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Roi sur son Trône: the Achaemenid royal audience in late Qajar media

The presence of Persepolitan or neo-Achaemenid imagery in late Qajar architecture is now widely recognised, notably in the work of Judith Lerner (1980) and Jennifer Scarce (2015), and now explored by Talinn Grigor as part of a broader phenomenon of national and international “Persian revivals” (2021). This iconographic phenomenon arose in a fluid, aesthetic context of transmedial copying and compilation fuelled by lithographic and photographic reproduction (Roxburgh and McWilliams, 2017). In parallel, the influence of official excavations at Takht-e Jamshid/Persepolis in 1877 on the revisualisation of the site in Iran is well-known (Lerner 2016).

This paper aims to advance the case for specific patterns of neo-Achaemenid citation in the late nineteenth century by scrutinising selective Qajar-era appropriations of the royal audience scene. The scene, itself an archaising adaptation of pre-existing stagings of imperial kingship in ancient Western Asia, was visible (at the time) only on surviving door jambs at Persepolis. Redeployed in specific locations in the house of Qavam al-Molk in Shiraz, the scene also became for a while the most prominent neo-Achaemenidism in elite carpet production (Evans 2016), seemingly signalling spatial and tribal as well as royal affinities. I argue that detailed multi-media mapping allows us to both refine and diversify our understanding of the intended meanings of pre-Islamic “influence” in the context of nineteenth-century Iran.

Jun 29, 2022 05:00 PM in London