An Investigation of the Relevancy between Turco-Mongol Mythologies and the Motif of Tree in the Demotte Shahnameh and Jami al-Tavarikh from a Cultural Semiotic Point of View

In the view of a wider audience, the interpre­tations of book paintings from the Demmote Shahnama have never been the subject of detailed semiotic studies. While Ferdowsi’s Shahnama is a literary context with axial at­tention to the lyricism that appeared in the Iranian pretext, Jami al-Tavarikh is basically a historic source in which the pictorial language of the Ilkhanid context remained the main fo­cus of attention. It is quite possible to pinpoint an Ilkhanid background to both the Demotte Shahnama and Jami al-Tavarikh. A fresh look at the Great Mongol Shahnama’s book paint­ings is essential based on the semiosphere ap­proach in a way that epic narrations from the general texts of Shahnama and Jami al-Tav­arikh have been considered as a non-text and filtered through the Turco-Mongol culture in an implicit way or even accepted an explicit transsemiotic mechanism and introduced in a completely various pictorial language as a result of trans-continental influence. The aim is to study those codes related to the “Tree” in the two stunning book paintings from the De­motte Shahnama and Jami al-Tavarikh that are entered into the realm of the Ilkhanid semio­sphere through the trans-continental cultural translation. This paper is a basic one that rests on descrip­tive-analytical methodology and the cultural semiotic approach developed by Yuri Lutman. What results clearly suggest is the significant concept of tree in Turco-Mongol myths in­cluding the power of generation and creation, the source of invincibility for heroes, protec­tion and security for both country and the king himself, a passage to enter the after here, the holy presence in royal ceremonies as well as a sacred location indicating the place of the Sahmans and Khans tombs.