Timurid Prince Research Articles

Gathering up the Fragments of a Dismembered Timurid Masterpiece

Abstract: The Rasāyil, a sumptuous manuscript produced at the royal library of the Timurid prince Bāysunghur in Herat in 1427, contains seven rare treatises copied by the renowned calligrapher Shams al-Sulṭānī. This article discusses the manuscript’s literary content and artistic features and presents the intriguing discovery that the anthology, acquired by Bernard Berenson in 1910, is not the complete codex and indeed, bears signs of mutilation. It also identifies most of the lost components as extant and housed in three other collections. These discoveries enable a virtual reconstruction of the codex in the form produced for the prince.

The Issue of Succession in the Illustrated Shahnamehs of the Three Timurid Princes (Shahnamehs of Baysunghur, Ibrahim Sultan and Mohammad Juki)

The Issue of Succession in the Illustrated Shahnamehs of the Three Timurid Princes (Shahnamehs of Baysunghur, Ibrahim Sultan and Mohammad Juki)

The Role of the Hafiz-I Abru’s Written Heritage in the Historiography of the Temurids Period

Historical works written in Movarounnahr and Khorasan in the 14th-15th centuries occupy a special place in Eastern historiography in terms of their writing style and scope of the topic. Because they were the basis for the development of the field of historiography and the emergence of new directions in it. The development of the field of historiography is primarily due to the patronage of Amir Temur and the Timurid princes, as well as the merits of the great historians who lived in that time. To date, there are a number of studies on the history of Amir Temur and the political and cultural life of the Timurid period, in particular, on the works of historians of this period. However, little attention was paid to the role of the scientific heritage of historians who lived dyuring this period in the development of the field of historiography. This article analyzes the role of the scientific heritage of one of the famous historians and geographers of the Middle Ages, Hafiz-i Abru, in the historiography of the Timurid era. For this, the contribution of the historian to the development of the cultural life of the Timurid period, especially in the field of historiography, in connection with the history of this period, will be highlighted. The significance of the scientific heritage of Hafiz-i Abru in the study of the history of Amir Temur and the Timurid period is discussed. The similarities and differences of the historian with other historians of his time are analyzed.

A Palette for a Prince: The Colours in the Shahnamah for Muhammad Juki

AbstractThe Shahnamah (RAS 239) copied for the Timurid prince, Muhammad Juki (1402–1445) in Herat, has long been considered one of the finest surviving, illustrated Timurid manuscripts. It was presented to the RAS in 1834 by Lieutenant Colonel Doyle (1787–1848), but attracted little scholarly attention until Barbara Brend published her monograph in 2010. The manuscript contains 31 exquisite miniature paintings, two of which (fol. 430v and fol. 531r) were added later during the Mughal period (1526–1761). This article will examine the sumptuous, jewel-like colours employed to depict scenes from the epic and the metals, pigments, and dyes from which they were derived. Precious metals and organic colours made from plants such as indigo and lac extracted from female insects are examined in detail: the methods of their production and extraction, the techniques used for their application, their commercial value, and the prestige they afforded their patrons all contribute to an understanding of what constituted the miniature painters' palette in the Timurid period.

Social and educational-cultural environment in movarounnahr in XIV-XV centuries

In this article, the military policy carried out by the mongol khans in the movarunnahr region in the first and second quarter of the 14th century, the great services of amir temur in teaching peace in the country and its unification, as well as the fundamental reforms he carried out in the development of public administration, social and cultural-educational environment, councils, the facts about amir temur's diplomatic relations with other countries and the effective work of subsequent timurid princes for the destiny and development of the country are highlighted.

On the sponsorship activities of the temurian prince

The article analyzes the patronage of the Temurid princes in science, literature and art on the basis of historical sources. Works and works of art created on the initiative of Timurid princes are presented. It also examines the landscaping work carried out in the country under the auspices of the princes and analyzes the direct participation of princes in cultural life.It is recognized in various countries of the world that our great ancestor Sahibkiran Amir Temur and the Temurids made a worthy contribution to the development of world civilization and culture. Particularly noteworthy are the issues of direct participation and sponsorship of the Temurid princes in cultural life.

