An Iranian Narrative in Images of Horses in Iranian Art from Antiquity to the 21st Century © 2018 Michael Craig Hillmann
by Michael Craig Hillmann mchillmann@aol.com
• Images in any of the following media and of any of the following subjects from Iranian antiquity to the present day can suggest narratives that reveal significant aspects, features, and themes in Iranian culture:
(1) Iranian Kings, (2) Persepolis, (3) Iranian mosque architecture and architectural decoration, (4) Perso-Arabic calligraphy, (5) Esfahān’s Royal Square, (6) Persian miniature paintings from the 14th to the 16th century, (7) Iranian Painting from the 17th to the 21st century, (8) Persian pile carpet designs, (9) 20th- and 21st-century Iranian architecture, and (10) Horses in Iranian art from Luristan bronzes (6th millennium BCE) onward. • Full commentary accompanies live versions of this slide show, designed primarily for classroom, meeting, and conference presentation. PowerPoint presentations on the other cited subjects and media are also available. • The entry called “Asb” [horse] in Enclopedia Iranica [= www.iranicaonline.org] is a standard source for information on horses in Iranian culture
• Appreciation of art objects as culture does not require competence in a foreign language as do using Persian language phenomena and Persian literature texts in the study of Iranian culture. This means that recognition of familiar things and of things as culturally unfamiliar occurs with the first glance at a work of art, which means that visual arts are usually a more accessible window into a foreign culture than language texts or monographs on aspects of culture. At the same time, one would hope that the cultural content and themes in Iranian art objects would parallel those in Persian language and literature texts and serve as further evidence for cultural observations made by Iranist cultural anthropologists, historians, and sociologists. • Because various forms and media of Iranian art, such as calligraphy, Persian carpet designs, philately and other graphic arts, wall murals, horticulture and gardening, metal and ceramic vessels, and mosque architecture, figure significantly in the daily lives of Iranians of all sorts, their study may reveal more about those Iranians than Persian prose fiction, lyric verse, and essay writing. • This PowerPoint slide show treats images of horses in Iranian art from Luristan bronzes (1st millennium BCE) to Nasser Ovissi’s Where Have the Riders Gone? (2007).
Suggested Characteristics of Iranian Art
• vegetal/floral forms • gardens: spring/royal/heavenly • spring (season) • royal, clerical, and family patriarchies • kings as the quintessential Iranians and kingship as the quintessential Iranian order • God • religion • Persianness • ceremonialness • idealization/stylization of “real” world • depiction of an imaginary “pretty” world • eclecticism of style • curvilinear/rectilinear/geometric forms
• expression of hybridity and dualities - simultaneous spontaneity/regularity - Islam and non-Islam - past in the present - function and decoration
• aesthetics of decoration - idealization of reality - non-mimesis - beautification of reality - romanticism - embellishment and ornamentation
Doushe Lorestān Cave Painting, 8th Millennium BCE
• For images of horses not in this PowerPoint presentation, readers can google: “images for horses in Iranian art.” The same holds for googling other subjects, people, and places treated in this PowerPoint presentation.
Luristan Bronzes Iran, 1000-500s BCE
• These Luristan bronze horse bits intimate the significance of horses in Iranian culture and offer evidence–as do most of the images in this slide slow–for the characterization of Iranian art as exhibiting an aesthetics of decoration.
Pazyryk Carpet Mt. Altai, Siberia Achaemenid Era 6th-4th century BCE
• Perhaps woven as a tribute to the Achaemenid king for presentation at Persepolis. • Evidence that garden designs figured prominently in Iranian art from the beginning, with garden compartment carpet designs still woven today.
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Pazyryk Carpet Detail, c. 500 BCE
• The Pazyryk Carpet, found in the late 1940s in the Mt. Altay region of Siberia, is the oldest known Persian pile carpet. Its outer border presents a procession of horses with grooms and men on horseback. • A similar procession is depicted on bas reliefs at Persepolis.
