Why was the Shahnama Illustrated?

Author(s): Oleg Grabar

Source: Iranian Studies , FEBRUARY 2010, Vol. 43, No. 1, Special Issue: Millennium Of
The Shahnama Of Firdausi (FEBRUARY 2010), pp. 91-96
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of International Society of Iranian
Studies

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 Iranian Studies, volume 43, number 1, February 2010

Oleg Grabar

Why was the Shahnama Illustrated?

A long-standing pu^le in our knowledge of the culture surrounding the Shahnama lies
in the fact that its illustrations , which became so well known, postdate the appearance
of the text by nearly 300 years. There are several ways of explaining this anomaly.
All contribute something to our understanding of Iranian culture, but none is entirely
satisfactory. This essay suggests that a solution may lie in a better understanding of the
social and ideological consequences of Mongol rule and /or in the peculiarities of urban
culture at the time.

The remarks which follow are an attempt to set in writing a problem which has
puzzled me, in many different ways, for the more than fifty years of my off-and-
on involvement with illustrations of the Shahnama. These remarks are not really
a contribution to scholarship, as they do not provide answers to the questions
they pose and as I no longer have practical or intellectual access to all the new
information necessary to answer these questions. The ways in which I present
them may be useful for the work of new generations of scholars, as they
reflect a meditation that began in 1952 in a seminar on Buchwesen led by my
teacher Kurt Weitzman, a major figure in his time who is not as prized now as
he was by a beginner graduate student.
It is generally agreed that Firdausi's great epic, the Shahnama^ is the most
frequently illustrated text in Persian art. The great Mongol Shahnama from
c. 1330-36 and the extraordinary Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp from the middle
of the sixteenth century are towering masterpieces in the rich history of
Persian painting, but they are only two out of several hundred illustrated manu-
scripts of the great epic. It is also likely that the Shahnama inspired many mural

Oleg Grabar is Aga Khan Professor emeritus of Islamic Art at Harvard University and Professor
emeritus in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His
latest book is called Images in the Lands of Islam (French and English editions, Réunion des
Musées Nationaux, Paris, 2009).

^or the Mongol Shahnama, see Oleg Grabar and Sheila Blair, Epic Images and Contemporary
History (Chicago, 1980); the many subsequent studies by Abolala Soudavar, Robert Hillenbrand
and Sheila Blair, among many others, have been reviewed by Sheila Blair as "Rewriting the
History of the Great Mongol Shahnama" in Shahnama, the Visual Language of the Persian Book of
Kings, ed. by Robert Hillenbrand (Aldershot, 2004), 35-50. For the Shah Tahmasp manuscript,
the basic presentation of the images and text by Martin Dickson and S. Cary Welch, The Hough ton

ISSN 0021-0862 print/ISSN 1475-4819 online/10/010091-6 ¡^ Routledqe

©2010 The International Society for Iranian Studies 1^ Tay|or Routledqe &Francif Group
DOI 10.1080/00210860903451238

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92 Grabar

paintings, but these have not been well preserved. More is known about scenes
allegedly inspired by Firdausi's epic that are found on Persian ceramics of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but these also pose all sorts of problems
about their exact association with the book.
Much has been written over the past fifty years on the paintings in manuscripts
in all medieval arts, Christian or Muslim. At times, they have been considered
primarily as specific illustrations of precise topics found in the text surrounding
them, as translations into visual form of written accounts. They were often attri-
buted to the great painters of Persian history and attempts were made to relate
them to events of the time when the manuscripts were transcribed, as historians
or critics understood them as heroic transformations of contemporary private or
public events. The trouble with such interpretations, which have dominated
much of the recent writing about the Great Mongol Shahnama in particular, is
that they can rarely be demonstrated on visual terms alone and they leave the
reader or the interpreter with the depressing feeling of being almost there in
understanding an image but unable to really justify a possibly accurate instinctive
decision. But then, it can be argued, it is precisely in its power of inventive inti-
mation without secure foundations that we recognize a work of art from a mere
illustration.
How then to understand or to handle the mass of "mere illustrations," the
infantry of visual culture, whose examples fill so many pages of manuscripts?
Two approaches exist. One is centered on the existence of images, of paintings,
and begins with individual illustrations, which are described and then defined in
formulating a relationship of the image to the text. All sorts of ways have been
developed in scholarship for the evaluation of the degree of text-imposed pre-
cision found in any one image. It has even been suggested that the frequently bril-
liant color descriptions of the text may well have inspired some of the paintings
and, above and beyond a direct text-image relationship, there may have been a
more pervasive impact of the text as a whole on the structure of images.4 Then,
the treatment of images in any one manuscript can be compared with that of
other codices and lead to comparative iconographie studies well developed in

