A Study of the Illustrations of the Sharaf-Nama in the Chester Beatty Library's Anthology. Pers 124 of 1435-36

PERSICA XVI, 2000 67

A STUDY OF THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE SHARAF-NAMA IN THE CHESTER BEATTY LIBRARY’S ANTHOLOGY. PERS 124 OF 1435-36

Caroline Singer University of Edinburgh

The purpose of this article is to discuss a portion of the 121 illustrations of the Chester Beatty Library’s Anthology Pers 124.1 It will concentrate primarily on the illustrations to Nizami’s Sharaf-Nama, the first part of his epic poem, the Iskandar-Nama, extolling the life of Alexander the Great. In addition, it will consider the overall choice of subjects illustrating the Iskandar-nama made by Persian manuscript painters from c. 1380-1474. It will also address the problem of provenance inherent in this understudied manuscript. The Anthology has variously been attributed to provincial Southern Iranian schools, and, most recently, has been connected with a group of near-contemporary manuscripts thought to have been executed in Sultanate India. In conclusion, a comparison will be made with a Shah-Nama of similar date, and with remarkably similar stylistic traits, in the hope that further work may be done on the basis of this preliminary study. The manuscript, now in two leather-bound volumes, comprises an anthology of Per- sian and Arabic literature, richly illustrated with 121 miniatures within the pages of the text. Originally, two double frontispieces adorned the beginning of Volume One; the right half of the first frontispiece is now missing, and the left page is damaged, obliterat- ing the name of the patron and place of manufacture. It is, however, still possible to appreciate the lavish and fairly sophisticated illumination of these frontispieces, decorated in blue, black and predominantly gold, with medallions encircling a central rosette and angelic figures in all four corners. In the medallions are written the names of the works included in the Anthology, while the second pair of frontispieces contain the open- ing to the first poem, surrounded by similar illumination. The date of the production, and the two scribes who copied the texts are known — the date is given as A.H. 838-40 (A.D. 1435-36) and the scribes are named as ‘Ali Pagir al-Ashtarjani (i.e. from Ashtarjan near Isfahan), and Zain al-Isfahani. The majority of the

1 A.J. Arberry, M. Minovi and E. Blochet (ed. J.V.S. Wilkinson), The Chester Beatty Library. A Cat- alogue of the Persian Manuscripts and Miniatures, Volume I, mss. 101-150 (Dublin, 1959), pp. 45-53, pls. 29-31. 68 CAROLINE SINGER

Anthology is written in black nasta’liq, enclosed within gold and blue margin rulings on cream-coloured paper. The chapter titles are written in gold, and each new book is announced by an illuminated cunwan. The poems contained within the Anthology are as follows: 1. The Khamsa or Quintet of Nizami, comprising the Makhzan al-Asrar or ‘The Store of Mysteries’, The Romance of Khusrau and Shirin, the Romance of Layla and Maj- nun, The Haft Paikar or ‘Seven Portraits’, and the Iskandar-Nama or ‘Book of Alexander’, which is divided into two parts — The Sharaf-Nama and the Iqbal- Nama. This comprises the main body of Volume One. 2. The Mathnawi of Jalal al-Din Rumi, written in the margins of Volume One. 3. The Khamsa of Amir Khusrau Dihlavi, comprising the main body of Volume Two. 4. The Qasida al-Burdah of al-Busiri in Arabic, written in a black naskh with a Per- sian translation in gold nasta’liq, in Volume Two. 5. The Mantiq al-Tair or ‘Speech of the Birds’ of Farid al-Din ‘Attar, in Volume Two. 6. The Bustan of Sa{di, in Volume Two. Of the 121 miniatures, forty-eight illustrate Amir Khusrau, and seventy-eight illustrate Nizami. Of these latter images, twenty-seven are allocated to the Iskandar-Nama (seventeen for the Sharaf-Nama). The other four works are unillustrated. There are a few pages in which the triangular thumb-pieces at the side of each page have been decorated with gold foliage and sometimes coloured animals. It is evident from the rest of the page turn- ers, which are blank, and from the ruled pages without illustrations at the end of Volume Two, that the ornamentation of the manuscript was not completed. There is documentary evidence in Volume Two that this Anthology once belonged to the library of ‘Adil Shah, Isma}il b. Yusuf, of Bijapur in Southern India, who ruled from 1511-34. Part of this inscription reads: ‘By virtue of a purchase made from Khvajah ‘Ayyub this Anthology [passed into] the library of his august and splendid majesty… Sultan ‘Adil Shah.’2 The date given is 12 November 1514. It is also known that at this time the two volumes were bound as one. In its modern history in the Collection of Chester Beatty, the manuscript has been included in several important exhibitions; at the exhibition of Persian Art at Burlington House, London in 1931,3 in Cairo in 1935,4 in the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition of 1965,5 and most recently in Edinburgh in 1977.6 However, despite having been included in such prestigious exhibitions, there is no detailed study of the Anthology,

2 Ibid., p. 53. 3 L. Binyon, J.V.S. Wilkinson and B. Gray, Persian Miniature Painting including a critical and descriptive catalogue of the miniatures exhibited at Burlington House January-March 1931 (Oxford, 1933), Cat.no. 54. 4 G. Wiet, Exposition d’Art Persane (Cairo, 1935), p. 93, pl. 69. 5 B.W. Robinson, Persian Miniature Painting from Collections in the British Isles (London, 1967), Cat.no.1000, pp. 87-8, pl. 39. 6 R. Hillenbrand, Imperial Images in Persian Painting (Edinburgh, 1977), pp. 25-6, 57, and pl. 38. A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 69 which is surprising, given the unusual proliferation of illustrations and the quality of their finish. Each one has an individual significance and interest, and the artists were obviously required to summon up such considerable powers of invention in order to produce such a large quantity without excessive repetition. In addition, there was at this time no established cycle of illustrations to the work of Amir Khusrau, and thus no set of standard formulae for the artists to follow. In contrast to other near-contemporary Anthologies, for example B.M.Add.27261 of c.1410-11,7 which contained a personal selection of twenty or so images of the stories and themes that particularly interested the patron, Iskandar Sultan of Shiraz, this Anthology appears large and indiscriminately illustrated. The patron has amassed here a collection of some of the very finest poetry in the Persian and Arabic languages. The absence of the Shah-Nama in this Anthology is unsurprising considering the length and importance of the national epic; the patron may well have commissioned a separate volume for that work alone, the possible identification of which will be discussed later, and this would have completed an impressive gamut of great Persian poetry. This particular manuscript encompasses spiritual, historical and romantic works; a ‘condensed’ library, beautifully written and lavishly illustrated. The completeness of this work may indicate that the Anthology was among only very few books that the patron commissioned, and thus the richness and proliferation of the illustrations might have been a way of embellishing a library containing a minimum amount of books — objects that were, after all, powerful statements not only of learn- ing and erudition, but also of wealth and importance. The patron was apparently not lacking in available funds. The 121 miniatures are all illuminated with a wealth of gold, silver and lapis lazuli pigments, and at least three individuals are documented to have worked on the Anthology — the two scribes named earlier, and the translator of the Arabic poem into Persian, who signed his name and the date of his work in the colophon: ‘I am known as Hafiz, my name is Muhammad’.8 If, as will be suggested later, there were three artists working on the illustrations, then (given that the scribes were not also painters), the patron would have employed a mimi- mum of six men in the creation of this one Anthology. No small-budget undertaking, then, and the question must be raised as to why, in such an obviously costly work, the figures and their surroundings seem ‘primitive’ and somewhat simplified, in the context of other early fifteenth-century Persian painting — why does the artistic expertise not match the monetary value itself? One answer may lie in the availability, or otherwise, of progres- sive artists in the area in which the patron lived. It seems most likely, for instance, that the artist who painted ‘Iskandar and the mermaids’(Vol. 1, f.291b) had never seen this very episode depicted in the Shirazi Anthology of Iskandar Sultan dated 1410-11 (BM Add.27261), or in the numerous and more or less faithful imitations in fifteenth-century

7 Anthology, c.∞1410-11, Shiraz, British Library Add.∞27261. See B. Gray, Persian Painting (Geneva, 1971), pp. 69-73, and P. Soucek, Illustrated Manuscripts of Nizami’s Khamseh 1386-1482 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 1971), pp. 261-63, 283-306. 8 Arberry et al., op.cit. p. 45. 70 CAROLINE SINGER manuscripts of both Shiraz and Herat.9 This may indicate that the artists and patron stood outside the two mainstream Timurid painting schools, a fact further supported by the nisba of the scribes, suggesting Isfahan, and thus the involvement of a wealthy provincial patron. The main body of analysis of the illustrations will centre upon the seventeen images that illustrate the Sharaf-Nama section of the Iskandar-Nama. Before discussing them, however, it is important to consider the page as a whole; namely the arrangement of the image within the text. By this period in Timurid Persia, manuscripts were showing an increasing interaction between the words of the text and the accompanying illustration, so that both parts of the book complemented and commented upon each other; a subtle art intended for connoisseurs. One example of many is the illustration to the story of the drowned man being rescued in the Gulistan of Sa{di, Herat 1426,10 which incorporates three lines of text within the image, as if they were chiselled into the rock. However, no such inventiveness is apparent in the Anthology, in which the text remains strictly separate from the images. They are bound within regular rectangular frames and occupy a third of the page, rarely emerging from beyond the borders into the margin, and then only half-heartedly (plate 14). The position of the image on the page is varied, but generally there is little sense of a self-confident manipulation and integration of text and image of the kind that was being produced by scribes and artists working in close collaboration in the sophisticated workshops of Herat, and, to a lesser extent, Shiraz. In this Anthology, the images of the Iskandar-Nama differ from those of Nizami’s other poems in three ways: Firstly, in the larger number of illustrations dedicated to it (twenty-seven in all); secondly, in the size of these images, which are all at least two cen- timetres taller than the average miniature in the book, which, given the size of the written surface — 17≈10.7 cm. — makes a considerable impact; and thirdly, in that two of the Anthology’s three double-page illustrations are large battle scenes in the Sharaf-Nama (plates 3, 4, 15, 16 and 17). These are images of a complexity, size and detail that is not seen in the other poems.11 For convenience, the seventeen images of the Sharaf-Nama will be divided into “interior”, “exterior” and “interior/exterior” scenes, and an attempt will be made to demonstrate a division of labour between two main artists (Artist 1 and Artist 2) who appear to have worked on the same images. A third artist, it is suggested, worked specifically on a small number of action and battle scenes, which will be considered separately. A fourth artist painted four scenes in the Khusrau and Shirin story — f.41b ‘Khusrau listening to Shapur telling the story of Shirin’s life’, f.46 ‘Khusrau killing a lion, watched