About the Attention of the Temurid Rulers to the Creation of Manufactured Works

In the cultural aura of the XV century, the Timurid princes, who were the rulers of that time, occupied a place in a number of historical and literary sources of both literary figures and literary personalities. An artistic manuscript in the epoch of Timurides, as well as the other genres of that period, developed on the basis of creative assimilation of the best traditions of masters who had worked in the previous centuries. It is emphasized that this manuscript is a kind of a rare example of calligraphy and artistic design of a Timurid book.

Formation of diplomatic relations between timurid dynasty and chinese empire

There are a lot of images reflecting diplomatic relations between Temur sultanate and Chinese Empire in sourced referring to Amir Temur's history. For example, in “Zafarname ” written by Nizomuddin Shomiy and Sharafuddin Ali Yazdiy and “Matlai sa'dayin va majmai bahrayin” written by Abdurazzak Samarkandiy the diplomatic relations between Mawarannahr and China in the reign period of Sahibkiran and Timurid princes, especially when Shahrukh was on the throne, were described authentic details. This article is focused on the events of diplomatic relations between these two countries on the basis of the above mentioned memoirs. Also, the terms of that period were especially paid much attention.

ALISHER NAVOI'S WORK "MEZON UL-AVZON" IN UZBEK RESEARCH IN DREAMS

“Mezon ul-avzon” was highly appreciated by his contemporariesand recommended as a guide for Timurid princes in the study of the science of aruz.This article examines the analysis of the work "Mezon ul-avzon" in Uzbek (Turkish)literature

Imperial Talismanic Love: Ibn Turka’s Debate of Feast and Fight (1426) as Philosophical Romance and Lettrist Mirror for Timurid Princes

Abstract This study presents and intellectual- and literary-historically contextualizes a remarkable but as yet unpublished treatise by Ibn Turka (d. 1432), foremost occult philosopher of Timurid Iran: the Munāẓara-yi bazm u razm. As its title indicates, this ornate Persian work, written in 1426 in Herat for the Timurid prince-calligrapher Bāysunghur (d. 1433), takes the form of a literary debate, a venerable Arabo-Persian genre that exploded in popularity in the post-Mongol period. Yet it triply transgresses the bounds of its genre, and doubly marries Arabic-Mamluk literary and imperial culture to Persian-Timurid. For here Ibn Turka recasts the munāẓara as philosophical romance and the philosophical romance as mirror for princes, imperializing the razm u bazm and sword vs. pen tropes within an expressly lettrist framework, making explicit the logic of the coincidentia oppositorum (majmaʿ al-aḍdād) long implicit in the genre in order to ideologically weaponize it. For the first time in the centuries-old Arabo-Persian munāẓara tradition, that is, wherein such debates were often rhetorically but never theoretically resolved, Ibn Turka marries multiple opposites in a manner clearly meant to be instructive to his Timurid royal patron: he is to perform the role of Emperor Love (sulṭān ʿishq), transcendent of all political-legal dualities, avatar of the divine names the Manifest (al-ẓāhir) and the Occult (al-bāṭin). This lettrist mirror for Timurid princes is thus not simply unprecedented in Persian or indeed Arabic literature, a typical expression of the ornate literary panache and genre-hybridizing proclivities of Mamluk-Timurid-Ottoman scientists of letters, and index of the burgeoning of Ibn ʿArabian-Būnian lettrism in late Mamluk Cairo; it also serves as key to Timurid universalist imperial ideology itself in its formative phase – and consciously epitomizes the principle of contradiction driving Islamicate civilization as a whole. To show the striking extent to which this munāẓara departs from precedent, I provide a brief overview of the sword vs. pen subset of that genre; I then examine our text’s specific political-philosophical and sociocultural contexts, with attention to Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s (d. 1274) Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī and Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī’s (d. 1502) Akhlāq-i Jalālī on the one hand – which seminal Persian mirrors for princes assert, crucially, the ontological-political primacy of love over justice – and the Ẓafarnāma of Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 1454), Ibn Turka’s student and friend, on the other. In the latter, much-imitated history Amir Temür (r. 1370‒1405) was definitively transformed, on the basis of astrological and lettrist proofs, into the supreme Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān); most notably, there Yazdī theorizes the Muslim world conqueror as historical manifestation of the coincidentia oppositorum – precisely the project of Ibn Turka in his Debate of Feast and Fight. But these two ideologues of Timurid universal imperialism and leading members of the New Brethren of Purity network only became such in Mamluk Cairo, where lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) was first sanctified, de-esotericized and adabized; I accordingly invoke the overtly occultist-neopythagoreanizing ethos specific to the Mamluk capital by the late 14th century, especially that propagated at the court of Barqūq (r. 1382‒1399). For it is this Cairene ethos, I argue, that is epitomized by our persophone lettrist’s munāẓara, which it effectively timuridizes. To demonstrate the robustness of this Mamluk-Timurid ideological-literary continuity, I situate the Munāẓara-yi bazm u razm within Ibn Turka’s own oeuvre and imperial ideological program, successively developed for the Timurid rulers Iskandar Sulṭān (r. 1409‒1414), Shāhrukh (r. 1409‒1447) and Ulugh Beg (r. 1409‒1449); marshal three contemporary instances of the sword vs. pen munāẓara, one Timurid and two Mamluk, by the theologian Sayyid Sharīf Jurjānī (d. 1413), the secretary-encyclopedist Aḥmad al-Qalqashandī (d. 1418) and the historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), respectively; and provide an abridged translation of Ibn Turka’s offering as basis for comparative analysis.

