Sassanid Designs on Wine Cups in Arabic Poems (Early irst and Middle Centuries AH)

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor, Department of Arabic Language and Literature, Kashan University, Isfahan, Iran.

Abstract

Arabic poets in the early centuries, especially those who described wine, in addition to talk about wine, its pleasures and drunkenness, also described the bar, cupbearer and even the cups of wine. In describing the cups, they have not neglected to describe the images or drawings on them. These paintings, which, like the customs and traditions of drinking wine and different types of wine, are associated with pre-Islamic Iran, usually reflect images inherited from the traditions of the Sassanid period. Although the surviving cups from the Sassanid period are very few and it is not possible for us to see these paintings, but the poems of Arabic poets, especially in the Abbasid period, depict some of these paintings for us in the form of words. Representation of these types of paintings may make us more familiar with the art of painting in Iran and Iraq at the beginning of the Islamic period, which undoubtedly follows the tradition of Sassanid painting. In the following article, after a brief introduction about the paintings on buildings and other tools, which are mentioned in Arabic poetry, the most important themes of the paintings on wine glasses (cups) in the poems of the Abbasid era are discussed and these paintings are compared with the paintings of existing antiquities. This article is an attempt to show a part of Sassanid painting on wine cups that has been displayed in the poems of Abbasid poets with an interval of two to three centuries. These Images usually express the situation of the Sassanid court in joy and war.
In their research on the characteristics of Iranian art, Iranian and Orientalist scholars have not paid much attention to Persian and Arabic literary texts and poems. Arabic literature in Abbasid times clearly shows the life, society, thought and art of pre-Islamic Iran. Although the reports of the Arabic poets of this period from the drawings on the cups may not be completely true, but because we have received few cups from that time, these reports can also be trusted.
The research that Iranian and orientalist artists have done on patterns on clothes and dishes is based more on surviving concrete examples from the past and less on texts, especially Arabic texts. Therefore, we suspect that the issue raised in this article has not been comprehensively addressed so far. The value of this article goes back to the fact that Arabic-speaking poets may have spoken of images that are not concrete examples in museums or elsewhere and are new to researchers of Sassanid art. This research answers the following questions: How did Arabic poets in the Abbasid period and the Middle Ages AH describe wine glasses? What were the most important themes or motifs of the images on the wine cups in these periods?
This research shows that, paintings on the wine cups of the Abbasid period And the Middle centuries, the ones in the hands or in front of the poets, were very much influenced by Sassanid art and reflected the favorite images of Iranians, which has become an important subject for poetic illustrations in Arabic poetry.
The method of this research is descriptive-analytical and based on reading the remaining poetic texts from the first and middle centuries AH; where the poets also spoke of images on wine cups. After a brief reference to the history of describing the images of objects in Arabic poetry from the pre-Islamic period to the Abbasid period, the author deals with the general characteristics of the images on the vessels left from the Sassanid era, then extracts the images of wine cups from ancient Arabic poetry Has categorized and tried to compare them with existing objective and ancient examples.
The main subject of the pictures on wine cups in the Abbasid period, the Sassanid kings, their courtiers and their political connections with Roman kings, are scenes of hunting, drinking, feasting, horseback riding and warfare, and there is almost no religious scene, family scene of the Sassanid court and herbal design.These images include the following images: Sassanid king, wine drinking, throne sitting, obeying people, the scene of the Sassanid army fighting, horsemen archery, Kasra and Caesar sitting together, Roman emperors surrendering in Kasra's palace, Kasra's captivity with the Roman emperor, predatory lions and dancing women, etc. Looking at the examples of cups inscribed with Sassanid images that we brought in this research, it can be said that most of these cups were depicted by poets living in Iraq and Iran in the second to fourth centuries AH. After this, the most abundance is related to the poets of the sixth to eighth centuries in the Levant and Egypt, and we see only one or two examples in the poems of the poets of the region of Andalusia (Islamic Spain) in the sixth and seventh centuries.
Arabic literature in the Abbasid era and the Middle Centuries AH clearly reflects the life, society, thought and art of pre-Islamic Iran. Although the reports of Arabic poets about the designs on the cups may not be completely true, but because we have received only a few cups from that time, these reports can also be useful and reliable. Considering the abundance of these images in the poems of Iraqi poets in the second to fourth century, it can be said that from this time, the subject of cups painted with the image of Kasra and his Army in war and celebration, has become a famous poetic motif. Egypt in the sixth to eighth century, using imitations of Iraqi poets in previous centuries, used this issue; In other words, it is possible that they did not see these painted cups, but used this theme, imitating previous poets. As for Andalusia, it can be said with more certainty that the Andalusian poet spoke only on imitation of the poets of the East (Iraq) on many subjects, including the same cup with Sassanid motifs. The titles of the images that have been on the wine cups and the poets of the Abbasid period and the Middle Centuries have spoken about it are as follows: Kasra and Caesar together, Archery horsemen on horseback, the scene of the Sassanid army battle, the ceremony of visiting Kasra, the hunting of Kasra and his cavalry, the drinking of Kasra, the obedience of the people to Kasra, the surrender of the Roman emperor to Kasra, the captivity of Kasra to the Roman emperor, the welcome of the Roman emperor, the Christian religious leaders, the predatory lions and the singing women.
 

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URL2: iranview.ir/post/19256 (Visited on 2021.04.19).
URL3: raseef22.net/article/40950.
 
 

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