Dissertation

Bal ami s tabari: an illustrated manuscript of bal ami s tarjama-yi tarikh-i tabari in the freer gallery of art, washington

Fitzherbert, Teresa

2001

Overview

This dissertation attempts to demonstrate that the Freer Gallery's illustrated copy of Bal'ami's tenth-century 'translation' of Tabari's Ta'rīkh al-rusul wa'l-mulūk (History of the prophets and the kings) was produced, circa 1300, in Iraq or the Jazira under Ilkhanid rule. 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-Islamic state in the years immediately following the Ilkhan Ghazan's official conversion in 694/1295. 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 Fars under Injuid patronage in the 1330s-1350s, to include an Arab cultural metier some thirty years earlier. It also 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. Furthermore, this manuscript shows how painting was already in the service of historiography by the turn of the thirteenth fourteenth centuries.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Museum studies