The Cosmological Primacy of Keyumars: Mountain Spaces, Lithic Articulations, and Body Aesthetics in the Dawn of Iranian Visual Culture.

Abstract: This study investigates the figure of Keyumars—the primordial human and first sovereign within the Iranian cosmological and epic traditions—by interrogating the intersections between mythological narratives and the material record of the Iranian plateau. Utilizing an interdisciplinary framework that integrates spatial semiotics, material culture studies, and cultural memory theory, this article analyzes three central thematic axes: spatiality (the cave and the mountain), functional lithic technology, and body aesthetics (the leopard-skin vestment). By contrasting the poetic geography of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh with the archaeological realities of the Caspian Mesolithic and Neolithic sequences (specifically Hotu and Kamarband caves), this research decodes how early human spatial perception was conceptualized within cultural memory. Furthermore, this article addresses the visual and symbolic grammar of early post-Paleolithic art on the plateau through a rigorous analysis of the Mirmallas rock art in Lorestan, positioning these petroglyphs as manifestations of an emerging graphic narrative and collective memory. Historiographically, the study contextualizes and critiques the divergent structural and comparative mytho-historical paradigms proposed by Arthur Christensen and Mehrdad Bahar regarding the Indo-Iranian or Mesopotamian origins of the Keyumars figure. Ultimately, this article argues that the myth of Keyumars operates not as a literal historical chronicle, but as an epistemological framework through which subsequent Iranian visual culture and political theology rationalized the transition from nature to culture, from untamed landscape to architectural space, and from biological body to socialized subject.