Shahnameh, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1981) remains unsurpassed and there is, to my knowledge, no
new systematic study of these illustrations. For general introductions to almost any aspect of Shah-
nama's illustrations, one must look at several other contributions in the volume edited by Hillen-
brand, which contains, among other things, a very complete bibliographical and methodological
introduction prepared by M. Shreve Simpson, "Shahnama as Text and Shahnama as Image: A
Brief Overview of Recent Studies, 1975-2000," 9-23.
2Both texts of the epic found on objects and illustrations of epics have led to complex arguments,
which have not yet been resolved. See Sharif Shukurov, "Shah-name" Firdousi i rannyaya illustrativ-
naya tradii siy a (Moscow, 1983).
See especially, Abolola Soudavar, "The Saga of Abu-Sa'id Bahãdor Khan. The A.bu-Sa'idnãmé"
in The Court of the ll-khans, 1290- 1340. Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, XII, ed. by Julian Raby and
Teresa Fitzherbert (Oxford, 1996), 98-215.
This is one of the many original points made by Sharif Shukurov in his "Shah-name" Firdousi,
for instance pp. 109 and ff.

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 Why was the Shahnama Illustrated? 93

Christian art for the illustration of the Bible and of liturgical books. However, the
absence in Islamic culture of formal institutions empowered, like the Church, to
maintain standard manners of illustration and standard ways of using, making,
and understanding images, has allowed for a visual anarchy which may have
its attractive aesthetic side but which complicates the establishment of formal
interpretations and which so often makes most images look like exceptions.
The second approach does not begin with individual images, but with a
whole codex. In this approach, illustration is but one of the components in
the making of a book. It depends on the size chosen for the volume, the
process of writing in it, the ways of adorning its pages, the number of technical
specialists for colors or page design involved in its completion, the later uses of
manuscripts that were often not completed at one sitting, and so on. The image in
this approach is no longer the sole concern of the investigator, because each
image or at least each manuscript is the result of a series of decisions made
for economic or ideological, official or private, decorative or pedagogical,
reasons. The image or the manuscript become historical documents, not agents
of aesthetic taste.
Both these approaches - a historico-cultural one or a codicological one - will
continue to be used, as well they should, and ways exist to relate them to each
other. They could eventually help in answering a more general question: why
was the Shahnama illustrated? The question may, at first glance, be considered
as absurd, as the lively adventures of Firdausi's epic lend themselves easily to
illustrations, even invite them. But then why did nearly three centuries elapse
between the time of the book's writing, c. 1000, and the first series of illustrated
manuscripts, c. 1300? By contrast, it is rather remarkable that the Vis u Ramin, an
epic of love written more or less at the same time as the Shahnama, which also
lends itself to visual translations and commentaries, has not been illustrated to
this day.5 The text of course hardly enjoyed the same popularity as the Shahnama,
and there are apparently no manuscripts surviving from before the sixteenth
century. This suggests that there was something special or unique about the
need for images of the Shahnama, something tied to a time, the end of the
thirteenth century, and/or to a subject, the heroic cycle, and something that
was not shared with other texts.
Before elaborating on the times and the subject, I would like to sketch one
hypothesis which may not be as popular as it used to be, but which must,
however, always be kept in reserve as we think about our subject.
It is the hypothesis of silence with occasional mute sounds. It is indeed possible
to propose that there were illustrated Shahnama manuscripts as early as the
eleventh century, even though no early manuscript of the text, with or

5Fakhraddin Gorgani, Vis and Ramin, trans, by Dick Davis (Washington, 2007), a fascinating
poem long and unexpectedly unrecognized in writing on Persian art. We may note, however, a
modern illustrated Russian translation (Petrozavodsk, 1996) which concentrates on the erotic
aspects of the story.

