A Dynamic Atlas of Persian Poetic Symbolism: Families, Fields, and the Historical Rewiring of Meaning

TL;DR

This paper constructs a multi-layer graph of Persian poetic symbols from a large corpus, revealing how their relationships and prominence evolve over centuries, highlighting the dynamic nature of poetic symbolism.

Contribution

It introduces a method to organize recurrent poetic forms into families and map their relations over time, moving beyond isolated word analysis.

Findings

Symbolic core is sparse, referential component dense.

Certain families like Night, Day, and Earth remain widespread.

Graph analysis shows evolving connections and prominence of symbols over centuries.

Abstract

Persian poetry is often remembered through recurrent symbols before it is remembered through plot. Wine vessels, gardens, flames, sacred titles, bodily beauty, and courtly names return across centuries, yet computational work still tends to flatten this material into isolated words or broad document semantics. That misses a practical unit of organization in Persian poetics: related forms travel as families and gain force through recurring relations. Using a corpus of 129,451 poems, we consolidate recurrent forms into traceable families, separate imagistic material from sacred and courtly reference, and map their relations in a multi-layer graph. The symbolic core is relatively sparse, the referential component much denser, and the attachment zone between them selective rather than diffuse. Across 11 Hijri-century bins, some families remain widely distributed, especially Shab (Night), Ruz (Day), and Khaak (Earth). Wine vessels, garden space, flame, and lyric sound strengthen later, while prestige-coded and heroic-courtly vocabulary is weighted earlier. Century-specific graphs show change in arrangement as well as membership. Modularity rises, cross-scope linkage declines, courtly bridges weaken, and sacred bridges strengthen. Hub positions shift too: Kherqe (Sufi Robe) gains late prominence, Farkhondeh {Blessed} and Banafsheh (Violet) recede, and Saaghar (Wine Cup) stays central across the chronology. In this corpus, Persian symbolism appears less as a fixed repertory than as a long-lived system whose internal weights and connections change over time.