The Story of a Drunken Mughal: Islam, alcohol, and imperial ambition

This paper examines the commonly held notion that Islam forbids alcohol and therefore Muslims do not drink. This statement contains two very significant and commonly repeated assumptions: first, that Islam prohibits all forms of alcohol consumption and second, that Muslims have always adhered unwaveringly to the tenets of their religion. Alcohol prohibition under Islam has never been as clear-cut as is often portrayed, whereas the idea that all Muslims do not drink paints Muslims as exempt from the diversity of approaches to religious restrictions and regulations found in virtually all societies throughout human history. This paper moves beyond the rhetoric of religious prohibition to explore the role of alcohol in Timurid Central Asia during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, focusing specifically on the life and times of Babur, a Timurid prince turned South Asian empire builder. By exploring the contexts of alcohol consumption in Babur’s Central Asia, it is possible to not only understand and explain larger cultural and religious trends, but also to move beyond monolithic portrayals of Islam and Muslims throughout history.

An Iskandarnāma of Nizami Produced for Ibrahim Sultan

This paper introduces a copy of the Iskandarnāma of Nizami dated 1435 and dedicated to the Timurid prince Ibrahim Sultan, grandson of the eponymous founder of the Timurid dynasty. It discusses the various features of the manuscript together with comparable examples from the same period, and also focuses on Abu al-Fath Ibrahim Sultan ibn Shah Rukh and his role as both a military leader and a patron of the arts during his tenure as the governor of the provinces of Fars, Kirman, and Luristan (1414–35). Utilizing the visual data together with the historical context of the period, this essay interprets one of the illustrations of the Iskandarnāma, hoping to fulfill what David Summers called “the most basic task of art history,” which he says “is to explain why works of art look the way they look.” The addition of this Iskandarnāma manuscript to the surviving corpus of works that can be connected to Ibrahim Sultan will provide a further insight into the important patronage of this Timurid prince.

Sufi orthopraxis: visual language and verbal imagery in medieval Afghanistan

By the late fifteenth century, the remarkable rise in popularity of mysticism following the Mongolian invasions had penetrated literary manuscripts being commissioned for illustration in the eastern Islamic world. The article focuses on the literary and visual cultures of Sufism during this period, emphasizing the intersection of the verbal imagery of poetic description and the visual language of pictorial representation in these illustrated manuscripts. It traces the advent of an emphatic style of allegorical depiction in Persian painting, which emerged through a contemporary discourse of Islamic mysticism and an intertextual system of signification uniting literary discourse and esoteric religious practice. Initiated at the court of the last Timurid prince in Afghanistan, the phenomenon continued to affect both literary and visual production in Iran, central Asia, Mughal India, and the Ottoman territories over a period of centuries.

