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The social networking website X (formerly Twitter) replaced Iran’s official flag emoji with the pre-revolution Lion-and-Sun emblem (Shir-o-Khurshid) on January 9, 2026, even as anti-government protests rock the country.
The Lion-and-Sun symbol has been used for centuries by Iranian monarchs or Shahenshahs as symbols of their authority. It was replaced after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran on the nation’s flag with a new symbol, the current one made up of four crescents and a central vertical line, a stylised calligraphic rendering of the Arabic word “Allah”, meaning God, according to The Week.
Interestingly, the Lion-and-Sun also featured on the standard of South Asia’s Mughal Empire. Which is not as surprising as it initially appears. The Mughals were Timurids, from the House of Timur or Tamerlane, who belonged to the Turko-Persian tradition.
As Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective edited by Robert Leroy Canfield notes: “The Islamic culture that developed in the ninth and tenth centuries AD in what is now Eastern Iran was to have a significant impact on most Muslims of west, south and central Asia. Under the patronage of Persianized Turkic Muslim rulers, the culture spread westward to the Mediterranean and eastward into India. Up to the fifteenth century AD, Turko-Persia represented a distinctive variant of Islamic life and thought in these regions, particularly among the elite, but thereafter regional variants started to emerge.”
But the Lion-and-Sun symbol is even older than the Turko-Persian tradition. It began in ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.
In Illuminating an empire: Solar symbolisms in Mughal Art and Architecture, Robin Thomas notes that “The lion symbol and its association with the sun is something that researchers have been able to trace back to ancient Mesopotamia, while the symbol also appears in the zodiac where the house of the Lion (or Leo) falls in the part of the year when the Sun is at its strongest (between July 22 and August 22). Furthermore, lion in itself was an ancient symbol of royalty in both Persia and the Indian subcontinent. However, more relevant to the case at hand, this motif is known to have been used during the time of Timur as well, where figures of lions decorated the spandrel of the Ak Saray Palace in Shahr-i Sabz, Uzbekistan.”
Thomas adds that, “Edward Terry, part of the British delegation of Sir Thomas Roe to the Mughal court of Jahangir from 1615-1619, provided a sketch of the Mughal imperial flag in his book along with the description that “the royal standard of the great Mogul, which is a couchant lion shadowing part of the body of the sun.”
Environmental historian Mahesh Rangarajan, in his book Environmental Issues in India A Reader writes that, “Thomas Roe reports that the imperial standard sported a couchant lion and a rising sun (Welch 1986). A painting by Payag from the Padshahnama, the chronicle of Shah Jahan’s reign by Abdul Hamid Lathery preserved in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, depicts the siege of Qandahar in the Deccan in 1631 by Shah Jahan’s army led by Nasiri Khan. The imperial standards are scarlet pennants with green borders with a passant lion and a rising sun behind it in each of them. Another Padshahnama painting by the Kashmiri painter, of Shah Jahan’s royal processors in 1655, clearly shows pennants which have a field of green with a couchant lion and the sun rising behind it in each. This symbolism is ancient and was common in older Persian imagery;”
According to Thomas, the lion and sun motif started appearing prominently on the imperial Mughal flag from Jahangir’s period onwards. “By the end of the seventeenth century, the imperial flags start to match the descriptions of Mughal flags from the time of Akbar, which contained just the emblem of the radiant sun on a triangular flag,” he writes.
In Iran though, the Shir-o-Khurshid continued to be used till 1979. But while the jury is still out on whether it will again become the symbol of Iran, the motif shows how wildlife and celestial bodies connect peoples, human cultures and often bridge time itself.
