Winged Man of Pasargadae to relocate to safe haven
August 11, 2012 - 16:35
TEHRAN -- Iran’s Parsa and Pasargadae Research Center (PPRC) plans to relocate the 2500-year-old Winged Man of Pasargadae stone bas-relief to a museum or another safe haven in order to prevent it from being damaged by the elements.
It will be replaced with an exact replica of the Winged Man, PPRC Director Mohammad-Hassan Talebian told the Persian service of ISNA on Saturday.
Located in Pasargadae, the first dynastic capital of the Achaemenid Empire, the Winged Man is a relief of a standing man with four wings who is praying. The Winged Man also wears a crown which has two horns on it
Some archaeologists and historians have considered the Winged Man to be Cyrus the Great. Some scholars say that that Cyrus the Great is Zulqarnain, whose story is told in the Holy Quran, because Zulqarnein means “one with two horns” in Arabic.
The PPRC has signed a contact with a company to make a moulage of the Winged Man.
The contractor believes that the moulage must be made of the same stone used for making the original bas-relief, Talebian said.
The Achaemenids cut stones from two nearby quarries to build Pasargadae, which was registered on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in July 2004.
Due to this fact that the quarries are recognized as part of the horizontal view of Pasargadae, extraction from them is forbidden.
However, PPRC is mulling over the extracting stone from the quarries for making the moulage.
Archaeologists have warned about the detrimental effects of the elements on the Winged Man over the past decade.
A new study by the archaeologists has recently turned the spotlight on the Winged Man.
They have announced that the erosion of the bas-relief has snowballed over the past few years after comparing old photos of the Winged Man with those have recently been taken.
MMS/YAW
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