9 Including the Gubelkian Anthology of 1410-11 (L.A. 161) and the Hermitage Khamsa V.P.1000 (f. 48a). See N.M. Titley, “Persian Miniature Painting. The repetition of compositions during the fifteenth century” in Akten des VII. Internationalen Kongresses für Iranische Kunst und Archäologie (Berlin, 1979) pp. 471-91. 10 Chester Beatty Library Cat. no.119 f.15b. See Arberry et al., op.∞cit. pl. 28. 11 On double-page illustrations, see E.G. Sims, The Garret ms. of the Zafar-Nama: a study in fifteenth century Timurid patronage (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 1973), p. 149: ‘the non-frontispiece double page compositions appear in manuscripts made in or near Shiraz from about 1390 to about 1436 in a variety of texts.’ Her list of manuscripts containing double-page compositions (pp. 150-51) does not include this Anthology which contains three in all. A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 71 by Shirin’, f.47 ‘Khusrau and Shirin enthroned’, and f.50b ‘battle between Khusrau and Bahram Chubin’; but given their smaller size, apparently earlier date and lower quality, they will not be discussed further.

The Interior Scenes — Plates 7, 10, 11 and 16.

Three of the four interior scenes are enthronement images, and although the size, colour, shape and positioning of the thrones and the gestures of the figures are different, the basic construction of the scenes are the same and can be analysed according to certain fixed principles. Firstly, various viewpoints within the room are combined, in order to gain maximum effect from every element — the carpets are depicted aerially so as to display their decoration fully, the thrones are flattened onto a single plane and constructed of bands of different colour and ornamentation which achieves great decorative opulence, and the walls and windows are painted frontally. These techniques are by no means unique in Timurid painting. All the figures occupy a single picture plane, and there is very little sense of movement or depth in any of these scenes. The protagonists them- selves have life enough — their clothes are brightly and variously coloured and their gestures and faces are, at times, individual and fairly expressive, despite a certain stiffness, but they are essentially isolated and immobile — bound to the particular space they occupy at that particular moment, The lack of more than one picture plane, and of any sense of recession, means that the figures seem to exist in a claustrophobic world, in which there is no air to breathe and nowhere to move within the dense ornament. The tripartite division of the room in plate 7, ‘Iskandar and Queen Nushaba’, highlights this sense of isolation; the two enthroned monarchs are separated from the onlook- ers by five different sections of decoration. There is no feeling that either the women or the men could cross these thresholds and enter that royal space, where Queen and World Conqueror are set in majesty against the rich red of the carpet and haloed by the gold of the throne. The gesture of the kneeling man pointing over to the left, indicates that he is looking at something — but what? Only the willowy maiden closest to Nushaba gives any indication of being involved in the scene by her glance, which is directed towards the centre. However, she is as separate from them as the rest. This feeling of immobility, of figures as icons, is not merely applied to royalty but effects all the figures in interior scenes, and is due, to a large extent, to the way in which the images were actually painted; that is, by two different hands. What follows is merely a hypothesis, and requires further detailed examination of the manuscript to provide conclusive evidence. The first painter, Artist 1, who may be called “the figure painter”, would have planned his composition and painted the figures onto the blank area of the page, perhaps with the sections of the room marked out in basic blocks. Artist 2, who is the “illuminator”, since he also painted the cunwans and the frontispieces, would then have filled in the rest of the scene with decoration: wall tiles, carpets, frescoes and thrones. Against the beautifully gilded, richly coloured, painstakingly elaborate background the figures stand, sit or kneel in splendid isolation from one another, con- ceived at a different moment and executed by a different hand to that of their surroundings. 72 CAROLINE SINGER

Interior/Exterior Scenes — Plates 1, 5, 9 and 13.

The division between the figure painter and the illuminator is perhaps most clearly seen in the four scenes that combine elements of the interior and the exterior. In three of these cases, the ‘interior’ element is a throne placed in a landscape. In plate 13, for example, Iskandar, seated on his throne on the extreme right of the illustration, is enclosed within a clearly defined tall, thin, rectangular royal space, marked with a black line and filled in by the illuminator with beautifully intricate patterns in bands of yellow, purple, red, gold and blue. In the rest of the scene are the entertainers, the landscape and Iskan- dar’s host, the Khaqan of Chin, who kneels before the king. The gulf between the two figures is considerable, intensified by the two completely separate environments surrounding them — Iskandar is isolated and enclosed within the splendour of his throne, while the Khaqan kneels on the ground surrounded by the lush fertility of the landscape. Although the other figures here — musicians and a dancer — do not interact with one another, they all nevertheless exist beneath the same sky and breathe the same air. Iskan- dar’s throne even cuts off a part of the trunk and foliage of the fruit tree; it is as if this block of illumination had been superimposed on top of the exterior scene. This clearly shows the lack of fluidity between the two hands — the figure artist, who almost certainly painted the landscape settings, and the illuminator, who would have filled in the rectangular block of the throne, and painted the Chinese style blue and white vases, a reflection of Timurid courtly tastes and trade with China.12

Exterior Scenes — Plates 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 17.

There are six exterior scenes, excluding the battle scenes of Artist 3. All of them, despite the stiffness of the figures and the somewhat confused depiction of scale, display a more fluid interaction between the figures and their environment, and a greater sense of their ability to move from one part of the picture to another. In plate 17, the walking motion of both Iskandar’s horse and of his guide, and the pointing gesture of the guide over to the left, conveys a feeling of movement from right to left, from outside the picture space towards the object of desire — the Water of Life. Despite the very cramped space of illustration, the artist has managed to convey a sense of ‘before’ and ‘after’ — Iskandar to the right of the tree cannot see what lies beyond — the revelation of the water discovered by Khizr and Ilyas. Less than an inch separates the two areas, but psychologically they are miles apart, and the tree, cutting the scene into two halves, successfully enhances this. Other scenes are not quite so lively — there are several images in which a decidedly static approach to the task of story-telling has been taken. Often these scenes convey less dramatic moments of a particular episode, ignoring the events that precede or come after them that would appear to have more dramatic impact. Plate 2, for example, illustrates 12 For a discussion of this, see B. Gray, “Blue and White Vessels in Persian Miniatures of the Four- teenth and Fifteenth Centuries Re-examined”, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, 1948-49, pp. 23-31. There are a number of other features in the illustrations that indicate exposure to Chinese motifs — the dragon flanking Iskandar’s throne (plate 1), the Chinese tai cloud (plate 10) and the blue and white ‘willow pattern’ frescoes on the walls of the palace interiors (pls. 11 and 19). A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 73

Iskandar’s interest in a fight to the death between two partridges, and his championing of one bird who would foretell his fate and the outcome of his impending battle against Dar- ius. It is a charming pastoral scene, the focus of which — the battling birds — is almost lost amongst the trees, shrubs and other animals, and the image does not seem to convey the drama of Nizami’s description: ‘From the fierceness with which the partridges grappled together, they fled not at the sight of the king.’13 Moments later in the story, however, Iskandar’s bird meets a nasty fate: ‘An eagle came and split his head’,14 thus delivering a fearful prophecy. This part of the story, with its potential for drama and motion in an image, has been avoided by the artist. Similarly, there is a crucial moment later in the poem, when Nushaba exposes Iskandar’s disguise and reveals her portrait of him, to his amazement: ‘Iskandar…opened out Nushaba’s silk: In it he beheld precisely his own form;…He refrained altogether from an answer: feared, and the colour of his face became like straw.’15 This particular event was chosen by several other fifteenth-century Persian artists, for example in the 1444 Khamsa in the Topkapi Saray, H.870,16 and the 1410-11 Anthology, British Library Add.27261, which had many imitators. The artists of the Anthology chose an altogether more static enthronement scene. The most striking example of the phenomenon, in which very little action takes place in the images, is plate 8. Iskandar, seated on a carpet in the open air, converses with a man in front of a flickering fire. There appears to be remarkably little textual point to the scene, which does not occur in any other illustrated fifteenth-century Nizami manuscript. The passage which corresponds closest to it is a lengthy, poetic, semi-philosophi- cal description of fire, as part of the account of the preparations for the feast in honour of Queen Nushaba.17 It makes scant reference to Iskandar’s presence, but at one point describes the fire as ‘a mass of pure gold’.18 Indeed, the painting is an impressive evocation of this — the flickering, evanescent glow- ing flames are a stark contrast to many contemporary images of fires, with their stylised Chinese-cloud flames, but the composition is nevertheless fairly static.

