Rock Art Research

Rock art research has largely passed Persepolis by, yet the Achaemenid terrace was cut from the living bedrock of the Kuh-e Rahmat by the same hands, and the same technique, that carved the royal tombs into the cliff at Naqš-e Rostam. Bednarik locates the epistemological impediment to interpreting rock art as universal to all periods up to the introduction of extensive written records — a boundary condition implying a class of corpora on the far side of it. Persepolis is such a corpus: its repeated motifs carry contemporaneous trilingual inscriptions, an anchor unavailable in the non-literate corpora that are palaeoart’s primary subject matter. This paper exploits that anchor to calibrate iconological inference. Panofsky’s model is stress-tested against the epigraphic record — not as three levels but as he actually framed it, three acts of interpretation each requiring an external corrective that must survive to function — and the results are reframed through Peirce’s trichotomy, Eco’s thresholds, and Cassirer’s demand that a discipline know its symbols to be symbols. Three cases yield one finding. At the Apadana, where Darius’s text directs the viewer to look at the sculptures, iconology holds. At Pasargadae, where a trilingual inscription stood directly above the four-winged figure and named only its patron, it collapses. With the griffin, where no contemporaneous text speaks, comparative analogy substitutes — and the comparative data dissolve their own conclusion. Confidence tracks not the presence of writing but its kind: Darius’s sentence is a Peircean index, Cyrus’s a bare symbol. A three-tier confidence spectrum follows — a heuristic for non-literate corpora, not an algorithm. This is calibration, not method.