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Many in the Indian Subcontinent are familiar with the ‘Shir-o-Khurshid’ or ‘Lion-and-Sun’ symbol. It symbolised kingship in ancient, pre-Islamic Persia and later on, in Islamic Iran as well. The lion has had a huge influence on the Middle East, with it appearing in cultures throughout the region — Canaanite, Babylonian, Assyrian, Israelite, Islamic and of course, Persian. But the other big cat, the tiger, is not behind, at least in the case of Persia.
Let us take a very popular (albeit a controversial one in our times) name: Babur or Babar. It is the name of the founder of the Mughal dynasty that ruled large parts of South Asia from 1526-1857. His full name is Zaheeruddin Muhammad ‘Babur’. What is the meaning of Babur, you may ask? ‘Tiger’ is the answer.
Babur, who claimed descent from two of Asia’s biggest conquerors — Genghis Khan and Tamerlane or Timur — spoke a Turkic language known as Chagatai. The word ‘Babur’ appears in the language, a loanword from, you guessed it — Persian. Incidentally, the Mughal standard was the ‘Shir-o-Khurshid’.
Why, might one ask? The answer is that the Mughals followed the ‘Turko-Persian’ tradition. “Turko-Persian Islamicate culture…is an ecumenical mix of Arabic, Persian, and Turkic elements that melded in the ninth and tenth centuries in eastern Iran — that is, in Khurasan and Transoxiana. From there it was carried by conquering peoples to neighboring areas, so that it eventually became the predominant culture of the ruling and elite classes of West, Central and South Asia,” writes Robert L Canfield in Turko-Persia in historical perspective.
But how did a word for tiger appear in Persian? Persia and the Greater Middle East were home to the Asiatic lion. The answer is that the tiger too was found in Persia. It was called the Caspian or Hyrcanian tiger (Panthera tigris virgata). It is now extinct.
‘Hyrcania’ was a region of ancient Persia well-known in the ancient world. It lay immediately south of the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water.
The region can be described as Persia/Iran’s very own ‘cloud forest’.
Today, the Hyrcanian forests stretch from Azerbaijan in the west to the vicinity of Gorgan in the northeast of Iran. Three Iranian provinces — Gilan, Mazandaran and Golestan (where Gorgan is) — are home to these unique forests. ‘Gorgan’ is derived from an ancient Persian term meaning ‘Wolf Land’, which became known to the Greeks as ‘Hyrcania’.
Indeed, these forests are still home large predators like the Persian leopard, brown bear and wolf, in addition to herbivores like red deer and roe deer.
There was one more predator here once. Again, over to Mohammad Tohidifar et al:
But Hyrcania was just one of the haunts of the Caspian.
Incidentally, Central Asia — Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan — as well as the Muslim-dominated areas of the southern Caucasus Mountains — Azerbaijan — follow the Turko-Persian tradition.
The Caspian tiger made its mark on Persia and the cultures it came in contact with, both in the pre-Islamic as well as post-Islamic periods.
The tiger reached the amphitheatres of Rome, where it was used in fights with other animals, as well as humans.
The tiger also appears in the Shahnameh, the national epic poem of Iran.
The Hyrcanian tiger famously appears in the works of William Shakespeare like Macbeth, Hamlet and Henry VI.
Irish playwright Conor Hanratty notes that: “Hyrcania was a beloved reference in ancient Roman texts as a place of real wildness. When Dido wants to accuse Aeneas of heartless savagery in Virgil’s Aeneid, she suggests that he was nursed by Hyrcanian tigers. One assumes that Shakespeare learned the reference from a source like this.”
Why did the Caspian die out across its range? Reasons include habitat loss and hunting. “However, its lowland forest habitats have been completely destroyed and opened-up for agriculture and urbanization…” Tohidifar et al note about the tiger’s extinction in Hyrcania.
Central Asia and the Caucasus mostly came under Tsarist Russian rule by the 19th century. When the Soviet Union took over these regions, it completed what its predecessor had set out to do: Hunt the tiger to extinction.
“The main reason for the disappearance of the tiger in Central Asia was habitat destruction and extermination by military and professional hunters,” Jungius notes.
Today, efforts are on to bring back the tiger to these regions. It won’t be the Caspian, but its relative the Amur or Siberian.
“Studies of ancient mitochondrial DNA have suggested a close relationship between the Caspian tiger and the extant Amur tiger Panthera tigirs altaica: perhaps some Central Asian tigers returned eastward across southern Siberia, establishing the Russian Far East’s Amur tiger population,” Luc Hermann notes in Chronological distribution of the tiger Panthera tigris and the Asiatic lion Panthera leo persica in their common range in Asia.
While WWF-Russia is spearheading an effort to bring Amur tigers to Kazakhstan in Central Asia, will it really be the same as having the Caspian back, one might ask?
Science can send humans to the moon. But it cannot bring back a species. Even if it does, humans playing God can never be the same as the original.