13 There is no full translation of Nizami’s Khamsa in the English language, although it is well summarised by P. Soucek in her Ph.D. thesis, vol. 1, pp. 10-186. The translation of the Sharaf-Nama used in this paper is H. Wilberforce Clarke’s Sikandar-Nama e Bara (London, 1881). Henceforward it will be referred to as ‘W. Clarke’. For this quotation, see Canto XXII, l. 41, p. 234. 14 W.Clarke, Canto XXII, l. 59, p.235. 15 Ibid., Canto XXXVIII, l. 87-90, p.468. 16 1444 Khamsa, H.870, f.235b. See Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum (New York, 1972), ed. R. Ettinghausen, p. 15, fig.3. 17 W. Clarke, Canto XXXIX, pp. 491-98. 18 Ibid., p. 491, l. 30. 74 CAROLINE SINGER

It is possible, then, that the choice of the image may in part have been dictated by a more or less ‘set-piece’ attitude to design, in which the figures and gestures could be varied in order to match the text, but which ultimately remained formulaic — an attitude taken to extremes in the six identical pavillions illustrating the Haft Paikar,19 which are almost purely decorative, and avoid any specific narrative purpose. Within these apparent constraints, however, the ‘figure’ artist has managed to include some fine touches of life and incidental detail into the exterior scenes; the man emerging tentatively from the edge of plate 8 in order to pick fruit, the hesitant servants peering over a throne or from a doorway, as well as the trappings of courtly life — vases, golden tables and musical instru- ments. There is also some impressively varied vegetation; palm trees, fruit trees, trees with large maple-like leaves, and tall thin cypresses. In plate 11, the artist has attempted a more ambitious scene, in which the court artists of Iskandar and the Khaqan of Chin are engaged in a painting competition, to determine which nation produced the greater artistic talent. The Greeks duly painted a scene (which is not described by Nizami) on one side of a wall, partitioned by a curtain, while the Chinese set about polishing their side so that when the curtain was lifted, both sides looked identical, and Iskandar was unable to choose an outright winner. The artist here has shown the contest in progress — Greeks painting and Chinese polishing. He has made no attempt to diffentiate between the Greeks and Chinese — all are portrayed as Persian. Two near-contemporary renditions of the same episode20 depict the moment when the two images are unveiled and Iskandar is shown to be amazed and confused by their similarity: ‘Of the two arzhangs.. the form was one; both as to drawing and as to colour — no difference. At that work (of exact) similarity, the beholder remained astonished’.21 In comparison with these more dramatic renditions, the Anthology illustration is fairly simplistic and unsophisticated. Nevertheless, it is a rare episode in fifteenth-century Niza- mis, due to the complexity of the event, and thus an exception to the ‘set-piece’ approach. It is apparent, then, that the ‘figure’ painter (Artist 1) was most involved in the actual telling of the story, characterisation of figures and depiction of landscape, and that Artist 2, a painter of great finesse, was employed to set the princely scene. He painted the courtly milieu, the thrones, the palace interiors, in addition to the cunwans and frontispieces — not a painter of real life, but a master of the surface of the page. This is one reason that the scenes seem so primitive; Artist 1 was not, evidently, particularly out- standing, but he cannot be blamed for the lack of cohesion and strange awkwardness of the scenes; the employment of two incompatible painting styles, and the attempt to incorporate them into a single scene, dictates the overall impression of the illustrations.

19 Anthology, Vol. I, ff.164, 166b, 169, 172, 177, 180b. 20 ‘Iskandar judging the painting contest between the artists of Rum and Chin’: a. Nizami, Khamsa, Shiraz, 1450, Metropolitan Museum, 13.228.3, f.322a. See Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum, ed. R. Ettinghausen (New York, 1972), p. 13. b. Nizami, Khamsa, mid-fifteenth-century, Topkapi Museum H.753. See I. Stchoukine, “La Khamseh de Nizami, H.753 du Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi d’Istanbul”, Syria 49 (1972), pl. IX. For a discussion of (a) see P. Soucek, “Nizami on Painters and Painting” in Islamic Art in the Metro- politan Museum, pp. 9-21. 21 W.Clarke, Canto LIII, l. 20-21, p. 640. A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 75

Artist 3 — The Battle Artist. Plates 3, 14, 15.

The third artist was, it seems, specially employed to paint the scenes of battle, and his style, as distinct from that of the figure artist, can be seen in a comparison between plate 4 and plate 15. Both employ the characteristic high horizon line but the battle artist uses the barren space to concentrate the eye onto the main event, aided by the striking crimson of the horse’s caparison, whereas in plate 4, Iskandar and the dying Achaemenid King are relegated to the bottom corner while the hill is dotted with clouds, small shrubs and somewhat disconnected figures. The action of the event in plate 15 is concentrated into a few expressive strokes; Iskandar’s vicelike grip on the rope, the dragging diagonal of Kintal’s body and left leg, the horse, fully extended, galloping out of the picture — all suggest movement and speed. A comparison can be made between the serried rows of soldiers’ faces, their helmets a straight line, in plate 4 and the individually delineated helmets and faces of the soldiers in plate 15. The wide-eyed and simplistic horses clumsily drawn with laboured lines and little real sense of anatomical observation in plate 4 contrast with the sleek streamlined silhouette of Artist 3’s steeds, usually in motion, the red of their gums and tongues set against the white of their teeth, neighing with fear or agression. The two double-page battle scenes are rich in pageantry and exuberance — a testa- ment to the painstaking application of colour; in some figures, no less than eight separate colours were employed, as well as elaborate gold-work motifs and small “metal-work” stippling on the gold armour. Moreover, this artist displays more of a mastery of the human reponse; he is aware, in plate 3 — the battle between Iskandar and Dara — that war involves a multitude of simultaneous incidents between individuals, and despite the somewhat overfull composition and areas of identical ranks of indistinct soldiers, it is possible to pick out soldiers in retreat, in combat, in attack, in fear; each of the sixteen men in the top right-hand corner of plate 3 are individuals, differentiated by facial hair and colour — every one has a thought running through his head. The depiction of a mor- tal blow in plate 14 displays an understanding of the body’s response to injury — the Russian soldier lurches forward, his mouth gaping open, hands grasping onto the horse’s neck; the force and impact of the blow is almost palpable. This particular figural arrangement has also been used in a Khamsa of 1445 in the John Rylands Library.22 In both the battle scenes, Artist 3 has avoided the technique of depicting a single specified event within the battle — close examination of the poem revealed no one event or confrontation that matched the illustrations. Instead, the artist seems to have selected and adapted various episodes within the lengthy descriptions of both battles; that between Iskandar and the Russians lasts for seven days and comprises several repetitive single combats, which have been condensed into this one scene. He has taken his lead from Nizami’s descriptions of the noises, the wounds, the clamour, the dust, that is likened to the Day of Judgement:

22 ‘Victory of Iskandar over the Zangi’ — Nizami, Khamsa, Shiraz, 1445, Ryl. Pers. 36. See B.W. Robinson, Persian Painting in the John Rylands Library — a descriptive catalogue (London, 1980), p. 85, no. 421. 76 CAROLINE SINGER

‘The movement (of masses of armed men) Came forth from conflict’s path. Tumultuous action came upon the many men.’23 The artist has also avoided an explicit emphasis on the figure of Iskandar, who, despite distinctive headgear (a leopard’s head helmet in plate 3), and steed (an elephant in plate 14), is by no means the main protagonist. What has been implied instead is the strength and force of Iskandar’s army, as it sweeps across the gutter of the page into the domain of the opposition, who retreat from this powerful offensive.

Discrepancies in the images

A number of “mistakes” can be detected in the illustrations when compared closely with Nizami’s poem; some of these are fairly fundamental, and alter the meaning of the story. For example, Nizami specified that no men were allowed near the virgin Queen Nushaba, in order to protect her purity: ‘(She) has many manly slaves; but none (of them) sees her face’.24 and stressed that Iskandar visits her unaccompanied and in disguise: ‘He prepared the means (of proceeding) according to the usage of messengers, (and) went messenger-like towards the graceful one (Nushaba)).’25 The disguise did not fool Nushaba, who had a portrait of Iskandar in her possession. Yet in the illustration, (plate 7), Iskandar wears the same crown and royal regalia that he wears in other illustrations, and three male attendants wait in the wings, watching the scene. When the Khaqan of Chin, disguised as a legate, visits Iskandar he demands ‘That the king should make the palace void of the stranger’26 Iskandar complies, but in self-defence has the ankles and wrists of the Khaqan bound. The illustration (plate 10) indicates that the Khaqan’s feet and wrists are tied, but clearly show seven shifty courtiers loitering in the background. In both episodes, the significance of Iskandar’s encounter hinges on the absence of retainers, highlighting his bravery in confronting potentially hostile rulers without guards. This may suggest that the artists — and perhaps the patron — were not sufficiently familiar with the finer details of the text, for these figures cannot merely be explained away by pictorial demands. In plate 17 the artist had the choice of two different accounts of the discovery of the Water of Life, both recounted by Nizami in the Sharaf-Nama. In the first, Khizr sees the water, removes his clothes and bathes in it ‘When Khizr caught acquaintance with (beheld) the fountain… He alighted and quickly plucked off his garments; Bathed head and body in that pure fountain,’27

23 W. Clarke, Canto XXIX, p. 319, l.24. 24 Ibid., Canto XXXVII, p. 455, l.41. 25 Ibid., Canto XXXVIII, p. 460, l.2. 26 Ibid., Canto LI, p. 623, l.18. 27 Ibid., Canto LXIX, p. 802, l.28-29. A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 77 a moment illustrated in the Uppsala Nizami,28 and in the second, Khizr and Ilyas, having discovered the pool, eat a meal beside its banks; ‘At that fountain-head they spread the table-cloth; For a fountain renders food pleasant-tasting.’29 Neither version has been illustrated here; instead the water is afforded the minimum of space, while the two prophets gesture towards it, and Iskandar approaches from behind the tree on the right. Given that the pivotal point of the epic is Iskandar’s search for and ultimate inability to find the Water of Life, and thereby to become immortal, it seems curious that he is depicted riding towards the water, when in fact he should be struggling in the Land of Darkness; ‘In that place of shade…the Khusrau was dejected.’30 In other versions, he has been shown in the same picture as Khizr and Ilyas, although heading in the opposite direction. Here, despite the tree that separates the two halves of the picture, Iskandar is dangerously close to the water, and the absence of time and space differentiation means that this attempt at continuous narrative, although potentially a sophisticated solution, effectively alters the interpretation and point of the text. In plate 4 Iskandar listens to the last wishes of the dying king Dara, stabbed, with Iskandar’s consent, by two self-seeking ministers from the Persian camp. They lead Iskandar to the scene of the crime in the hope of reward, and watch the slow death of their king whose head is supported on Iskandar’s knees, in keeping with Nizami’s description; ‘Iskandar placed the wounded head on his thigh’31 The artist has painted a confusing scene which does not fully correspond to the details of the poem. The two traitors are depicted as attendants (the one on the left appears to be tending the horses), and mourning women and spectating soldiers are included, but are not mentioned in the text. Another medieval Alexander romance,32 describes the same episode a little differently; Dara is taken to the women’s quarters and mourned by his mother. This may account for the inclusion of women here. The artist may, on the other hand, have created a visualisation of Dara’s third and final wish, that Iskandar, the victo- rious new ruler, should respect and take care of his womenfolk, especially his daughter Roshanak whom he pledges to Iskandar: ‘Roshanak, indeed, who is my daughter… Thou mayst exalt as thy own bed-fellow’33 Either way, the illustration is not a literal rendition of Nizami’s words.

