Investigation and Symbology of Plant Motifs on Iranian Coins from Ilkhanid to Qajar Period

The inscriptions and motifs on the coins have always been influenced by the religion, culture and political-governmental conditions of every period. Coins can be considered as an undistorted historical document to know the conditions of society in every period. Symbols give new value and meaning to an object and trace without destroying its real value. One of the most widely used symbols is plant motifs, which became more effective and powerful in the early Islamic time due to the fading of human and animal motifs in Islamic art. These motifs were painted sometimes abstractly and sometimes realistic. The aim of this study is typology of floral motifs on coins from the Ilkhanid to the Qajar period and also to study these motifs from a symbolic point of view in order to answer questions such as: What floral motifs are there on the Ilkhanid to the Qajar coins? And what are the symbolic meanings of these motifs? The present study is a descriptive-comparative and analytical approach and its information is extracted through library resource studies (study library resources) and field surveys (investigating the samples of various inside and outside museums) on more than 100 coins. The results of studies showed that plant motifs have been used on coins as in other industries objects. In the Ilkhanid and Timurid periods, these motifs were mostly limited and were used marginally to fill the background space and sometimes for creating frames, but from the Safavid period onwards, these motifs can be seen on coins with more quantity and distribution, it is why we can find fewer coins in this The period without plant motifs. The most common plant motifs are lotus and rosette flowers and Arabesque(Eslimi)-Khatai and Bergamot motifs, and symbolically, the selection of these motifs is all based on ancient Iranian beliefs and is rooted in the belief in immortality, blessing, fertility and believing in the Iranian utopia.