Analyzing the Miniatures of Rostam's Seven Labors in Tahmasbi Shahnama Based on Cultural Semiotics Pattern

In the discourse of Safavid era, we could see a duality-centered and opposition, placing Shiite Safavids in tension with Uzbek Hanafi and Sunni Ottomans. According to the paradigm of cultural semiotics, it is within this opposition and tension that semantics is taken place. Safavid is regarded within the culture, internal actor, and east neighbors or the enemy within no culture, nature or the other. Since the art is regarded such as a pattern –maker system in cultural semiotics, it could be at the service of discourse and ideology, showing this duality-centered and opposition. One of the most important advertising media along this oppositional semantics at Safavid era, is the illustrated manuscript of Tahmasbi Shahnameh. The seven labors of Rostam's story and its illustration by the artists of this period is a remarkable example of duality-centered, created in the discourse atmosphere of Safavid Shiite government against Sunni religion governments of neighborhoods, showing hero and antihero within an oppositional system, and involved of dominant discourse. The aim of the present research is to analyze the oppositional system of Rostam's seven labors miniatures in Tahmasbi Shahnameh by respecting a cultural semiotics pattern within the discourse dominated on that period and, to answer these questions: How an artist has illustrated the oppositional system of hero and antihero in miniatures of Rostam's seven labors in Tahmasbi Shahnameh? To what extent the miniatures have been affected by the oppositional discourse of Shiite and Sunni governments? The results of research indicate that the oppositional system of Safavid discourse and ideology has been established in the cultural-artistic text of this period and the artist utilized metaphorical description at the service of this discourse for marking the oppositional system. The method of research is historical-interpretive and within the miniature readings, descriptive-analytic one. In addition, the method of collecting the data is through library studies.