Political Ideas & Institutions of Mughal State

The Mughal Period on a clearer basis extended from 1526-1540 and 1555-1712 (due to the interregnum of Sher Shah Suri 1540-1555). The Mughal Empire was an Islamic imperial power which ruled most of the India subcontinent from the early 16th to the mid-19th centuries. The Mughal Emperors were of Turko-Mongol descent, but developed a highly sophisticated mixed Persian culture. At the height of its power, around 1700, it controlled most of the Subcontinent - extending from present-day Bangladesh to Kashmir and part of what is now Afghanistan. To be mentioned in a more precised manner, the rule of Mughal Empire stretched from Mughal period, an exemplary period in its own particular ways. This period is sometimes considered to be the blue print of modern India. In the fifteenth century when the political condition of India had deteriorated and there was no powerful kingdom in the northern India. The last ruling dynasty was of the Lodhis with a weekend position. Such a situation invited invasions from the northwestern borders of India. Babur’s invasion and subsiquent were indeed its result. Babur invaded India in 1526, i.e. Battle of Panipat, in which Babur defeated Ibrahim Lodhi and thus established his empire over India. Expansion and annexation of India by Mughals and diplomatic absorption of the Rajputs, economic policies, religious policies and socio-economic policies, the sovereign, his power and duties are worth mentioning. Punjab to Bengal including Jaunpur and Bihar in the 16 century. Included Kabul in the north-west and Kashmir in the north, Sindh, Multan and Gujrat in the west, Malwa and Benar in the south and Orrissa and Bengal in the east at the time of Akbar’s death. It stretched from Kabul, Kandhar and Peshawar in the north and Kaveri in the south by the end of seventeenth century. Its population at that time has been estimated as between 110 and 130 million, over a territory of over 4 million km² (1.5 million mi²). The foundation for the Baburids empire (Mughal Period) was established around the early 1500s by the Timurid prince Babur, when he took control of the Doab and eastern regions of Khorasan controlling the fertile Sindh region and the lower valley of the Indus River. In 1526, when Babur defeated the last of the Delhi Sultans, Ibrahim Shah Lodhi, at the First Battle of Panipat, Babur was invited to invade the Delhi Sultanate by Rana Sanga, who thought that after defeating Ibrahim Lodhi, Babur would go back and he would become the Ruler of Delhi. To secure his newly founded kingdom, Babur then had to face the Rajput confederacy led by Rana Sanga of Chittor, at the battle of Kanwah, 1527. These early military successes of the Turks, achieved by an army much smaller than its opponents, have been attributed to their cohesion, mobility. Every ruler contributed in his own particular way, which hold a great importance in adding glitters to the shining empire. Beginning from the very first ruler everyone did his best or tried do his best.

Power, Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran * By BEATRICE FORBES MANZ

Beatrice Forbes Manz’s Power, Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran makes an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of the complex political and religious landscape during the reign of Timur’s son and successor, Shahrukh (r. 1409–47). Manz chooses to focus on the reign of Shahrukh in order to answer two central questions, the first, ‘how a government retained power and fulfilled its function without a monopoly of force’, and the second, ‘how society maintained its cohesion’ (p. 6). These questions are difficult to answer even when governments and political institutions are strong and centralized, but applying them to the Timurid period poses particular challenges which Manz addresses skilfully. Chapter 1 provides a complex yet necessary overview of the political situation after the death of Timur. Far from a simple and smooth succession, Shahrukh’s consolidation of power over his father’s kingdom required successful military campaigns, good diplomatic skills, and the ability to rule effectively. Apparently, Shahrukh possessed all of these. After addressing all internal threats to his rule, which largely came from various family members including nephews and various other Timurid princes, Shahrukh had to deal with external challenges, most notably that posed by the Qaraqoyunlu in the West. Manz explains how Shahrukh accomplished all of this, particularly through maintaining the loyalty of Turco-Mongol military leaders. This loyalty receded during the last ten years of Shahrukh’s rule, as the inexperienced descendants of that initial group of loyal commanders took over their fathers’ positions. This ultimately led to the breakdown of Shahrukh’s rule.

