Author

Collège de France, and Institute for the Study of the Ancient Cultures (North Africa and West Asia)

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.

Keywords