Iconography of Animal Motifs in Seals of Magi in Sasanian Period

So far, many researches have been done about clergy, their hierarchy, role and position in the Sassanid era and there is considerable information about them. Most of this awareness comes from textual evidence, including religious and non-religious books. The only archaeological evidence related to this important stratum of the society of this period is the seals, the seals impression and also the reliefs of Kartir. The reliefs of Kartir, due to their predominance of individuality, do not help us much in understanding the role and position of this class in the Sassanid period, but the second group, the seals and, seals impression discovered belonging to the Sassanid period, is a first-hand source for studying this important and influential group. Although many of these seals, in particular the seals that were discovered on the Takht-e Soleyman, were introduced by scholars as Magi seals, only a small part of them are based on inscriptions into this stratum. This means that only a small part of them clearly have the phrase magician or priest. In the present study, this seals have been studied and in fact, they have been selected from all the seals attributed to Magies. The motifs on these seals are very diverse and include almost all the motifs on the seals of the Sassanid period, including human, animal, plant, symbolic and monogram. In this study, with the iconographic approach, only animal motifs depicted on Magi's inscriptions are inscribed. For this purpose, after collecting the desired designs from various reports - which are generally in the form of catalogs and introducing seals - and providing a brief description, they were analyzed based on Zoroastrian texts. This article has reached the general conclusion that there are no exclusive and special motifs of Moghan in painting, and this group has followed the same taste and general aesthetics