Shahnama Project : Shahnama

Firdausi

Shahnama Project

<p style='text-align: justify;'><p>Eighteenth-century Indian binding of claret-coloured leather with white medallions, pendants, corner pieces and border panels inlaid and embossed. Doublures with medallions and pendants painted in silver. Modern slip-case of scarlet morocco.Robinson reads the year of the colophon as 924 A.H., but I think there must be some doubt over this. 904 A.H. is also a possibility. Robinson, Persian paintings in the John Rylands Library, pp. 118-48, describes a good illuminated heading at the start of the preface, on f. 6v, and an excellent illuminated double title page on ff. 16v-17r, 'recalling the Commercial Turkman work of a generation earlier'. He also identifies the work of three separate artists in an earlier group, working perhaps a little later than the date of the text; a second group also contains the work of three painters, probably between 1580 and 1590. For more details, see ibid., pp. 119-20. Many of the earlier paintings were also repainted or retouched in India.</p><p>The manuscript illustrations contain a complete sequence of the single combats of the Davazdah Rukh, see Melville,'Serial killers'.</p></p>