A Comparative study of the Bird-Woman motif in Iranian Art in the Seljuk era with the Art of Mesopotamia, Greece, India, and Southeast Asia civilizations

The Bird-Woman hybrid creature can be seen as a mythical creature in a wide range of artworks from the Islamic era. In the Seljuk period, in addition to engraving on various surfaces in two dimensions, this motif has also been displayed in bronze and figural pottery works as three-dimensional sculptures. The Bird-Woman is often depicted as a single and sometimes in pairs, and in some texts they are referred to as superhuman supporters or containing propitious forces. Considering that in many contemporary type of researches inside and outside Iran, regarding to this motif in the Seljuk period, it has been referred to as harpy, the main question of this research is what is the relation between the concept of The Bird-Woman motif in the Seljuk period and similar examples in the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Greece, India, and Southeast Asia. In this regard, the research relies on written sources and descriptive-analytical method to qualitatively analyze the data.The theoretical framework of the article is based on the theory of intertextuality and its main purpose is to explain the relation between the concept of the Seljuk Bird-Woman motif with existing pretexts in the civilizations of Greece, Mesopotamia, India, and Southeast Asia.
Similar examples are found in written sources during this period in the books of the Ajayeb al-makhluqat and the Munis al-ahrar, which are creatures called the Zagh Abu Ujwa and the Bahri. The first refers to the combination of a Zagh's body with a man's head, and the second refers to a bird (probably a Falcon) body with a man's head. Therefore, since the subject of this article was a Bird-Woman hybrid, they were not addressed further but it can indicate this diversity in meaning. On the other hand, the realm of similar specimens of this creature is so vast that it makes searching and finding a single source for this theme more difficult and, of course, necessary. In Indian and Southeast Asian civilizations, for example, there are pairs of birds called Kinnara and Kinnari that have human faces and are sometimes depicted next to a sacred tree. In Mesopotamian civilization, which is the oldest historical model of the Bird-Woman combination, we find pottery tablets with the body of a woman standing on two lions, which represent the wings and claws of a bird.
In order to read this combined motif, which does not belong only to Iranian art, we need to refer to the art of other civilizations in order to clarify its meanings and concepts through their relationship with each other. It is also possible to achieve the main goal of this study, which is to explain the relationship between the concept of Seljuk Bird-Woman motifs and the contexts of the civilizations of Greece, Mesopotamia, India and Southeast Asia. The results show that the concepts underlying this theme are derived from Mesopotamian and Indian texts and  have less to do with similar Greek examples; It seems wrong to use the title harpy for a Seljuk Bird-Woman.