Exploring a Neglected Masterpiece: The Gulistan Shahnama of Baysunghur

The paper begins by summarizing the basic information about the Shahnama produced in Herat for the Timurid prince Baysunghur, son of Shah Rukh, in 833/1430, one of the three iconic illustrated versions of Firdausi's poem in Persian painting. It then considers in turn the originality of this manuscript, its iconographic program and the intervals at which the images are placed within the text. The themes of enthronement and combat or battle are explored at length, as are the page layout, the role of illumination and the technique and execution of the paintings.

IS THE BEARDED MAN DROWNING? PICTURING THE FIGURATIVE IN A LATE-FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTING FROM HERAT

In the study of Persian miniature painting and its development through the fifteenth century, it is dif ficult to overestimate the importance of the illustra tions in the 1487 manuscript of the Mantiq al-tayr in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.1 Three of the illustrations in this manuscript are among the earliest specimens of the style of painting ush ered in by the artists at the famed atelier of Sultan Husayn Bayqara, the last Timurid prince in Herat.2 Over the years, aside from the usual debates about attribution, these enigmatic paintings have enticed art historians' curiosity and generated a number of largely inconclusive interpretations. general tendency to explain their content symbolically is ostensibly due to the designation of the Mantiq al-tayr as mystical poetry. Translated into English under such titles as Speech of the Birds or Conference of the Birds, the Mantiq al-tayr was written by Farid al-Din cAttar in rhyming couplets some three centuries before this manuscript was copied and illustrated.3 'Attar's twelfth century work was indeed an explicit contribution to the discourse of Sufism, which like its counterparts in Jewish Kabala and medieval Christian mysticism, sought a direct, individual experience of God. Advo cating the pursuit of the real?as opposed to the phe nomenal?truth, 'Attar's work is an allegorical tale presenting the various stages that a seeker of truth must go through in his or her quest for unity with the divine. paintings in the Metropolitan Museum manuscript have for the most part been understood as literal depictions of events from a handful of 'Attar's numerous parables, which elaborate the importance of these stages on the path to Sufism. Of the eight illustrations in the Metropolitan Museum manuscript, the first four are early seventeenth-cen tury additions. Of the four original illustrations, one does not display the characteristics that distinguish the other three paintings as early examples of the new style. Rather, this fourth painting, The Beggar before the King, has been characterized as depict ing a scene, which has been an integral part of the art of Iran from the Sasanid dynasty onward and appears in all schools of all periods of Persian miniature painting.4 My concern here is with The Man Drowning,5 one of the other three fif teenth-century illustrations, which are stylistically sim ilar enough to one another to be attributed to the same artist or group of artists. According to Priscilla Soucek, the advice given to students of calligraphy by Qazi Ahmad in the sixteenth century reveals the conservatism of artistic education in Iran, which jus tified two basic mechanisms of continuity in manu script illustration: literal reproduction and selective adaptation.6 Taking into account this tradition-bound artistic practice, I have assumed the content of the Bearded Man Drowning, and, except for the court scene, of all the paintings original to the manuscript, to have been provided by 'Attar's text. Nevertheless, although all three adhere to the convention of depict ing the events of the accompanying text, half of each of these three paintings contains images that do not appear to bear any direct link to that text?at least not on the literal level.

Early illustrated manuscripts of Kashifi´s Akhla¯q-i Muḥ sinı¯

Of the Many Recorded Manuscripts of Husayn Vaᶜiz-i Kashifi's Treatise on ethics, Akhlāq-i Muḥinī, only six were planned to have illustrations to the text. The manuscript bearing what is ostensibly the earliest date (900/1494-95), was acquired by the Royal Ontario Museum in 1997. It opens with a shamsah, inscribed with a dedication to the Timurid prince Abu’l-Muhsin, and containing the date 900 in numerals (fig. 1). On the last folio, a quatrain relating to the year of composition of the treatise contains a chronogram as well as the date 900 in numerals. The abjad date can, however, be read either as “900” or “907,” and Maria Subtelny has demonstrated convincingly that the latter date must be the correct one, as the text contains a reference to the reconciliation of Abu’l-Muhsin and his father Sultan-Husayn, which took place around 906/1500. Therefore, the work could not have been composed in 900 A.H., and, consequently, the attribution of the Toronto manuscript to this date is false.

Timurid Signs of Sovereignty

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