Timurid Signs of Sovereignty

Abstract

As rulers of Iran and Central Asia in the late 14th and 15 th centuries, the Timu ids drew upon diverse sources to establish their authority and legitimacy. They considered themselves heirs to the Chinghizid line, but they were also rulers of a Muslim polity, and several scholars, notably Manz (1988), Woods (1990) and Subtelny (1994; 1995), have addressed the question of how Timur and his descendants balanced Turco-Mongo lian and Islamic traditions to fit the evolving political situation. These scholars have exploited a variety of textual sources, not only the standard histories and chronicles by Timurid apologists, but also contradictory re ports by opponents of the regime as well as other types of written docu ments including official correspondence and genealogies. These scholars have drawn attention to the changing claims to sovereignty and to the im portance of the relative chronology of the written sources, as later writers, even within the same time period, cast or recast events to suit contempo rary needs or ideologies. This paper uses a relatively undervalued source visual evidence which complements (and sometimes cpntradicts) the written word, to show what symbols of sovereignty were used in the mid and late 15th century to support the Timurid line. Let us begin with an unusual single-page painting in the Art and His tory Trust Collection (Pit. VI, Fig. 1). The painting bears no date or sig nature, but on formal and stylistic grounds it can be assigned to Harat in the late 15th century. It is a small (18.5 x 10 cm) rectangle, from which the dome and roof of a pavilion project slightly above the upper right corner. Its irregular shape and composition resemble those in paintings illustrating fine manuscripts produced at the Timurid court in the late 15th century. Many comparisons might be drawn, but a good one is the Bathing Maidens observed by the Eavesdropping Master from the well known copy of Nizaml's Hamsah made for the Amir 'All FarsI Barlas in 900/1494-1495 and now in the British Museum (Ms. Or. 6810, fol.l90a; Stchoukine 1954, n. LXXXI and LXXXIV; Lentz & Lowry 1989, n. 140, color illustration on p. 275). Unlike many other paintings of similar for mat, however, the detached painting has no text nor even a blank space left for a few lines of text within the gold rulings. Rather, the detached paintings may have been the frontispiece to a manuscript. The irregular format resembles that in the right-hand page of the double frontispiece to the famous copy of the Sa'dfs Bustdn (Cairo, Dar al-kutub, Adab Farsi 908) prepared for the Timurid prince Sultan Husayn (Stchoukine n. LXXIX; Lentz & Lowry 1989, n. 146; color illustration on p. 261). Ac cording to the colophon, the manuscript was completed by the scribe Sultan 'All MashadI at Harat in Ragab 893/June 1488. The double fron