SAFAVID SHIRAZ, CIRCA 1550

A similar copy of the Shahnama in the Museum for Turk ve Islam Musezi (TIEM 1984) is dated 1549 (illustrated in Lale Uluç, Turkoman Governors, Shiraz Artists and Ottoman Collectors: Sixteenth century Shiraz manuscripts, Istanbul 2006, figs.103-05, 110-11). Another, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, is dated 1552 (MS. Ouseley 369, illustrated in Robinson, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Persian Paintings in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1958, PL. XIII). The latter is particularly interesting, because, like ours, it displays the unusual practice of including an illuminated heading, the only one in the manuscript, for the section on the reign of Luhrasp. As in this painting, the heading bears a title in white thulth script, reading ketab-e lohrasp-nameh, “The Book of Luhrasp”. Why the reign of this relatively minor ruler should have been awarded this distinction in certain manuscripts of the period is not clear.