Shahnama Project : Shahnama

Firdausi

Shahnama Project

<p style='text-align: justify;'><p>Provenance: presented to the Bodleian by E.A. Reade Esq CB of Ipsen Court in 1868.</p><p>Binding – thick cardboard covers painted over on both sides in bright, crude geometrical patterns.</p><p>Paper – medium thickness, yellowish, Oriental. Worm eaten in places.</p><p>Illustrations are indicated with sparkly green fabric tassles. The illuminations are of good quality, lots of gold in double page sarlauh (10v-11r), one proper 'unvan (traditional shape, f. 1v) and two others indicating the beginning the beginning of a daftar (f. 219r/220r) – very unusual strip of geometric ornament around the upper part of the page. Folio 79r contains a chalipa of a very peculiar style.</p><p>For the colophon illustration we provided the last page of the manuscript, which is organized as a typical colophon but does not contain any information about its provenance.</p><p>Thick Kashmir ms (653 ff.), full copy, with prose introduction (1v-7v, incipit: sipas-u afarin mar khuday-ra...), table of kings (ff. 8r-9v). It seems to be a fairly expensive commercial production (very heavily illustrated – 114 mns, using gold and silver). However, the quality of the calligraphic and illustrative work is not high: lots of marginal glosses, which are additions of the missing parts and corrections; it is also noteworthy that the instructions to the scribe responsible for the rubrics - or the artist - have not always been trimmed from the margins.</p><p>Heavily interpolated, especially with the Barzunama. The manuscript seems also to be disturbed, especially in the Chapter on the Great War of Kay Khusrau.</p><p>The sarlauh is absolutely stunning, especially for such a ms. Very shiny gold. Typical product of Kashmir style; however, there were two hands, or two groups of paintings produced by two groups of painters. One is very Kashmir with very bright orange, pink and green, some more of very provincial Indian with male figures decorated with long moustaches. There is the obvious influence of the Safavid protograph with the figures of some unappropriately wandering youths in the foreground of a battle or an execution scene.</p></p>