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94 Grabar

without images, has been preserved. The hypothesis would be based on the logic
of necessarily existing books with the text and on the existence of an Iranian
heroic painting in pre-Islamic Soghdia,7 and on the more hypothetical assump-
tion that illustrated manuscripts of epic stories existed as a parallel to the
mural paintings. These manuscripts would have resembled the Manichean illus-
trated books, apparently the earliest remaining examples of the genre within a
broadly conceived Iranian world, and which seem to have been common in
the eighth century.8 It was even possible to propose that the Soghdian tradition
of illustrated books would have been preserved in Buddhist and Chinese Central
Asia during the first centuries of Islamic rule and would have reappeared in
Khurasan or Transoxiana with Samanid culture and a revival of traditional
Iranian themes, as, for instance, with the various accounts of early illustrat
codices of the Kalila and Dimna stories. Theoretically all this is possibl
since Persian epic poetry was used in the decoration of Ghaznavid palace
and elaborate representational mural paintings are mentioned in various accou
of the life of sultan Mascud. Books are less likely to have affected the imagery
eleventh and twelfth century ceramics,11 but the presence there of a rich icon
graphy implies an acceptance of images in society. However, even though ne
archaeological, perhaps more likely than textual, discoveries may well br
additional documents to strengthen this hypothesis, on the whole it is n
very likely one for two reasons. One is that the prestige and the practic
epic texts seems to have been greater among Turkic rulers than more fu
Iranian ones like the Samanids and their successors and almost no evidence
seems to exist of such interests in whatever we know of the culture of western
and southern Iran. It is, in other words, difficult to identify a milieu other
than that of expatriate Soghdians in Buddhist lands that could have favored
epic traditions and more specifically the Shahnama before the end of the thirteenth
century.
The other reason is that there is relatively little evidence in the paintings that
appear around 1300 for a thematic past that would have affected the new images.
Although the point of constant visual invention may not be considered as
demonstrated in full scholarly light, there is a freshness and novelty of invention

The question is also discussed by Basil Gray, "Shãhnãma Illustration from Firdausï to the
Mongol Invasions," in The Art of the Saljüqs in Iran and Anatolia, ed. by Robert Hillenbrand
(Costa Mesa, 1994), 96-102.
Boris Marshak, Legends, Tales, and Fables in the Art of Sogdiana (New York, 2002) and his chapter
in Eleanor Sims, Peerless Images, Persian Painting and its Sources (London, 2002), 7-19.
Zsuzsana Gulasci, Medieval Manichean Book Art (Leiden, 2005).
9D. S. Rice, "The Oldest Arabic Manuscript," Bull. School oj 'Oriental } <& African Studies, 22 (1959):
207-220; O. Grabar, "Notes on the Iconography of the 'Demotte' Shãh-nãma," in Paintings from
Islamic Lands, ed. by R. Pinder- Wilson (Oxford, 1969), 32-47, reprinted in O. Grabar, Constructing
the Study of Islamic Art, vol. II (Ashgate, 2004).
Alessio Bombaci, Kufic Inscriptions in Persian at Ghavni (Rome, 1966).
M. S. Simpson, "The Narrative Structure of a Medieval Iranian Beaker," Ars Orientalis, 12
(1981): 15-24.

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 Why was the Shahnama Illustrated? 95

in the illustrations of the so-called small Shahnamas and, as I have already men-
tioned, few of the epic images on ceramics or metalwork require models in
books. But then unexpected surprises can also arise and we may some day
return to the explanation of a continuous tradition of epic illustrations from
the eighth to the thirteenth centuries.
Let me turn then to the two areas for investigation which strike me as possibly
more fruitful to explain the appearance oí Shahnama paintings around 1300. The
first is the establishment of Mongol rule through the Ilkhanid dynasty. Much
has been written since the thirteenth century on the enormous destruction that
accompanied the Mongol invasions. But it is equally important to recall that
much was not destroyed and that very rapidly the new rulers of Iran and Central
Asia, the Ilkhans themselves and their various lieutenants, spent much money
and effort on the economic reconstruction of the land in order to enrich the new
feudal lords of the system. In Iraq, Western Iran, and Azerbaijan, this reconstruc-
tion was accompanied by a significant investment in cultural matters, as is clear
with the revival of Baghdad as a center for art and science, the continuing devel-
opment of Maragha for astronomy and mathematics, and the formation of a bril-
liant artistic and intellectual center in Tabriz. It is possible to imagine that, in a
world the Mongols were beginning to consider as their own, the appearance of
illustrated Shahnamas was either a way to "Iranize" the Mongol rulers of Iran or
to make them appear as supporters of the Iranian past through images accessible
to all, literate or not. Their own model in the Shahnama was Alexander the
Great, the conqueror who became a defender of Iran's past,13 but the images
they sponsored for others than themselves dealt with all the heroes of Firdausi's
epic. An interesting study could deal with the importance given to the Turanian
hero Afrasiyab, often depicted in a very favorable light, even though not an
Iranian. A possible parallel would be that of antique stories, myths, and images
transformed into French ones in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by
poets and dramatists and in many circles of cultured society. Such is the case
with the classicizing names of some of the very contemporary heroes in Molière's
Tartuffe or Le Misanthrope or in occasional passages in La Fontaine's Fables. I
would be willing to argue strongly for the theory that the creation of Shahnama
images served to show the Mongol rule as fully transformed into an Iranian
Islamic one, if the only remaining document was the Great Mongol Shahnama
and if I could feel confident that the characteristics and qualities of the so-called
"small" Shahnamas and of assorted other epic illustrations of the early fourteenth
century could be connected with the Mongol court and with official art.

