From Persepolis to Persepolis: Bestiary’s Evolution after Sealings from the Achaemenid to the Sasanian Period
Volume 1, No. 1; Special Issue: Nature in Ancient Iranian Arts and Texts; edited by Helen Giunashvili and Mohammad Amin Mirghaderi, November 2023, Pages 43-59
https://doi.org/10.22034/hunara.2023.177782
Delphine Poinsot
Abstract This article presents a comparative study of bestiaries in Achaemenid and Sasanian glyptics, based on seal impressions from archival corpora. A systematic comparison of animal representations is carried out within the framework of zoo-iconography. This method makes it possible to formally determine the species represented in each of the bestiaries, and leads to the study of the evolution of their representation between Classical Antiquity and Late Antiquity in Iran. The practice of zoo-iconography leads to an environmental approach that questions the evolution of the animal kingdom as depicted in the two bestiaries by comparing them with archaeozoological data.