mehdi qadernejad; Abdollah Aghaie
Abstract
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The hunting icon is one of the first function's that mankind has always tried to depict throughout its history. In ancient Iran, hunting has a religious role and has an important place. In the meantime, Mithraism is one of the religions that has perpetuated the notion of hunting through images. One of these images is the scene of Mithra hunting in the altar of Dura-Europos. We see the repetition of this image in Taq-I Bustan and in the hunting scene of the king. To study the continuity of the hunting scene image (the hunter Mithra to the hunter king), we have used the iconography approach of Erwin Panofsky.Continuity and repetition is somehow implied in the image-icon and is the internal logic of iconology, Iconology is one of the most important approaches that has been used in the study of image. That’s why we use this approach in the present study. The main question of the present article is why the bas-relief of the hunter-king in the Taq-I Bustan is the continuation or conceptual continuation of the same idea of the hunter Mithra on the wall painting of Dura-Europos? The research method of this article is descriptive-analytical and the materials have been collected through documents and libraries. According to the two images studied, it can be said that the idea of practical hunting is to show the struggle between Mithra-Shah and the forces of evil, in order to show the victory of good over evil, and in this way practices such as teaching the principles of aristocracy, passing stages of youth-practice, sacrifice, killing the boar and its associated symbol, etca are continuaously accompaniments of hunting action. The iconology of the idea of hunting shows that the concept of hunting has gone beyond hobby and its mere meaning and has taken on historical, cultural and religious-political values. Moreover it has continued over time and has been repeated and preserved in images like in Taq-I Bustan.
