Notes on the Sasanian Alabaster Disc in the Cleveland Museum of Art

Among the Sassanid artifacts is a disc at the Cleveland Museum of Art. There is no information about person engraved on the disk, just in the Cleveland Museum's recorded information, and idea of Dorothy Shepard, this hunter man is Ardeshir II of Sasanian Dynasty. Due to the unusual form and uniqueness of disc among the Tape Hesar Bronze Age culture works, and despite the fact that the motif and subject engraved on it are characteristic of the art of the Sassanid period; But with the help of archaeological data, interesting information can be provided. The objectives of this study are to understand the person engraved on this marble disk In this study, In addition, the authors try to evaluate the origin of the marble disk based on archaeological findings so that they can speculate about the geographical area production of this object and determine whether this work is the production of the area from which it was found. Or was it produced elsewhere in the realm of the Sassanid kingdom? the authors have shown similar examples of disks from the prehistoric period and have shown that the construction site of this object in North and Northeastern Iran is in sites that contain both Bronze Age cemetery and the Sassanid period remains. And the original disk belongs to the Bronze Age and the culture of Hesar / Gorgan, examples of which have been found in the tombs of this period. Also, considering the form and decoration of the crown engraved on this disc and its comparison with the crown of Ardeshir II in the Taq-e Bostan and the plate of Ardeshir II recovered from the Mes Aynak site in Afghanistan, it seems that Ardeshir II could not be the king engraved on this disk. The depicted person on this plate is probably one of the Sassanid princes who ruled the Northern region or one of the local dynasties kings; during early Islam of the region, dynasties that remained faithful to the Sassanid traditions for several centuries. However, we will need more information from archaeological or incidental findings to reinforce these ideas or change it.