Simurgh: Fantastic Bird in Persian Visual Culture

The fantastic bird, Simurgh, has had a potent presence within Persian visual and literary cultures since the pre-Islamic past of Persia. To understand its evolution from a mythical bird into a mystical creature, this illustrated lecture explores the Persian national epic, the Shahnama, where Simurgh plays a crucial role as the guardian of the Persian heroes and protector of the Persian throne.

The examination of the visual features of Simurgh in Persian visual culture manifests the evolution of its formal characteristics from a hybrid bird into a fantastic one through several phases of modification. Drawing on examples from the ancient to contemporary Persian art, Dr. Behrang Nabavi Nejad will examine these visual changes within the social and historical contexts of the artworks, and proposes the formation of three distinct aesthetic features in its representations in Persian art.

Presenter Bio:

Behrang Nabavi Nejad completed her PhD at the Department of Art History and Visual Studies, at the University of Victoria. Her doctoral thesis explores the text-image relationships in several illustrated manuscripts of the Shahnama, a medieval Persian narrative, as well as the intertextual relations of this text with its preceding and contemporary literary sources. In her research, she continues to explore the process of production, patronage, and reception of the illustrated manuscripts of the Shahnama with relevance to their socio-political contexts.

Dr. Behrang is currently a faculty member at Capilano University in North Vancouver, where she teaches courses on Persian art and architecture as well as other art history courses. Her most recent publication is titled “A Battle of Equals: Rustam and Isfandiar in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Shahnama,” in The Epic World, 2023 (ed. by Pamela Lothspeich, Routledge).