28 ‘Khizr bathing in the Water of Life’ — Nizami, Khamsa, 1439, Uppsala, University Library O. Vet.82, f.344r. See K. Adahl, A Khamsa of Nizami of 1439 (Uppsala, 1981), pl. 23. 29 W. Clarke, Canto LXIX, p.803, l.40. 30 Ibid., Canto LXIX, p. 806, l. 64. 31 Ibid., Canto XXX, p. 343, l. 111. 32 Iskandar-Nama. A Persian Medieval Alexander Romance trans: M. Southgate (New York, 1978). 33 W.Clarke, Canto XXX, p. 345, l. 171-3. 78 CAROLINE SINGER

In plate 3 Iskandar is portrayed wearing a leopard’s head over his helmet, an attribute reserved exclusively for the Iranian hero Rustam, who, in illustrations of the Shah-Nama, is habitually depicted with exactly this headgear. No mention is made of such a detail by Nizami. There is another instance in the Anthology where Rustam and Iskandar are connected — not in details of dress, but in pictorial conventions. In f.297b Iskandar lying sick, the dying hero, yet looking distinctly alert and attentive, is painted in almost exactly the same position and manner as the ‘set-piece’ composition used in more than one illustrated manuscript to depict the intoxicated paladin Rustam, awaiting his single night of love with Tahmina.34 Moreover, there is another parallel to this scene of the dying Iskandar, in the Jawamic al-Hikayat of 1439-4035 in which the Caliph, in much the same pose as Iskandar, is being massaged by a courtier.36 In both cases, the appropriation of another scene — of the pleasurable bed-time activities of a ruler — explains Iskandar’s strangely contented and alert appearance while lying on his death-bed in f.297b of the Anthology. This fitting of various episodes into ‘set-piece’ formulae, and the discrepancies found in the images, seem to corroborate observations made separately by M.L. Swieto- chowski37 and P. Soucek.38 The former describes the standardisation of images as the artists’ usage of a ‘lowest common iconographic denominator’,39 and she talks of ‘minimum iconography’40 employed in the illustration of familiar tales. Soucek remarks: ‘While the nature of the text was obviously an important element in the desire of a purchaser or patron to own a copy of a given work, the intrinsic connection of the text and illustrations appears to be only a minor factor in the total evolution of the manuscript illumination…This is not to say that the artists were careless, merely that they treated their illustrations as typical rather than particular representations of an event.’41 This would explain the discrepancies between text and image found within the illustrations of this Sharaf-Nama. Finally to plate 6, Iskandar at the Ka’ba, in which the artist conveys more of the text within the image than is immediately apparent. Iskandar is shown grasping the ring of the Ka’ba door in veneration — a straightforward enough event, and one described by

34 For example, ‘Rustam awaits Tahmina’ — Nizami, Khamsa, mid-fifteenth century, W. India, John Rylands Library (Ryl.Pers.9). See B.W. Robinson, Persian Painting in the John Rylands Library — a descriptive catalogue (London, 1980), p. 100, no. 439. 35 ’The caliph Mahdi being massaged by his slaves’ - Jawamic al-Hikayat, provincial style, fifteenth century, British Library, Or. 11676, f.237a. See G. Meredith-Owens, Persian Miniature Painting (London, 1973). Pl. IX. 36 This was pointed out by R. Hillenbrand in Imperial Images in Persian Painting (Edinburgh, 1977), p. 25. 37 M.L. Swietochowski, “Some Aspects of the Persian Miniature Painter in relation to his texts”, Studies in Art and Literature of the Near East in Honor of R. Ettinghausen, ed. P.J. Chelkowski (Salt Lake City, 1974). See also R. Hillenbrand, “Recent Work on Islamic Iconography”, Oriental Art XXIV, 2 (1978), pp. 201-13, esp. p. 208, for further comments. 38 P. Soucek, “Comments on Persian Painting”, Studies on Isfahan — Proceedings of the Isfahan Col- loquium 1974 (Iranian Studies VII (1974). 39 Swietochowski, op.cit., p. 112. 40 Ibid., p. 117-8. 41 Soucek, p. 74. A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 79

Nizami in the poem. However, the story continues with Iskandar’s decoration of the holy place with all the manner of luxurious treasures — ‘[He] adorned all the house of the Ka’ba with treasure and jewels; Adorned the door and roof with musk and ambergris’42 This event is suggested implicitly by the noticeable difference between this Ka’ba and that visited by Majnun in the earlier poem, which is an altogether plainer affair (plate 20). The abundance of breathless ornament which pushes Iskandar to the very surface of the page and roots him to the spot manages to incorporate two stages of the pilgrimage, and succeeds also in linking the illustrations of separate poems. This sense of unity within the illustrations of a manuscript is, in general, rare in Persian painting of this time.

The Iskandar cycle in manuscripts of Nizami c. 1380-1474

A comprehensive index of all the subjects illustrated in manuscripts of Nizami’s Khamsa from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries has been published by L.N. Dod- khudoeva.43 From this, it has been possible to draw up a table (see Appendix 1), that aims to show the relationship of the Iskandar-Nama cycle of the Anthology to that of other manuscripts produced prior to this one, and up to 40 years after it — spanning the years c.1380-c.1474. At the core of this first table is the complete group of Iskandar-Nama illustrations in the Anthology, and any manuscript that shares the same subject will be included along with the folio number upon which the particular image appears. A second table (Appendix 2), completes the documentation of the Iskandar-Nama cycle from c.1380-1474, by including all those subjects that are not illustrated in the Anthology, but which occur in other manuscripts of the period. From these tables it is possible to ascer- tain which subjects were most popular (i.e. which were shared by five or more manuscripts): ‘Iskandar versus Dara’, ‘Iskandar at the Ka’ba’, ‘Iskandar and the Khaqan of Chin’, ‘Iskandar versus the Russians’, ‘Khizr and Ilyas at the Water of Life’, ‘Iskandar and the seven philosophers’, ‘Iskandar and the mermaids’, ‘The barrier against Gog and Magog’, ‘Iskandar versus the forces of Zind’, and ‘Nushaba recognises Iskandar from his portrait’. Of these ten scenes, eight are found in the Anthology. The images that are unique to this manuscript are: ‘Iskandar watching the partridges’, ‘Iskandar with Roshanak and her mother’, ‘Iskandar by a fire’, ‘Iskandar at the throne of Kay Khus- rau’, ‘Iskandar pledging Queen Nushaba to his General, Dival’, ‘Iskandar with the Indian sage’, and ‘Iskandar visited by two angels’. What emerges immediately from Dodkhudoeva’s index is the extremely large quantity of illustrations in the Anthology, compared to all the other manuscripts of the period — she lists it as containing 65 illustrations, a statistic which in fact omits eight of the Anthol- ogy’s 73 Nizami illustrations, and fails to take into account the 48 illustrations to Amir Khusrau’s poetry. The next most highly illustrated manuscripts are: the Uppsala Nizami

42 W.Clarke, Canto XXXVI, p. 445, l. 58. 43 L.N. Dodkhudoeva, Poemi Nizami v srednevekovoy miniaturnoy zhivopisi (‘Nizami’s poems in mediaeval miniature painting’) (Moscow, 1985). 80 CAROLINE SINGER of 1439 O.Vet. 8244 with 52, the Topkapi Saray ‘sultanate style’(?) Nizami of 1440, Hazine 77445 with 45, and the 1440 Yazd Nizami, Hazine 870,46 with 32. Thus the manuscript can safely be classed as an unusually highly illustrated copy of Nizami’s Khamsa. According to Dodkhudoeva, the Iskandar-Nama is by far the most frequently illustrated of the five poems in this period, with 88 subjects listed for the Sharaf-Nama, and 39 for the Iqbal-Nama (127 in all), compared to 75 for Khusrau and Shirin, 48 for Laila and Majnun, 47 for the Haft Paikar , and 23 for the Makhzan al-Asrar. This last poem, Nizami’s first and most mystical work, is not illustrated in the Anthology; neither are the other four spiritual poems contained within the volumes I and II — it is evident that the patron felt it seemly to have only the more secular poetry illustrated. It is difficult to define the Anthology as either “unique” or “commonplace”, since it illustrates most of the popular subjects of the Iskandar-Nama, but also includes others that were relatively, or in some cases completely original at the time. Since no one Nizami manuscript illustrates exactly the same subject in the same way, it could perhaps be said that each is unique, yet subject to overlapping — shared iconography and subject matter — that allows it to be classified into a certain school, style and period. The manuscript that appears to have most in common with the Anthology, both in choice and quantity of illustrations, in the Uppsala Nizami of 1439; overall they share 26 subjects, 11 for the Iskandar-Nama alone. This is perhaps unsurprising, since it is linked to the Anthology in other ways — almost exactly contemporary date of execution, remarkably similar style and iconography, (compare plate 10 — ‘Iskandar receives the Khaqan of Chin’ with the same subject in the Uppsala Nizami),47 and lack of a definite provenance, with suggestions of ‘southern provincial’and ‘sultanate’ applied to both. The question must now be asked: What, if anything, do the statistics presented in the two tables say about the artists and/or the patron of the Anthology? Firstly, the allo- cation of images throughout the Iskandar-Nama is not governed by a policy of placing the images at uniform intervals, seen for example in the Freer “small” Shah-Nama, which is ‘characterised by… a steady and orderly as opposed to random distribution of text and illustrated pages’.48 The artists of the Anthology, whilst maintaining a steady flow of illustrations, by no means placed them at regular points in the text — intervals in the Iskandar-Nama illustrations range from as many as 17 to as few as one folio apart, with fluctuations in between (the average interval is six folios apart). Thus the artists seem to have had relative freedom in their choice of scenes, in that they were not required to illustrate a particular episode on a specified page, in order to maintain a pre-ordained layout. Unfortunately, however, their choice of subject matter does not readily provide any clues — a wide selection of themes are represented, from a painting contest to an

