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Nimrud, Kay Kavus, Alexander, Or Why the Angel Has the Fish1

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Nimrud, Kay Kavus, Alexander, Or Why the Angel Has the Fish1 Persica 23, 1-29. doi: 10.2143/PERS.23.0.2050507 © 2009-2010 by Persica. All rights reserved. KINGLY FLIGHT: NIMRUD, KAY KAVUS, ALEXANDER, OR WHY THE ANGEL HAS THE FISH1 Firuza Abdullaeva University of Oxford Darius sent Iskandar a ball and a polo stick to say that Iskandar was still a child and was not ready for a serious battle with him. Iskandar interpreted the ball as the Earth, and thanked Darius for giving him the sign that he would rule the world. Nizami, Iskandarnama2 It is sometimes difficult to get an adequate interpretation of a visual or literary image that has survived many centuries in different cultural traditions, inevitably being influenced by them. Sometimes the illustration of a text influences later versions. Sometimes the interpretation starts dominating the original text or its illustration. This paper will attempt to decipher the visual illustration of several versions of a story, an image that has gone through several cultural interpretations, and to explain its possible origins. The story taken as an example is a reflection of the phenomenon, which could be called the wandering iconography of wandering stories, whereby the literary images and their visual representation are borrowed, exchanged, influenced and emulated in different cultural traditions over the centuries, creating a unified image with many variations. This makes it difficult, or even impossible, to distinguish the sequence of such influences and emulations on the level of both the text and the image. 1 I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Mikhail Piotrovskiy, Olga Novoseltseva, Father Grazio Gianfreda, Matteo Compareti, Olga Vasilyeva, Olga Yastrebova, Muhammad Isa Waley, Robert Skelton, Adeela Qoreshi, Bilha Moor, Teresa Fitzherbert and many others for their help in providing the images for this article from the Hermitage museum, the Otranto Cathedral, the National Library of Russia, the London National Gallery, the Guimet museum, The Paul J. Getty museum, the Freer Gallery of Art, the Heidelberg University, the British Library, the Berlin State Library, and the Museum of Israel. My special thanks go to Charles Melville and Oleg Grabar for reading the draft of my article and making valuable suggestions. I am grateful to Christian Gruber for letting me have the electronic version of her yet unpublished book on the Mi{rajnama and Julia Rubanovich for sharing her ideas on the subject. 2 Nizami Ganjavi, Kulliyat, Tihran, 1378/1999, 2, pp. 980-2. 993239_PersicaXXIII.indd3239_PersicaXXIII.indd 1 99/08/10/08/10 111:191:19 2 F. ABDULLAEVA Quite often the absence of the text adds more confusion. A typical example of such a product of the melting pot of the multicultural literary and artistic milieu is the famous image of Bahram Gur and his slave girl, depicted not only in numerous manuscripts, but on many different artefacts. It is not always clear whose version of the story the artist is depicting (Firdawsi’s or Nizami’s), and so who is the girl (Azada or Fitna) accompanying the prince on his hunt.3 However, an even better example is the Innsbruck plate, with badly-written inscriptions in Arabic and Persian, depicting a king’s apotheosis, where it is not possible to say which king is ascending the sky: the Greek Alexander, the Semitic Nimrud or the Iranian Kay Kavus4. The tradition of imitation or rather emulation of the work of a predecessor in Islamic art caused the phenomenon that can be characterized as the exchange of imagery between the borrowed and the borrowing work and the mutual influence of their subject matter. Here ‘Islamic art’ is understood not only as visual (painting, mostly miniature book painting), but artistic creativity in general, including its imaginative aspect, i.e. literary work, which in most cases inspired artists to create their paintings and patrons to commission them. It is worth mentioning that in both systems, literature and painting, the tradition of emulation was adopted as the most appreciated. In comparison with the European attitude towards the allowed and prohibited in art, where the whole idea of plagiarism was articu- lated, criticized and condemned at an early stage, in the Muslim East the whole tradition of visual and imaginative art is based on 1) repeating a piece of work, adopted by society as exemplary and 2) surpassing it, demonstrating and proving the superiority of the new creation5. Its purpose is extremely clear: if one can produce something better than the work adopted in society as a masterpiece, it means that its author can be automatically considered as a new genius, superior to the well-known master who has been surpassed. In the history of art there are many examples of similar iconographic schemes being used to illustrate different folk and literary subjects. Sometimes the same compo- sitional models can be transferred from one cultural tradition into another6. The strongest example is the first illustrations of the Bible, where the subjects popular in Classical antiquity, Homer’s poems and Euripedes’ tragedies were chosen as the models for reli- gious illustrations7. 