Horses at the Achaemenid Ruins at Persepolis
Persepolis Horses
Parthian Coin
Sﾄ《ﾄ］id Silver Horse Sﾄ《ﾄ］ids (r. 224-651 CE)
Investiture of Ardashir I on the left (ruled 224-270/72 CE) by Ahurāmazdā on the right. Bas Relief at Naqsh-e Rostam.Both Ahurāmazdā and Ardashir are on horseback . See www.Livius.org for descriptions of Achaemenid and Sāsānid monuments.
Iranian postage stamp depicting polo on the occasion of the 1964 Olympics
• A Pre-Islamic Iranian archer, a chess board, a knight (= asb [horse] in Persian), a rook (= rokh in Persian), the Pahlavi symbol of lion with sword and sun, royal crown above, and a traditional medallion with the Persian for the French title within it make for an appealing, Iranian, yet cosmopolitan, commemorative stamp promoting the 1972 Olympic Games in iran (just a 1-rial stamp).
Polo and Hunting
SÄ sÄ nid Kings Hunting
Sāsānid Emperor Shâpur I in 260 CE with captive Roman Emperor Valerian at Naqsh-e Rostam (near Persepolis, near Shirāz)
• In the decade following the death of the Muslim Prophet Mohammad (c. 570-632), the Muslim Arabs invaded Sāsānid Iran and ended Sāsānid rule, which lead to the conversion of the Iranian people to Islam.
M O H A M M A D D E S T R O Y I N G M E C C A N I D O L S
o
Muhammad (c. 570-632) accepts the surrender of the Banu al-Nadim Jewish tribe after defeating them in battle.
Mi’rāj a Safavid miniature painting by Sultān Mohammad
• The Muslim prophet Mohammad (c. 570-632) astride his humanfaced horse called Burāq on a night journey guided by the angel Gabriel from Mecca to Jerusalem and to heaven and back. • Many depictions of the Muslim prophet Mohammad feature his face veiled out of respect and reverence.
Mohammad and his army‌
The angel Gabriel speaks of the martial skills of Mohammad’s cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali (d. 661) to Mohammad.
Karbalā Battle (680 CE)
On the plains of Karbalā, Ali’s son, the 3rd Shi’ite Imam Hosayn and his followers were defeated and killed by the forces of the Sunnite Caliph Yazid. Shi’ites annually commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hosayn.
Sunni-Shi’i conflict
Sāmānid ruler al-Muntasir (r. 1000-1005) crossing the Jayhun River [= Amu Daryā or Oxus]
Ghaznavid Sultan Mahmud (r. 999-1030) on horswback
Saljuq Prince, 11th-12th century
Mongol leader Hul훮qu Kh훮n (1218-1265) leading his Mongol army to battle. Hul훮qu conquered Baghs훮d in 1258.
Hulāgu Khān’s sack of Baghdād in 1258
• “The Islamic Golden Age–from the 8th to the mid-13th century–was a period of great flourishing of human knowledge and progress. And its focal point was Baghdad, then the world’s largest, most prosperous, and celebrated city, and a global repository of human knowledge.
But in January 1258, a vast Mongol army reached the city’s perimeter and demanded that the ‘Abbāsid caliph al-Mustasim, the nominal spiritual authority of the Islamic world, surrender. For many historians, the arrival of the Mongols into the heart of the Muslim empire is the single most devastating moment in the history of the Muslim Middle East. The the sack of Baghdad would mark the end of the Islamic Golden Age. Rather than submit, the ‘Abbāsid caliph challenged the Mongols to storm his city, which Hulāgu Khan (1218-1265), a grandson of Genghis Khān (1162-1227), and his nomadic Mongol army proceeded to do. In ten days of violence and destruction, Baghdād and its inhabitants were vanquished. Almost without exception, the population was either put to the sword or sold into slavery. The River Tigris ran red with the blood of slaughtered men, women and children.” Adapted from “The Mongol Sack of Baghdad in 1258,” a lecture by Eamonn Gearon. www.the greatcoursesdaily.
Battle of Chaldiran (1514), where the Ottomans defeated the Safavids Safavid miniature painting
Iranian Horses: mid-16th century and 1973
… by Nasser Oviissi • From Achaemenid seals (559-330 BCE) and Sāsānid (224-651 CE) reliefs at Naqsh-e Rostam to 13th-16th century miniature paintings and from Safavid (15011636) paintings to contemporary Iranian art, horses have figured prominently and intimate a remarkable thematic continuity in Iranian art. In other words, images from the distant past and what they mean are alive in today’s Persian art.