44 See Adahl, op.cit. 45 See I. Stchoukine, “Origine indienne d’un manuscrit persan achevé en 844 A.H., Syria 46 (1969), pp.105-14, pls. IX-XII. 46 See I, Stchoukine, Les Peintures des Manuscrits de la Khamseh de Nizami au Topkapu Sarayi Muzesi d’Istanbul (Paris, 1977), pl. XVIb. 47 F.320v; See Adahl, op.cit., pl. 21. 48 M.S. Simpson, The Illustration of an Epic — the earliest Shah-Nama manuscripts (New York and London, 1979), p. 83. A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 81 encounter with mermaids, and the images have no exclusively military, kingly, romantic nor religious emphasis. The patron may have desired nothing more than a liberal smat- tering of decorative illustrations in his manuscript, in order to enhance its value and add to its appeal as a showpiece, as well as to give him visual pleasure. Even the ten subjects that are unique to this Anthology fail to provide any significant clues — four of them are interior scenes of Iskandar conversing with others, and three are exterior scenes of much the same thing. The artists have not, in any of these subjects, devised a novel way of illustrating an episode — there are no new compositional devices, and the majority make use of the ‘set-piece’ conventions: enthroned monarch with others, or Iskandar seated on the ground with others. As for those subjects omitted from the Anthology (see Appendix 2), many of these could have been substituted for illustrations already in the Anthology — for example, ‘Iskandar with Socrates’ could also illustrate ‘Iskandar with the hermit’ — both are wise ascetics. The ‘battle between Iskandar and Dara’, unspecific as it is, could have illustrated ‘the battle between Iskandar and the forces of Zind’, while ‘Iskandar enthroned with Nushaba’ could also be the illustration to ‘Iskandar with the Indian princess’, and ‘Iskandar on the throne of Faylukis’ could be substituted by ‘Iskandar on the Iranian throne’. Thus in order to decipher a motive behind the choice of illustrations in the Iskan- dar-Nama, it may be necessary to open the debate out and consider the illustrative cycle of the Anthology as more of a whole. In a fascinating passage from the Tadhkirat al- Shu’ara (‘Memorial of Poets’) completed in 1487, Mir Dawlatshah Samarqandi writes: ‘Prince Baysunghur preferred [Amir] Khusraw’s Khamsa to Nizami’s, while his late highness Ulughbeg Kuragan did not agree and was a proponent of Shaykh Nizami. Between these two learned princes there was on occasion heated debate over these [conflicting] claims, and they compared the two Khamsas line by line.’49 Although it is not known whether the Anthology was originally bound as one or two volumes, it is nevertheless evident that this erudite literary debate involving the two Kham- sas was a fashionable occupation in the Timurid capital Herat, under the cultured rule of Baysunghur. It is likely that such a trend would have percolated down to the provinces, where provincial rulers tried to emulate the activities and modes of the capital. The illustrations to the works of Amir Khusrau in volume II and Nizami in volume I may then be seen as complementary — perhaps highlighting differences and similarities in corresponding stories, or even providing links between the two versions of the same story. An example of this can be seen in the illustrations to the Haft Paikar of Nizami and the Hasht Bihisht (the ‘Eight Paradises’) of Amir Khusrau, both involving Bahram Gur’s encounters with beautiful princesses of various regions, in different coloured pavillions. In the Nizami cycle, these episodes are represented by six exterior scenes of almost identical (but differently coloured) domed pavillions, with, in the majority of them, the king approaching on horseback. In contrast, the Hasht Bihist cycle contains seven almost identical (but differently coloured) interior scenes, of Bahram Gur listening to the princess tell

49 For the Tadhkirat al-Shu’ara of Mir Dawlatshah Samarqandi, see A Century of Princes — Sources on Timurid History and Art selected and translated by W.M. Thackston (Cambridge, Mass. 1989), pp.11-63 (for this excerpt, see p.24). 82 CAROLINE SINGER her story. Thus if the Nizami and the Amir Khusrau illustrations are combined, they afford firstly a view of Bahram Gur approaching the pavillion, and then a view of him in its interior, with the princess — a continuous narrative that spans both volumes and both authors. An additional twist to this concept occurs on f.172, which shows Bahram Gur’s attendant waiting outside the blue pavillion, while the corresponding image in the Hasht Bihisht shows the viewer what the attendant cannot see — his master inside the building. It may well be the case, then, that a full understanding of the Iskandar-Nama cycle of Nizami cannot be obtained without also considering the illustrations to Amir Khus- rau’s A’inah i-Iskandari (‘Epic of Alexander’). Such a consideration has yet to be under- taken, and is outside the scope of this paper.

The Question of Sultanate Provenance

The fact that the Anthology was once in the possession of a sixteenth-century Indian ruler contributes to the controversy surrounding its provenance, and touches upon a debate that has only fairly recently gathered momentum. This is the existence of an early illustration in Sultanate India; a term applied to pre-Mughal Muslim rule in India from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. After Timur’s devastating sack of Delhi in 1398, the Sultanate became Timurid, and it is believed by some scholars that: ‘it is virtually certain that patronage [of book production] was included in the way of life of the Islamic Sultanate rulers of India in the earlier part of the fifteenth century’.50 Ettinghausen and I. Fraad,51 in which they identify, on stylistic grounds, a group of so- called “provincial” manuscripts, including this Anthology, that they believe to be Sul- tanate. B.W. Robinson has helpfully summarised this argument,52 and described one painter of the Anthology as “exuberantly Indian”.53 A group of four manuscripts has emerged that are repeatedly cited as being of Sul- tanate origin: the Anthology, the Shah-Nama of 1438 (B.L.Or.1403),54 the Khamsa of 1439 (Uppsala University), and the Khamsa of 1440 (Topkapi Saray Hazine 774). On the grounds of similarity of subject matter (see Appendix 1) it is indeed likely that the three Khamsas are connected. In addition, Hazine 774 and the Uppsala Nizami are very similar in style, and almost certainly belong to the same school, if not the same hand (compare the two versions of ‘Farhad carrying Shirin and her horse’, for example.55 However, Barbara Brend states that in her opinion the Khamsas and the Shah-Nama (B.L.Or.1403) are not products of the same workshop, ‘and possibly that they were not from the same

50 N. Titley, Persian Painting and its Influence on the Art of Turkey and India (London, 1983), p.∞164. 51 R. Ettinghausen and I. Fraad, “Sultanate Painting in Persian Style, Primarily from the First Half of the Fifteenth Century”, Golden Jubilee Volume of the Bharat Kala Bhavan (Benares, 1972), pp. 87-93. 52 B.W. Robinson, Persian Painting in the John Rylands Library, pp. 95-6. 53 Ibid., p. 96. 54 See B. Brend, “The British Library’s Shah-Nama of 1438 as a Sultanate Manuscript”, Facets of Indian Art, ed. R. Skelton et al. (London, 1986), pp. 87-93. 55 ’Farhad carrying Shirin and her horse’ (a) Uppsala Nizami, f.78v; See K. Adahl, pl. 6. (b) Hazine 774, f.69. See I. Stchoukine, Syria 46 (1969), fig. 6. A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 83 country’,56 and I am inclined to agree. This makes it hard to accept the premise that because the Shah-Nama is likely to be from India on the grounds of its stylistic oddity, use of certain pigments and apocryphal preface which describes Firdausi’s journey to India,57 the three Khamsas are, by association, also Indian. The Sultanate style has been described as a continuation of the Muzaffarid style of the late fourteenth-century Shiraz, although as Titley points out,58 this outdated style was also continued in Southern Provincial and so-called Sultanate works — ‘both having been modelled on Muzaffarid originals’.59 The Anthology has many features that link it to the Muzaffarid style of Shiraz — the small format of the miniatures, the disproportionate relationship of the somewhat stiff, naive figures to the architecture, the general sense of flatness of the compositions and the employment of the high horizon line, without a sense of real understanding of the compositional possibilities it affords. All these stylistic features were noted also by Ettinghausen and Fraad, who used them as criteria for an Indian origin,60 but which alone canot be adequate proof of that. It is important, therefore, to examine specific details when determining the provenance of this enigmatic work, and try to interpret any clues afforded by internal evidence. Reference has been made61 to plate 6 — ‘Iskandar at the Ka’ba’ noting that the obvious lack of topographical knowledge of the Holy Shrine on the part of the artist may point to an Indian origin. Indeed, compared to the depiction of Mecca in Iskandar Sultan’s Anthol- ogy of 1410-11,62 the lack of accuracy cannot be denied. It may be, however, that the artist was depicting, instead, the most holy place he knew — the masjid, which, in Timurid Fars, was often elaborately decorated in a manner remarkably similar to that of the Ka’ba in this manuscript.63 The suggestion that Iskandar’s pose — one knee on the ground and ‘hand to heart’64 — is more Hindu than Muslim, is unconvincing; Iskandar’s stance seem to accord fairly closely to Clavijo’s account of the deferential pose demanded by Timur: ‘As soon as we came in sight of his Highness we made him our reverence, bowing and putting the right knee to the ground and crossing our arms over the breast.’65 Although it is his left, not his right knee, and one hand grasps the ring of the Ka’ba, it seems unlikely that this pose is Hindu.