3 One of the paintings at the exhibition “Coffee House Painting" at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Tehran, 14 March-5 May 2010) uses the image of Bahram Gur's hunt to illustrate the Khayyam's ruba}i, featuring the famous king. 4 It has been assumed that the king ascending the sky is Alexander the Great, even if the artefact was produced in the Muslim world (S. Redford, How Islamic is it? The Innsbruck plate and its setting, in Muqarnas VII: An Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture, Oleg Grabar (ed.), Leiden, 1990, pp. 119-135). 5 About tazmin/tadhmin as a serious shortcoming in poetry and unacceptable plagiarism, see Shams-i Qays, Al-Mu{jam, ss. 166-173, especially the fragment from Anvari, which Shams-i Qays uses to warn about using someone else’s verses inappropriately: Dar in muqabila yak bayt-i {Azraqi beshnaw Na az tariq-i tanahhul ba vajh-i istidlal In relation to this listen to this bayt from {Azraqi Not plagiarized but brought as a witness… (ibid., 171). On husn-i tazmin (“beauty of imitation”) as a trope see J. Meisami, Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Poetry. Orient Pearls, New York, 2003, pp. 271-280. 6 Sh. Shukurov, Shahnama, Moscow, 1983, p. 37. 7 K. Weitzmann, Ancient book illumination, Cambridge, 1959. 993239_PersicaXXIII.indd3239_PersicaXXIII.indd 2 99/08/10/08/10 111:191:19 KINGLY FLIGHT 3 However, later in the Western tradition the process of direct copying was accepted as appropriate only for student work. In the case of Muslim art this stage is the obligatory start, the main aim of which is to demonstrate the brilliant education of a new comer: in literature a poet, working in the tadhmin/tazmin form (“insertion”, “quotation” > “imitation”; or nazira “example, pattern” > “following the example, imitating”, “imitation”, Persian javab – “answer”), uses not only the theme, style or metre of the emulated poem, but very often he would use a direct quotation from his predecessor, adding his own verses to it, naturally continuing the poem, developing the subject8. In painting an artist can be even more conservative, or maybe less imaginative: he uses for his own images already existing clichés and whole compositions, varying the palette, adding or omitting some apparently minor details. All the above applies mostly to the ‘mature period’ of Persian art, when a wide spectrum of iconographically-fixed scenes was adopted for several subjects to be depicted in the most popular books, like the Shahnama by Firdawsi or Khamsa by Nizami. However, such double emulation of literary images and their visual representation caused a great mixture (not to say diversity!) of depicted subjects and scenes, which in turn created the mentioned above phenomenon of the wandering iconography of wandering subjects. To illustrate this idea, a scene concerning Royal flight was chosen, in which three kings are flying to the sky, using a flying machine of similar construction. These three kings are Nimrud, Kay Kavus and Alexander the Great. Some of the images of this scene are furnished with some enigmatic accessories, which are absent in the text. This paper aims to solve this riddle. KAY KAVUS ASCENDING THE SKY (ACCORDING TO FIRDAWSI) We shall start with the story of the king Kay Kavus ascending the heavens in his flying machine, mentioned in the Shahnama by Firdawsi (ca. 940 - ca. 1030).9 The image of this king is reproduced in many different variants in numerous manuscripts all over the world. Some of the illustrations of this episode betray an astonishing discrepancy between the text and its illustration. Some of the paintings contain an angel and a fish, which are not mentioned by Firdawsi. This was the starting point of this detective investigation, trying to identify who they are, and what they are doing in the picture. This episode in the Shahnama is of special interest: it allows the author to describe the character of the king as not only an ideal legitimate ruler, good in his thoughts, words and deeds, patronized by farr (divine charisma), but also as a king with a very live, contradictory and human nature, revealing him as an adventurous and curious person, sometimes brave, tender, grateful, clever and just, sometimes stubborn, cruel and silly. 8 On one of the best examples of such work, Hafiz’s ghazal (incipit: Ala ya ayyuha-s-saqi…) see J. Meisami, “Life in Poetry: Hafiz’s first ghazal”, in F. Lewis and S. Sharma (eds.) The Necklace of the Pleiades, Iranian Studies Series, Amsterdam and West Lafayette, 2007, pp. 163-181. Cf. the ghazal by khomeini with the same incipit (Divan-i Imam, Tehran, 1378/1999, p.
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