The Lion and Sun of Persia

During the long reign of the second Qajar shah, Fath ‘Ali Shah (r.1797-1834), “a start was made to systematize the granting of military and civil orders along European lines.” This led to some combination of a lion and a sun as evidenced by an enameled Circular Dish (Fig. 1) gifted to the British East India Company by Fath Ali Shah in 1817-18. The Circle Dish (Fig. 1) depicts the imperial emblem with “a crouching lion surmounted by a setting sun with a female face [encircled by] a band of dedicatory inscriptions.”Natif, "Introduction," introduction, 2. Many variations of the order were commissioned throughout the Qajar period, but there are a limited number of ceramic (Fig. 2) or enameled (Fig. 1) wares that feature the emblem with a dedicatory inscription. Layla S. Diba, Maryam Ekhtiar, and Basil William Robinson, eds., Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925 (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum of Art in association with I.B. Tauris of London, 1998), 204.

While in use, the symbol on this object would have conveyed an immediate association with the ruling dynasty. In 1836 Muhammad Shah formally adapted the lion-and-sun as the official emblem of the Iranian state, thereby incorporating this aspect of traditional culture within the symbolic representation of the sovereign state. Angelo M. Piemontese,"The Statutes of the Qājār Orders of Knighthood." East and West 19, no. 3/4 (Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente (IsIAO): September-December 1969): 432-433. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29755455. In that context, as the scholar Najmabadi argues, his decree proposed that the lion-and-sun symbolizes the state: “Every state chooses a sign for this purpose. And the Iranian state has had the sign of the lion-and-sun for the past three thousand years, or perhaps even from the time of Zoroaster.”Iran, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 1916. Salnamah-i vizarat-I umur-I kharijah. Tehran: Baradaran-I Baqirzadah, 213, quoted in Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 81; Piemontese, "The Statutes,” 440.