"Bal'ami's Tabari": an illustrated manuscript of Bal'ami's Tarjama-yi Tarikh-i Tarbari in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington (F59.16,47.19 and 30.21)

Abstract

This dissertation attempts to demonstrate that the Freer Gallery's illustrated copy of Bal'ami's tenth-century 'translation' of Tabari's Ta'nkh al-rus ul wa'l-muluk (History of the prophets and the kings) was produced in Iraq or the Jazira under Ilkhanid rule c. 1300. It will be argued that although the quality of the paintings indicates provincial rather than metropolitan production, the heavily edited redaction of the text and choice of illustrations strongly suggest it was designed for teaching the young, or recent converts to Islam, destined for high government or military office. The manuscript as a whole may be seen as focusing on lessons and parallels of particular relevance to the nascent Mongol-Islarnic state in the years immediately following the Ilkhan Ghazan's official conversion in 69411295.

If correct, the Freer Bal'ami broadens our understanding of fourteenth-century Persian painting in general, and offers insights into the still ill-defined history of the illustrated Persian book between the fall of Baghdad in 656/1258 and the reign of Uljaytu (r- 703-717/1304-1317)- It extends the currency of the distinctive red and ochre palette, generally associated with painting in Fan under Injuid patronage in the 1330s-I350s, to include an Arab cultural metier some thirty years earlier. More significantly, it provides a provincial example of an extensively illustrated history in advance of the magnificent metropolitan productions of Rashid al-Din's scriptorium. at Tabriz in the second decade of the fourteenth century. It also shows how painting was already in the service of historiography, possibly for a particular governor of Mosul, at the turn of the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries.