuries, here we try to use the archaeological and pictorial evidence to study the mythological structure of Siyāvosh narrative. The temporal range of this evidence incorporates the Sasanian period during the 3rd AH / 9th CE century. The main reason for choosing this particular period is to look at the evidence before recording the oral culture of Iranian epic. Throughout these two centuries, birth, life and death of Siyāvosh have been depicted in several works in verse and prose the most famous and coherent of which is Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāmeh.
The intriguing point about such works is their distance from the seminal myth: the inevitable result of attuning the main story with the generic requisites of epic literature has led to the loss of the primordial features of Siyāvosh myth. Yet, the detailed study of this epic’s episodes reveals some traces of the older story. In addition, a few texts belonging to the Sassanian and early Islamic periods could be helpful in this respect. There are other sources to study the peculiarities of Siyāvosh myth and those are the images and icons which were created before the 4th and 5th AH / 10th and 11th CE centuries. These images and icons can be categorized as archaeological evidence and they can contribute immensely to understand Iranian epic narratives and characters.
Generally, one could relate the Siyāvosh narrative to two fundamental mythical structures: one is that of the “myth of the martyr god” and the other is the “totemic undertone of Siyāvosh as being a horse”. All of this evidence was created in the eastern part of Greater Iran. The main purposes in here are both to analyze the validity of attribution of such evidence to the Siyāvosh narrative and also to reveal the embryonic myth of Siyāvosh from these data. This evidence is comprised of four groups of archaeological findings, each of them representing the Siyāvosh story in a particular way.
This research is based on the archaeological and written evidence and it implements a combination of historiological, mythological, linguistic and iconographical approaches to reach a comprehensive conclusion. In the cases where the main focus is on image or painting, the iconographical approaches are the main analytical means and accordingly, all the details and elements of each image will be completely described. The subject material of this study is archaeological data which could be divided into paintings and sculptures. The evidence which is considered here as the material and pictorial representation of Siyāvosh are a mural painting, a painted pottery, a number of coins and some anthropomorphic ossuaries, which will be individually analyzed.