Rostam choosing and taming his unparalleled horse called Rakhsh
• The most famous horse in Iranian history is Rakhsh, the incomparable steed of the incomparable paladin Rostam in Ferdowsi’s epic Shāhnāmeh [Book of Kings] (1010). • Rostam lassoing and separating Rakhsh from a herd of wild horses. A miniature painting in Shâhnâmeh, Shirâz, c.1435, Bodleian Library, Oxford. In Gray, Persian Painting, p. 98. • Rostam’s choice of a horse was career-making, a paladin’s horse emblematic of its rider’s warrior skills and status. • Hunting in the mythological world of Ferdowsi’s Iran was practice for war, and Rostam waged war to protect Iran’s king and the Iranian kingdom.
Rostam’s horse Rakhsh protects Rostam, Iran’s most famous legendary hero a miniature painting from a Shāhnāmeh manuscript.
•At the beginning of the famous story of Sohrāb, while Rostam is sleeping, Rakhsh wanders off and is captured by men from nearby Samangān. When Rostam awakens, in Ferdows’s words: “He was distressed to find that his Rakhsh was gone/ and hurriedly set for Samangān / and he said: ‘Where can I go to escape from this shame / What will warriors say about when his horse wa taken / he thus slept and died / Now I have to go helplessly, my heart distressed because of a horse’.”
• Rostam and his son Sohrāb, whom Rostam did not recognized, in hand-tohand combat with Iranian and Turanian horsemen watching and Rakhsh and Sohrāb’s horse standing riderless.
• Rostam at the side of his dying son SohrÄ b, their horses looking on.
Death of Sohrāb
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Iranian prince Siyāvash plays polo in front of Afrāsiyāb. A miniature painting in a 14 -century Shāhnāmeh manuscript. th
• The name “Siyāvash means “the one with the black horse. Siyāvash’s horse, according to Ferdowsi, was called “Shabrang Behzād,” which means “nightcolored pure-bred.”
Siyavash on horseback
Khosrow on horseback sees Shirin bathing, her horse beside he a miniature painting dated 1548
Khosrow and Shirin playing polo
Timur and his army waging war against the Egyptians. A 16th-century miniature painting by BehzÄ d.
Esfandyār’s Funeral a miniature painting from a 14th-century Shāhnāmeh
Sāsānid Emperor Bahrām Gur (ruled 420-438 CE) hunting a dragon
• Muhammad led by angels and astride his human-faced horse Burâq on a fabled journey to Jerusalem and Heaven called Mi’rāj. Fazlur Rahman calls the event “historical fiction,” perhaps a dream that Muhammad later described for his fellow Muslims. Muhammad’s face is veiled out of reverence and respect.
A battle scene a miniature painting from the Baysonghor ShÄ hnÄ meh
• Tricked by his step-brother ShaqÄ d, Rostam and his horse Rakhsh are wounded when they fall into a well studded with spears. Before he dies, Rostam is able to shoot an arrow through a tree and kill his step-brother hiding behind the tree.
Milan Hunting Scene Carpet Detail, 1542/3
Boston Hunting Carpet Detail Safavid, 16th century
Tahmasp Horses 16th century painting
A Horse painted by HabibollÄ h SÄ veh early 17th. century
A 14th-17th c. miniature painting
Karbala Epic (1985) by Abbas Bolokifar, TMoCA. Source: Keshmirshekan, Contem-porary Iranian Art (2013), p. 200.
‘Ashura Noon (1986) by Mohammad Bagher Aghmiri
TMoCA. Source: Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art (2013), p. 198.
Tabriz Hunting Carpet, Late 20th century
• Nasser Ovissi (b. 1934), the popular expatriate Iranian painter, depicts horses in many of his paintings, including paintings that evoke the distant Iranian past. See www.ovissigallery.com for illustrations of Ovissi paintings.
