Manipulation of Modern Dealers of Oriental Arts in the Dispersed Manuscript of the Majmaʿ al-Tawarikh

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Advanced Studies of Art, University of Kashan

Abstract

The bibliophile character of the Timurid ruler Shahrukh (r. 1405–1447) and his patronage of historical, religious, poetical and scientific books in Herat are well known. He commissioned his court historiographer, Hafiz-i Abru (d. 1430) to compose a series of historical and geographical works. Hafiz-i Abru was also commanded to complete several fragmentary copies of the Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, which had been transcribed for Rashid al-Din (d. 1318) in the early fourteenth century. One of these Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh manuscripts is preserved in the Topkapi Palace Library with the inventory number of “Hazine 1653” and is in part an autograph of Hafiz-i Abru. Since the pre-Islamic part of Hazine 1653 was missing, Hafiz-i Abru replaced the missing part with the first volume of his own Majmaʿ al-Tawarikh. Some years later, a further manuscript was copied from Hazine 1653 and nowadays is known as the “dispersed manuscript.” The contents of these two manuscripts are almost identical and thus their pre-Islamic sections comprise the first volume of Hafiz-i Abru’s Majmaʿ al-tawarikh and their other sections consist of Rashid al-Din’s Jamiʿ al-tawarikh. These two manuscripts are the only surviving illustrated copies of the Majmaʿ al-tawarikh.
The Dispersed Manuscript is one of the eight surviving illustrated books produced for Shahrukh. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the manuscript was transferred to the West, and for the first time, as a whole was included in the International Exhibition of Persian Art in the Pennsylvania Museum in 1926. Evidence shows that immediately after the exhibition of 1926, the manuscript was divided into two fragments and found its way into collections of Emile Tabbagh in Paris and Parish Watson in New York. These two dealers of oriental art dismounted the manuscript and started to sell the illustrated leaves before 1928. The dispersal of the codex in more than fifty public and private collections around the world restricted the opportunity for its careful examination by scholars. The book once had 407 folios, of which one hundred fifty are illustrated. Presently, 238 unillustrated folios of this manuscript belong to the Art and History Trust Collection, and the illustrated leaves are widely dispersed. After seven years of research, 146 illustrated folios have been identified.
By means of comparison of the text and images of this codex with Hazine 1653, which was copied by Hafiz-i Abru, three distinct groups of painting can be discerned. The first is the established “historical style of Shahrukh,” but the second and the third styles posses several problems. Careful examination of the text and image shows that these paintings have been executed over the text, and as a result, at the location of these miniatures a considerable amount of the text is missing. Moreover, in most of the cases, these repetitious or stereotyped compositions bear no relation to the text. This paper, which surveys the history of the manuscript, shows that approximately half of the illustrated leaves of the dispersed manuscript are manipulations done by the greedy European dealers of oriental art in the early twentieth century.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Fine Arts: Visual Arts
Volume 25, Issue 3
January 2021
Pages 125-134

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