Exploring the Semantic Development of Simurgh Symbolism in Persian Literature

Symbols are powerful images that articulate a set of cultural and mythological concepts in certain semantic clusters. These clusters produced through creative literary processes constitute a part of our cultural memory. One of the symbols is Simurgh that was generated in the pre-Islamic Persian texts and continued to remain in the cultural memory of the post-Islamic Iran. It has continued in the form of new articulations in Persian poetry and mysticism. These multiple articulations show that Simurgh in the Iranian culture has become a central signifier. Thus, an intertextual re-reading of the signifieds encoded in it can make the tradition of mythological and symbolic thought in the Iranian universe comprehensible for the new generation. Accordingly, by drawing on textual evidence from both the pre-Islamic and post-Islamic body of literature and by adopting the technique of close reading, the present paper makes an attempt to shed light on the rich symbolism of this bird in order to explore its semantic developments throughout the history. Moreover, it discusses how and why these semantic turns have taken place. On this basis, the present paper makes an attempt to answer this question: What is the difference between Simurgh in the pre-Islamic and post-Islamic literary texts and what creative manipulations in its form and content have taken place over time?