56 Brend, op.cit. p.87. 57 Ettinghausen and Fraad, op.cit., pp. 64-5. 58 N. Titley, “Shiraz and Isfahan — Persian miniatures of the 1370’s. Some unpublished manuscripts”, Oriental Art XX/1 (1974), pp. 52-60. 59 Titley, Persian Miniature Painting and its influence, p. 164. 60 Ettinghausen and Fraad, op.cit., p. 52. 61 Both in Ettinghausen and Fraad, op.cit., p.55 and in Brend, op.cit., p. 91. 62 ‘Majnun before the Ka’ba’, British Library, Add.27261, f.∞363; see E.J. Grube, “Timurid Art”, in “The Encyclopaedia of World Art XIV, pl.71. 63 See for example the portal decoration of the Friday Mosque of Varzana, 1443 (A.Hutt and L.Har- row, Iran 2 (London, 1978), p. 65, pl. 32. 64 Ettinghausen and Fraad, op.cit., p. 55. 65 Clavijo. Embassy to Tamerlane 1403-1406, translated by Guy Le Strange (London, 1928), 220. 84 CAROLINE SINGER

The analysis of plate 18 as being organised in ‘two registers’,66 which is compared with two Indian images,67 seems untenable. The organisation of this scene is no more on two registers than any of the other enthronement scenes in which the ruler sits on a double-stored throne — for example plate 1 — and furthermore, the story (of the Chinese slave-girl Fitna carrying a heavy ox up numerous steps) requires an element of height differentiation between planes. The intention and design underlying plate 18 and that of the Indian works cited seems to be unrelated. It is certainly true, however, that in f.6468 the artist’s depiction of the rock carvings at Taq-i Bustan carved by Farhad is completely inaccurate, and betrays a lack of knowledge of a most renowned monument of Western Iran. In other fifteenth-century depictions of the same scene, the artists have represented the carvings with greater accuracy.69 Brend’s discussion of the depiction of Indians in the 1438 Shah-Nama as having a brown skin, compared to the Iranian convention where “the darkest skin tone would probably have been rendered as… a slate colour”,70 places the Anthology in a Persian context, since, when Indians are portrayed, their faces are undoubtedly slate colour. An interesting point does arise, in that the Anthology is the only manuscript to illustrate Iskandar’s meeting with an Indian sage (f.277b), and in ‘Iskandar with the seven philosophers’ (f.271b), the slate-faced Indian is most emphatically placed at the front, larger than the others who are unceremoniously squashed in at the back. It has not been possible for me to compare the colours of these so-called ‘Sultanate’ manuscripts, since they are reproduced in black and white, although the description of the ‘subdued grey and greyish violet tones of the Uppsala Nizami’71 in no way accords with the jewel-like hues of the Anthology. However, one interesting feature is the frequency of a rich yellow colour, used primarily for backgrounds (for example f.101 vol. II) which may correspond to the ‘Indian Yellow’ or peori used in the 1438 Shah-Nama, which was purportedly formed from the urine of cows fed on mango leaves, and which created unusual brown stains on the pages of the manuscript.72 At present, it is not known whether the colour in the Anthology is this specifically Indian pigment; if it were, it would be an interesting piece of evidence for an Indian provenance. The yellow pigment is found most predominantly in volume II — the Amir Khusrau cycle, as is a purple colour that is unusual in Persian manuscripts of this time and is, according to B.W. Robinson, another colour associated with Sultanate India.73 An analysis based upon architecture has produced further material for this debate; Brend’s suggestion74 that the manuscript was produced in Bidar, the capital of the

66 Ettinghausen and Fraad, op.cit., p. 54. 67 Ibid., op.cit., figs.161 and 163. 68 This image is illustrated in Brend’s article. 69 For a discussion of this see P. Soucek, “Farhad and Taq-i Bustan: the growth of a legend”, Studies in Art and Literature of the Near East, pp. 27-52. 70 Brend, op.cit., p. 90. 71 Adahl, op.cit., p. 61. 72 A. Scott, “Laboratory notes — stains in silhouette on bound manuscripts”, British Museum Quar- terly II/3 (1932), pp. 94-97. 73 Robinson, Persian Paintings in the John Rylands Library, p. 115. He describes the colours purple and orange as ‘un-Persian’, and as indications of a Sultanate origin. 74 Brend, op.cit., p. 91. A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 85

Bahmani Sultanate in the Deccan is very interesting — there are striking similarities between architectural decoration found in Bidar, and details in illustrations to the Anthol- ogy. For example, the vase and leaf motifs in the two outer panels of the Ka’ba (plate 6) and the cross-shaped motifs on the inner panels, can be compared to the almost identical motifs on tile panels in the Divan-i ‘Amm in Bidar.75 In addition, the chevron brickwork found on plate 6 has parallels in the brickwork on the facade of the Madrasa of Mahmud Gawan in Bidar.76 Perhaps most striking is the almost identical position and representa- tion of the tiger and rising sun tile motif on the facade of the Royal Chamber at Bidar,77 to the lion and the sun in the illustration to the Haft Paikar (plate 29), showing Bahram Gur winning his crown from the clutches of two lions. (This was, of course, a standard Persian symbol). Brend mentions also the links between the ruler of Bidar, Ahmad Shah (1422-36) and a Shi’ite Shaykh from Kirman, an area in southern Iran that was an outpost of the Muzaffarid style of painting. However, it may be as well at this stage to consider Basil Gray’s argument against a Sultanate school,78 on the grounds that the well-established group of manuscripts of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, including the Ni’mat-Nama of c.1500 (India Office Library), and the Bustan of Sa’di in Delhi, both dedicated to Nasir al-Din Khalji (1500-10), do not seem to indicate a continuation of style with works such as this Anthol- ogy and the Uppsala Nizami. Given the traditionalism of Persian-style manuscript illustration, this break in continuity seems significant. Gray continues: ‘Why need we seek so remote an origin for these miniatures just because of some unusual features which have yet to be shown to be conclusively Indian?’79 Certain aspects of the Anthology’s illustrations seem to reinforce this opinion. The ‘cusped arch’ shape of the carving in Farhad at Mount Bisitun (f.64) for example, which Brend suggests is Indian in origin,80 and which, indeed, becomes a standard element of Mughal architecture, also has parallels in other Anthology illustrations — namely the cusped ogival throne headboards, (see plate 7), and the ‘cloud-collars’ worn by Iskandar and other figures in the Iskandar-Nama. The collars were worn by Timurid rulers in emu- lation of Chinese fashions, and were designed by artists — a sketch of one is reproduced in the catalogue Timur and the Princely Vision.81 The multiple tasks of artists employed in the princely ateliers is well documented, and is described for example in the Arzadasht: ‘Khwaja Abdul-Rahim is busy making designs for the binders, illuminators, tentmak- ers and tilemakers.’82

75 G. Yazdani, Bidar — Its History and Monuments (Oxford, 1947), pl. XXIX. 76 Ibid., pl.∞LII. 77 Ibid., pl.∞XXXVII. 78 Gray, “Complexities of Persian Painting”, Apollo 113 (1981), no∞232, pp. 410-2. 79 Ibid., p. 412. 80 Brend, op.cit., p. 91. 81 T.D. Lentz and G.D. Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision — Persian art and culture in the fifteenth century. Exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1989), cat.no.96, p. 194. 82 The Arzadasht, a progress report from the head of the Herati atelier to Baysunghur, is translated in Thackston, op.cit., pp.323-7. 86 CAROLINE SINGER

It would not be surprising if Artist 2 of the Anthology, being an illuminator, was also required to design accessories such as the cloud collar and throne headboards. Moreover, certain motifs in the Anthology are very similar to the decoration on monuments of a specifically Shirazi school of architecture of the early fifteenth century, noted for its extravagant use of decoration, as described by Golombek in her analysis of the shrine at Gazur Gah just outside Herat, built by architects from Shiraz in 1425.83 Finally, a detailed analysis of Shirazi manuscript illumination,84 describing the tripartite division of the cunwan, the four-column page layout with triangular thumb pieces and the intricate, dense surface ornament of the arabesques place this manuscript firmly in the Shirazi orbit, as opposed to the illumination in the Shah-Nama of 1438, described by Losty as “comparatively crude”, with an unequal cunwan and “broad straps of blue typical of later Indian illumination”. He continues: ‘The complete absence of the delicate curvilinear arabesques which are so typical of Iranian illumination under the Timurids… allows us perhaps to make distinctions between the type of illumination practised in India and Iran, the former being largely based on fourteenth-century models until the Mughal school.’85 It would be rash, therefore, to try and attach to this Anthology a specific regional attribu- tion while so little is known about the existence of a Sultanate school, and when there are elements within the illustrations that point to Southern Persia. The unresolved nature of this debate indicates the need for substantial further research into manuscripts such as the Anthology, which cannot yet be provenanced with certainty. The examination of a manuscript of the size, completeness and enigmatic origin of this one naturally raises more questions and problems than can possibly be solved in a paper of this length. An analysis of the remaining Khamsa images, and the whole of volume two illustrating Amir Khus- rau’s Khamsa, together with a detailed comparison between the actual text and its illustrations, would shed a great deal more light on its mysterious provenance, style and patron. However, there is one final point which, being made on the basis of reproductions alone, requires a good deal more work to substantiate, but which may prove to be fruit- ful. In an article in Apollo,86 B.W. Robinson gives a brief description of a Shah-Nama of 1436-7, which he ascribes to Shiraz, noting the inclusion of the 1426 Baysunghuri preface to the epic. He continues: ‘As might be expected when over 50 miniature paintings are involved, more than one artist was employed on them.’87 He identifies three separate artists on stylistic grounds who, contrary to the postulated division of labour of the Anthology’s artists, apparently worked on individual images.