A Painting by Nasser Ovissi
• cuneiform inscription • horse • mountain • Perso-Arabic script
Woman on a Horse by Nassir Ovissi
Woman on Horseback by Nassir Ovissi
World Postal Day 1993
from Pariyā [The Fairies] (1957) by Ahmad Shāmlu (1925-2000) “Fairies!–See my great height See my horse of purest white a white horse with silver shoes its mane and tail of honey hues my steed of lightning speed my gazelle with veins of steel! Look at its neck and shanks At its head held high, its mighty flanks! Tonight the town will be all lit up The house of the monsters all split up, To town the villagers as guests will come They'll hooray and say: 'The city is ours! Fairies!–The day has almost turned to night The castle gates are shut If you get up while there is time And get on my horse We'll reach the people's town…” • Source: Major Voices in Contemporary Persian Literature, 1990, pp. 180-185.
Woman, Horse and Stockade by NÄ sser Ovissi
Zul-Janāh (1985) by Kazem Chalipa TMoCA. Source: Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art (2013), p. 201.
• Shi’ite Emām Hosayn’s horse Zuljanāh riderless after the battle of Karbalā in which Hosayn/Hussein and his followers lost their lives. Legend has it that Zuljanāh himself killed over 50 troops of the Sunni caliph Yazid.
‘Asr-e Âshurâ (1976) by Mahmoud Farschian: Source: “Analysis of ‘The Evening of Ashura Painting” by Shahram Za’feranlou, Iran Review, 31 October 2014) at www.iranreview.org. [Late efternoon, 10 Muharram 680 CE Emâm Hosayn’s horse back at camp at Karbalâ
In 2002, this painting became an IRI postage stamp commemorating “the year of honoring and esteeming� of the martyred Imam Hosayn (d. 680).
Rostam and Rakhsh trapped in the pit of spears Shāhnāmeh, Qazvin style, 1586. Source: Persian Miniature Painting (1983) by Norah M. Titley, plate 16.
• Rostam, dying together with his horse Rakhsh in a pit/well his half-brother Shaghād designed, studded with swords and spears, and camoulflaged, shoots Shaghād dead with an arrow through a tree behind which Shaghād was hiding. • In a famous modernist Persian poem called “Rostam’s 8th Trial,” Mehdi Akhavān-e Sāles (1928-1990) opines that Rostam could have extricated himself from the pit into which he and his Rakhsh had fallen, the latter impaled on wooden spears studded upwards from the pit’s bottom. But, when Rostam saw that Rakhsh was mortally wounded, he realized that his days as a paladin had come to an end insofar as an Iranian warrior-hero cannot perform without his horse.
Where Have the Riders Gone? (2007) by Nasser Ovissi (b. 1934) Persepolis columns and Mt. Damavand in the background
• Ovissi implies that Iran needs the riders of yesteryear to lead it in today’s world. But, such riders either don’t exist any more or they perhaps know, like Rostam, that their days are over, that they can’t protect or save Iran with their out-of-date weapons and skills, as Akhavān-e Sāles alleges in his famous poem called “The Ending of the Shāhnāmeh.”