83 L. Golombek, The Timurid Shrine at Gazur Gah. (Toronto, 1969), pp. 60-62. 84 Elaine J. Wright, The origins and development of the Shiraz style of illumination c.1365-mid fifteenth century, unpublished M.Phil. Thesis (Oxford, 1991). 85 “J.P. Losty, The Art of the Book in India (London, 1982), p. 58. 86 Robinson, “Persian Epic Illustration: a Book of Kings of 1436-37”, pp. 170-4 (10 plates, 4 in colour). 87 Ibid., p. 173. A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 87

Nevertheless, from the examination of the reproduction, a very convincing comparison can be made between the two manuscripts. Firstly the use of colour — bright jewel-like tones and lavish use of gold and lapis lazuli are common to both, and the salmon pink ground of f.54b, pl.XIV, ‘the battle between Barman and Qubad’, is exactly the same as in the battle scenes of the Anthology. The general flatness of both interior and exterior compositions in the Shah-Nama creates the same feeling of crowded airlessness as the Anthology, and the use of the barren space and high horizon is similar in both manuscripts. These all indicate a shared formal conception, an impression reinforced by an examination of specific details. Taking one image from the Shah-Nama — ‘the enthronement of Kay Khusrau’, f.141b, pl.∞XIII in the Apollo-article — it is possible to discern similarities with several images from the Sharaf-Nama. Plate 9 — ‘Iskandar at the throne of Kay Khusrau’ — for example, highlights the similarity of throne types, with their flat two-dimensional bands of colour, and with the same gathered and gilded drapery at the bottom. The seated position of enthroned rulers — Kay Khusrau in the Shah-Nama, and Iskandar — are also similar. Interior details match up, such as the small windows in the interior scenes — a comparison of pl.∞XIII in the Apollo-article with plate 10 (‘Iskandar and the Khaqan of Shin’), shows that both have the same latticework frames and blossom set against a gold background, plus similar carpet designs and repeat geometric wall patterns. Pictorial devices such as the figure framed in the doorway against a gold background (pl.∞XIII and plate 5) — ‘Iskandar with Roshanak and her mother’), and the heads peering over the top of the throne in plate 10, and in the Shah-Nama’s ‘Enthronement of Faridun’ (f.∞18a, pl.∞II in the Apollo-article), all suggest a connection between the two works. Moreover, details of costume, armour and weapons, horses and their caparisons, and the depiction of men at war are all remarkably similar — for example the warrior thrusting his spear in the centre of plate 3 (‘Iskandar versus Dara’), who is reversed in f.54b, the ‘battle between barman and Qubad’ in pl.∞XIV of the Apollo-article. The artists of the Shah-Nama have attempted a slightly more daring integration of image and text, but generally the illustrations seem to remain more or less square, with text above and below, in four columns, written in almost identical calligraphy to that of the Anthology. Robinson suggests that Painter C may have migrated to India, or that he was an Indian working in Shiraz, on account of the stiffness and uniform arrangement of the figures,88 which draws this manuscript into the Sultanate debate alongside the Anthology. All of the above is, of course, highly speculative, and requires a thorough examination of the Shah-Nama itself, which is currently in a private collection. However, if it was linked to the Anthology then it would make perfect sense as the “missing” volume of great poetry that the patron had begun to collect in his Anthology a year earlier. Since the dates of production overlap (1436 being common to both), it is even possible to posit an explanation for Iskandar’s leopard skin helmet in plate 3; if the same battle artist was working on both manuscripts at the same time, he might naturally become a little confused as to which warrior he was depicting in which scene, especially if he was not very familiar with the text and was not painting specific, accurate depictions of any one event.

88 Ibid., p.173. 88 CAROLINE SINGER

I would like to conclude with a quote from the above-mentioned article which, although describing the 1436-7 Shah-Nama, may just as effectively be applied to the Anthology: ‘Enough has been said to show that this manuscript is of very great interest from both the historical and artistic point of view. It… cannot, perhaps, be ranked as a ‘royal’ manuscript, but it is nevertheless of very high quality, complete, and in good condi- tion.’89 It remains to be seen whether a more substantial association between the two can be proved.

Appendix 1

A list of manuscripts corresponding to those in TABLE 1; that is, those containing scenes of the Iskandar-Nama that occur in the Anthology. Where possible references are given:

1. Khamsa, c.∞1380, Southern Provincial school Tehran University Library, No.∞5179. See N. Titley, ‘A fourteenth century Nizami Manuscript in Tehran’, Kunst des Orients VIII(1972), pp.∞120-5. 2. Iskandar-Nama, c.∞1400, Shiraz. British Library, Or.∞13529. See B.W. Robinson, ‘The earliest illustrated manuscript of Nizami?’, Oriental Art 4(1957), pp.∞96-103. 3. Anthology, c.∞1410-11, Shiraz. Gubelkian Foundation, Lisbon, L.A.161. See B. Gray, Persian Painting (Geneva,1971), pp.∞69-79. 4. Anthology, c.1410-11, Shiraz. British Library, Add.27261. See B. Gray, Persian Painting, pp.∞69-73. P. Soucek, Illustrated Manuscripts of Nizami’s Khamseh 1386-1482 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 1971), pp.∞261-3 and 283-306. 5. Anthology, 1411, Shiraz, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art,13.22.19. 6. Anthology, 1420, Shiraz. Berlin, Staatliche Museen, I.4628. See N. Titley, Persian Miniature Painting and its Influence on the Art of Turkey and India (London,1983), p.∞53, fig.21. B.Gray (ed.), The Art of the Book in Central Asia (London and Paris,1979), p.∞137, fig.78. 7. Khamsa, c.1410-20, Herat. Formerly in the Cartier Collection. See L. Binyon, J.V.S. Wilkinson and B. Gray, Persian Miniature Painting (Oxford,1933), Cat.no.42, pls.XXXII A and B, and pls.XXXIII A and B. 8. Khamsa, 1431, Herat. Hermitage Library, St. Petersburg VP 1000. See The Arts of Islam, ed. G. Michell and D. Jones (London,1976), pl.560. 9. Khamsa, 15th Century, Shiraz. Russian State Library. St. Petersburg, PNC 370. 10. Khamsa, 1435-6, Shiraz. British Library, Or.12856. See B. Gray, ‘A newly discovered Nizami of the Timurid School’, East and West N.S. XIV(1963), pp.∞220-3. 11. Anthology, 1435-6, Isfahan/Sultanate school. Chester Beatty Library, Pers.124.

89 Ibid.,p.173. A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 89

12. Khamsa, 1439, Southern Provincial/Sultanate school. Uppsala University Library, O.Vet 82. See K. Adahl, A Khamsa of Nizami of 1439 (Uppsala,1981). 13. Khamsa, 1440, Yazd. Royal Asiatic Society, London, Morley 246. See I. Stchoukine, Les Peintures des Manuscrits Timurides (Paris,1954), no.23, pp.∞44-5. 14. Khamsa, 1440, Sultanate school? Topkapi Saray, Istanbul, Hazine 774. See I. Stchoukine, ‘Origine indienne d’un manuscrit persan achevé en 844 A.H., Syria 46(1969), pp.∞105-14, Pls.IX-XII. 15. Khamsa, 1440, Yazd. Topkapi Saray, Istanbul, Hazine 779. See I. Stchoukine, Les peintures des manuscrits de la Khamseh de Nizami au Topkapu Sarayi Muzesi d’Istanbul, (Paris,1977), pl.IIIb. 16. Khamsa, 1442-4, Yazd. Keir Collection, Richmond, III,82-100. See I. Stchoukine, ‘Une Khamseh de Nizami illustré à Yazd entre 1442-44’, Arts Asiatiques XII(1965), pp.∞31-51. B.W. Robinson (ed.), Islamic Painting and the Arts of the Book (London,1976) colour plate 13, pls.25-30, pp.∞152-3. 17. Khamsa, 1444, Yazd. Topkapi Saray, Istanbul, Hazine 870. See I. Stchoukine, Les peintures des manuscrits de la Khamseh de Nizami au Topkapu Sarayi Muzesi d’Istanbul, pl.XVIb. 18. Khamsa, 1444-5, Yazd/Shiraz, John Rylands Library, Pers.Ms.36. See B.W. Robinson, Persian Paintings in the John Rylands Library, a descriptive catalogue (London,1980), pp.∞70-88. 19. Khamsa, 1445, Herat. Topkapi Saray, Istanbul,Hazine 781. 20. Khamsa, 1445, Herat. F. Cleveland Morgan Collection. See R. Ettinghausen and G.D. Guest, ‘The iconography of a Kashan Lustre Plate’, Ars Ori- entalis 4(1961), pp.∞25-60, fig.60. 21. Khamsa, 1446-7, Herat. Topkapi Saray, Istanbul, Hazine 786. See I. Stchoukine, ‘Sultan cAli al-Bayardi, un peinture iranien inconnu du XV siècle’, Syria 44(1967), pp.∞401-8, pls.XXI-XXIV. 22. Khamsa, 1446-7, Yazd. Topkapi Saray, Istanbul, Revan 866. See I. Stchoukine, ‘La peinture au Yazd au milieu du XV siècle’, Syria 40(1963), pp.∞139-44. 23. Khamsa, 1450, Shiraz, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art 13.228.3. See P. Soucek, ‘Nizami on Painters and Painting’, Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. R. Ettinghausen (New York,1972), p.∞9-21. 24. Khamsa, 15th century, Shiraz. Chester Beatty Library, Pers.141. See Arberry et al., The Chester Beatty Library. A Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts and Miniatures I (Dublin,1959), pp.∞73-5. 25. Khamsa, 1450, Shiraz. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Suppl.Pers 1112. 26. Khamsa, mid-fifteenth century, Yazd. Topkapi Saray, Istanbul, Hazine 753. See I. Stchoukine, ‘La Khamseh de Nizami, H.753 du Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi d’Istanbul, Syria 49(1972), pp.∞239-46, pls.VII-X. 27. Khamsa, 1450, Herat/Shiraz, Berlin State Library, Diez A Fol.7. 28. Khamsa, 1463-4, Isfahan? Chester Beatty Library, Pers.137. See Arberry et al., op.cit., pp.∞67-9. N. Titley, ‘Shiraz and Isfahan, Persian Miniatures of the 1470’s, some unpublished manuscripts’, Oriental Art XX/1(1974), pp.∞52-60, figs.12 and 13. 29. Khamsa, 1474, Isfahan. British Library, Or.2931. See N. Titley, ‘Shiraz and Isfahan’, figs.8 and 14. 90 CAROLINE SINGER

Appendix 2

A list of manuscripts corresponding to those in TABLE 2; that is, those containing scenes from the Iskandar-Nama that do not occur in the Anthology.

1. Khamsa, c.1380, Southern Provincial. Tehran University Library, no.5179. 2. Iskandar-Nama, c.1400, Shiraz. British Library, Or.13297. 3. Iskandar-Nama, c.1405, Southern Provincial. British Museum 1958-7-12025. 4. Anthology, c.1410-11, Shiraz. Gubelkian Foundation, L.A.161. 5. Anthology, c.1410-1, Shiraz. British Library, Add.27261. 6. Iskandar-Nama, 1418, Shiraz. Baku, Literary Museum of Nizami. 7. Khamsa, 1420, Herat. Formerly in the Cartier Collection. 8. Khamsa, 1431, Herat. Hermitage Library, St. Petersburg, VP 1000. 9. Iskandar-Nama, 1435, Herat. Tehran Majlis Library, no.2360. 10. Khamsa, 1435, Shiraz. British Library, Or.12856. 11. Khamsa, 1439, Sultanate/Provincial, Uppsala University Library, O.Vet.82, OM. 12. Khamsa, 1440, Sultanate? Topkapi Saray, Istanbul, Hazine 774. 13. Khamsa, 1440, Herat. Royal Asiatic Society, London, Morley 246. 14. Khamsa, fifteenth century, Yazd. Topkapi Saray, Istanbul, Hazine 753. 15. Khamsa, fifteenth century, Shiraz. Russian State Library, St. Petersburg, PNC370. 16. Khamsa, 1442, Yazd, Topkapi Saray, Istanbul, Revan 862. 17. Khamsa, 1444, Yazd, Topkapi Saray, Istanbul, Hazine 870. 18. Khamsa, 1445-6, Herat. Topkapi Saray, Istanbul, Hazine 781. 19. Khamsa, 1446, Herat. Topkapi Saray, Istanbul, Hazine 786. 20. Khamsa, 1450, Shiraz. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 13.228.3. 21. Khamsa, 1450, Shiraz. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Suppl.Pers.1112. 22. Khamsa, fifteenth century, Shiraz. Dublin, Chester Beatty Library, Pers.141. 23. Khamsa, 1461, Shiraz. Topkapi Saray, Istanbul, Hazine 773. 24. Khamsa, 1463, Isfahan. Dublin, Chester Beatty Library, Pers.137. 25. Khamsa, 1474, Isfahan. British Library, Or.2931. 26. Khamsa, 1475, Southern Provincial. New York, Metropolitian Museum of Art, 13.228.9.

Appendix 3

A list of those subjects that do not occur in the Anthology (corresponding to the horizontal axis of Table 2)

1. King Faylukis comes to Iskandar 2. Iskandar’s ambassador at the court of Zind 3. Battle between Iskandar and the forces of Zind 4. Iskandar creating the looking glass. 5. Dara’s ministers come before Iskandar. 6. Dara and his men in a council of war. 7. The death of Dara. 8. Iskandar destroying the fire temples. 9. The dragon attacks Iskandar’s troops. 10. Wedding of Iskandar and Roshanak A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 91

11. Iskandar and Roshanak in the wedding chamber 12. Iskandar seated on the throne of the Iranian Kings. 13. Iskandar, disguised as an ambassador, visits Nushaba. 14. Nushaba recognises Iskandar from his portrait. 15. Iskandar with the looking glass. 16. Nushaba entertains Iskandar. 17. Iskandar prepares gifts for Nushaba. 18. Nushaba and Iskandar in bed together. 19. Iskandar with the hermit. 20. Iskandar at the castle of Sarir. 21. Iskandar in the cave of Kay Khusrau. 22. Iskandar at the grave of Kay Khusrau. 23. Iskandar dictating a letter to King Kaid. 24. Iskandar’s ambassador visits King Kaid. 25. King Kaid refuses Iskandar’s gift. 26. Iskandar with the Indian princess. 27. Iskandar receives the Khaqan of Chin. 28. The Khaqan returns with the news of the arrival of Iskandar. 29. Iskandar meets with Davali. 30. The idol of the veiled woman raised by Iskandar. 31. The people of Kipchak next to the idol. 32. Iskandar meets Khizr in the Land of Darkness. 33. Khizr bathes in the Water of Life. 34. Iskandar listens to the shepherd’s story. 35. The story of the Mari alchemist. 36. Death of the seventieth wise man. 37. Iskandar listens to Plato’s story of the ring and the shepherd. 38. The shepherd finds the ring. 39. Iskandar on his sea journey. 92 CAROLINE SINGER Fol. 237 Fol. 305 Fol. Fol.303 Fol. 279 350 Fol. 465 Fol.315 Fol. 306 Fol.322 Fol. 304 Fol.293 Fol. 243 Fol.309 Fol. 384 Fol. 320 Fol.not Fol. 485 Fol.230 Fol. 273 Fol. 293 Fol. 304 Fol. Fol.310 Fol. 260 267bFol. Fol.316 266 Fol. Fol. 279 322(?) Fol. 342 Fol. Fol. 347 296 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.Fol. 22.263 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. Fol. 278 Fol. Fol. 276 Fol. 212 365 199Fol. 267v205 210 Fol. 220b Fol. Fol.223b 298rFol. Fol. 233 228b 232b Fol. 242b Fol. 243 Fol. 253 Fol. 257b Fol.259bFol. Fol.276b Fol. 365r Fol. Fol. 293 146 277b Fol. Fol.279b 369rFol. Fol. 287287b Fol. 342 Fol. 291 Fol. 292b Fol. 297b Fol. 299b known known 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.known 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. -214 known -249 of Chin (Disguised as an 31 240b 320v 250 partridges & her mother fire & DaraNushaba not 13throne ambassador). 432 17 213b 273r 225b 302v 237 Dara 15painters of rum & chin dog on the pool the Khaqan& the russiansNushaba to Davali water of life not 39-40 34sage 263 215philosophers 286angels (Dressed as holy men). 225garden 272 story of the idol mermaids bathingtalisman against Gog & Magog 248b 330v 258 mourned 244 324 not 32 286 253 91 not 484 366 281b 291b 384v 294b 2. Iskandar watching the 3. Battle between Iskandar Fol. Fol.6. Iskandar at the Ka}Ba 7. Iskandar with queen 8. Iskandar seated beside a 9. Iskandar at kay Khusrau’s Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. 1. Iskandar enthroned4. Iskandar with the dying 5. Fol. Iskandar with Roshanak Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. 10. Iskandar receives the Khaqan11. Contest between the 12. Mani has painted a dead Fol.13. Iskandar as the guest of 14. Battle between Iskandar 15. Iskandar Lassoing Kintal 16. Fol. Iskandar pledging Fol. Foll.17. Khizr & Ilyas at the 18. Iskandar with socrates 19. Iskandar with the Indian 20. Iskandar with the seven 21. Iskandar with the two 22. Fol. Iskandar in the enchanted Fol.23. Iskandar listening to the 24. Fol. Iskandar watching the 25. Iskandar with the copper Fol.26. Foll. Fol. Building of the barrier Fol.27. Iskandar lying ill 28. Fol. Fol. Iskandar’s bier being Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Table 1. A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 93 Fol. 307 Fol. 280 Fol. 358 Fol. 330 Fol. 341 Fol. 450 Fol. 63 Fol. 219 Fol.328v Fol. 344r Fol. 309 Fol. 270 Fol.253 Fol. 256 Fol. 279 Fol.269 Fol. 227 242 Fol. 20. 21. 22.Fol. 23.25 24. Fol. 25. Fol. 26. Fol. 26 Fol. 27. 28 28. 27 29.Fol. Fol. 30. 29230 Fol. 31. Fol. 32. 33. 34 34. Fol. 30 35. 36 36. 37. 38. 39. 37 Fol. 42 Fol. not known known Fol.385 Fol. 393 Fol. 244 Fol.225 Fol. 230 not known not known 236 246 215325 217 230270274 264 228199 246 192 235 294 not 209 218 216 notknown18 not known 2 5 6-7 10 11 12 14 16 20 24 9. 1. fol.8. fol. 2. Fol. Fol.3.4. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. 7. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. 5. 6. Fol. 10. 11. 12.13.14. 15. Fol.16.17.18. Fol. Fol. 19. Fol.20.21.22. Fol.23. Fol.24. Fol. 25. Fol. Fol. 26. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Fol. Table 2M.S. No. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. SUBJECTS 94 CAROLINE SINGER

Plate 1. Iskandar on the throne of his father (I, f. 199a).

Plate 2. Iskandar watches the outcome of a fight between two partridges (I, f. 205a). A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 95

Plate 3. The battle between the armies of Iskandar and Dara (I, ff. 213b-214a).

Plate 4. Iskandar supports the head of the dying Dara (I, f. 215a). 96 CAROLINE SINGER

Plate 5. Dara’s daughter Roshanak is brought by her mother to the tent of Iskandar (I, f. 220b).

Plate 6. Iskandar at the Ka}ba (I, f. 223b). A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 97

Plate 7. Iskandar and Queen Nushaba enthroned together (I, f. 225b).

Plate 8. Iskandar seated, conversing in front of a fire (I, 228b). 98 CAROLINE SINGER

Plate 9. Iskandar and Balinas (Apollonius) attempt to decypher the inscription of the Golden Cup of Khusrau (I, f. 232b).

Plate 10. Iskandar receives the Khaqan of Chin, who is disguised as an ambassador (I, f. 240b). A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 99

Plate 11. The painting contest between the artists of Rum and Chin (I, 242b).

Plate 12. Mani has painted a dead dog in the pool of water painted by the Chinese (I, f. 243a). 100 CAROLINE SINGER

Plate 13. Iskandar is entertained by the Khaqan of Chin (I, f. 244a).

Plate 14. The battle between Iskandar and the Rus (I, ff. 248b-249a). A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 101

Plate 15. Iskandar lassoes Kintal (I, f. 253a); 102 CAROLINE SINGER

Plate 16. Iskandar pledges the released Queen Nushaba to his general Dival (I, f. 257b).

Plate 17. Khizr and Ilyas have discovered the Water of Life, while Iskandar still searches for it (I, f. 259b). A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 103

Plate 18. Fitna carries the ox up the stairs (I, f. 155a).

Plate 19. Farhad kills himself at Mount Bisutun next to his sculpture (I, f. 64a). 104 CAROLINE SINGER

Plate 20. Bahram Gur fights two lions that guard the crown (I, f. 151b). A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 105

Plate 21. Frontispiece of Sharaf-Nama (I, f. 1b). 106 CAROLINE SINGER

Plate 22. Iskandar watches the mermaids bathing (I, f. 291b).

Plate 23. Iskandar on his sick-bed (I, f. 297b). A STUDY OF SHARAF-NAMA 107

Plate 24. Iskandar in the enchanted garden filled with trees bearing precious stones (I, f. 287b).