from “The Ending of the Shāhnāmeh” (1958) by Mehdi Akhavān-e Sāles (1928-1990) This harp, broken and out of tune, tame in the pale, old harpist's hands, sometimes seems to dream. It sees itself in the Sun's luminous court as the rare beauty and beloved of Zoroaster or a coquettish intoxicated fairy in the pure, bright meadows of moonlight. It sees false lights– (= Islam) the caravan of dead flames in the swamp on the mehrāb's holy brow. In memory of the days of glory and pride and innocence it sings joyfully the sad tale of exile... On ships of rage with bloody sails we are coming toward the century's capital to conquer, to open wide the wide, nine-folded nothingland of this insensitive dusty place with the dreadful clashing of our sharp swords, the frightening thundcr of our dreaded drums, the stone-splitting flight of our swift arrows, to snatch demons' life bottles from the spell of the hidden fortress from the hands of their sorcerer guards, to smash them on the ground... We are the conquerors of fortresses of history's glory and witnesses of each century's cities of splendor. We are mementos of the sad innocence of the ages,
We are narrators of cheerful, sweet tales, tales of clear skies, flowing light, the water, dark cold earth, the tales of the most joyous message from the limpid luminous streams of the ages, tales of deep woods, behind it the mountain, the river at foot, tales of a friend's warm hand on cold city nights. We are the caravan of the cup and harp, gypsies our harp, strumming our lives, our lives poems and fables, intoxicated cupbearers in a drunken state. O, where is the capital of the century? We are coming to conquer, to open up its nothingland . . ." This broken harp, heartsore and impossible dreamer, the singer of imagination's empty sanctuary, eternally cloaked with secrets, what stories it tells itself day and night. O helpless, delirious one! Change the tune. Zâl's son Rostam cannot escape his step-brother's will. (= Shāhnāmeh hero) He is dead. He died. He died. Begin the story of Farrokhzâd's son Rostam, (= Sāsānid general) the one whose groan seems to come from a deep well's depths. He moans and weeps, he weeps and says:
"Oh, from now on we resemble hunchbacked, old conquerors. On ships of waves with sails of foam, our hearts bound by the memory of the lambs of splendor, in the fields of empty days, our blades rusty, worn out, and weary, our drums, forever silent, our arrows with broken feathers. We are conquerors of cities gone with the wind. (= Achaemenid conquests) In a voice too weak to come out of the chest, we are narrators of forgotten tales. Nobody pays us heed or spares a copper for our coins, as if they were of a foreign king or of a prince whose dynasty has been overthrown. At times we hope to awaken from this spell, like from the cave companions' sleep, we'll rub our eyes and say: “There it is, the golden rare palace of charming morning. But, Dāqyānus is immortal, o, o, alas." • Akhavān’s “false lights” are the deceptive promises of Islam. His first Rostam is the famous paladin who serves the Iranian monarchy for hundreds of years, but who ultimately suffers death at the hand of his step-brother. The second Rostam is the Iranian general whose army suffers defeat at the hands of the Muslim Arabs. Iranians, says Akhavān-e Sāles, have to change their tune because their traditional weapons do not work in the 20th century.
18th Century Painting Karim Khān Zand (r. 1756-1779) detail from an 18th-c. painting
Karim Khān Zand with horse and groom (1794) by Abdol Hasan Ghaffāri
Maydān-e Hakhāmaneshi [Achaemenid Square], Sāri
• Hakhāmanesh was the eponymous founder of the Achaemenids (r. 559-330 BCE).
Nāder Shāh Monument Mashhad, 1959 • Nāder Shāh Afshār (1688 or 16981747), who deposed the last members of the Safavid royal family in 1736, briefly ruled over the last Iranian empire until his assassination in 1747. • Iranian painters and sculptors have not similarly depicted 19th- to 21st-century Iranian rulers Fath ‘Ali Shāh Qājār, Mohammad Shāh Qājār, Nāseroddin Shāh Qājār, Mozaffaroddin Shāh Qājār, Mohammad ‘Ali Shāh Qājār, Ahmad Shāh Qājār, Rezā Shāh Pahlavi (r. 1921/6-1941), Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi (r. 1941-1979), Ruhollâh Khomayni (r. 1979-1989), and Āyatollāh ‘Ali Khāmene’i (r. 1979-2018).
Mohammad Āghā Khān Qājār (r. 1795-1797) Capturing Tbilisi
painting of a QÄ jÄ r prince hawking on horseback
N훮seroddin Sh훮h Q훮j훮r (r. 1848-1896) smoking a hookah pipe on horseback
Rezā Shāh Pahlavi r. 1921/1926-1941
A statue of Rezā Shāh Pahlavi being dismantled by anti-Pahlavi, pro-Mosaddeq demonstrators in the summer of 1953, when America participated in a coup d’état that brought down the duly elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq (r. 1951-1953)
Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi (r. 1941-1979)
• In military garb with a chestful of ribbons and medals, a sword at his side, and astride a horse, Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi appears in this photograph shortly before he fled Iran without a fight in the face of a revolution fomented by a horseless and swordless septuagenarian Shi’ite Muslim cleric by the name of Āyatollāh Ruhollāh Khomeini, who ruled as the Supreme Spriritual Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran from 1979 to 1989.