12M. S. Simpson, The Illustration of an Epic: the Earliest Shahnama Manuscripts (New York, 1979);
idem, "A Reconstruction and Preliminary Account of the 1341 Shahnama, with Some Further
Thoughts on Early Shahnama Illustration," in Persian Painting from the Mongols to the Qajars.
Studies in Honour of Basil W. Robinson, ed. by R. Hillenbrand (London, 2000), 217-247.
See especially R. Hillenbrand, "The Iskandar Cycle in the Great Mongol Shahnameh" in The
Problematics of Power: Eastern and Western Representations of A.lex ander the Great, ed. by M. Bridges
and J. C. Bürgel (Bern, 1996), 203-209.

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96 Grabar

Whether the latter is justified or not requires a kind of visual analysis of images
that seeks to reconstruct the reactions or feelings expected from the users of the
manuscripts. We may not be there yet in scholarly achievement, but the premise
can be proposed and the hypothesis argued that the Shahnama illustrations
were part of a process of Iranization by the new Turkic and Mongol rulers of
the land, who sought either to integrate the heroic myths of Iran as their own
or to show to the local population the Mongol acceptance of their past.14
But we may also, or alternately, argue that these illustrations did not originate
with or for the Turkic and Mongol ruling classes, but with the urban elites of
Iranian cities and perhaps even the native landowners. It is there that the Persian
language and Persian traditions would have been maintained and transmitted and
it is with this elite that we can connect the images on ceramics and metalwork so
richly developed in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Iran. Many manuscripts were
copied during that time and it is easy to imagine illustrations being added in the
thirteenth century, since this was the century of Arabic scientific and literary manu-
scripts acquiring illustrations. In this scheme the Iranian illustrated manuscripts of
the Shahnama would belong to the same set of artistic creativity as the illustrations to
the Maqamat, Kalila wa Dimna or Dioscorides, rather than to a world of princely
images created in courts and inspired by Central Asian and Chinese models.
These two paths for reflection and eventual investigation do not necessarily con-
tradict each other. In fact, they both require the development of a technique of
interpretation that goes beyond the art historian's restricted analyses of text and
image in one manuscript, or of image and image across manuscripts. The tech-
nique is a sort of social or visual psychology that asks of the student to put
him- or herself as a maker or as a user of manuscripts and to imagine the reactions
and judgments that could be made by looking at whole manuscripts with images,
before focusing on individual images. Some of these judgments will initially be
wrong and the more likely ones will not emerge without a long process of trial
and error. But the basic technique I am proposing, which consists of stating
hypotheses for interpretations and then accepting or rejecting them, rather than
drawing conclusions first from images, will eventually answer most of the
queries raised in this paper. These results would set the early Shahnama illustrations
within the broader context of the unusually rich paintings achieved across the
whole Near East around 1300, a time of great artistic upheavals and of momentous
changes in all aspects of the Islamic world. It will also allow us to identify the
originality of these illustrations as the first steps of a specifically Iranian painting.
It would finally provide an unusual answer to the universal problem of how
something new appears in the art of a culture.

Among others who have pursued this line of argument, see various articles by A. S. Melikian-
Chirvani, notably "Conscience du passé et résistence culturelle dans l'Iran Mongol," in Ulranface à
la domination mongole ' éd. by Denise Aigle (Tehran and Paris, 1997), 135-177; C. Melville, "The
Mongols in Iran," in The Legacy of Genghis Khan. Courtly A.rt and Culture in Western A.sia, 1256-
1353, ed. by Linda Komaroff and Stefano Carboni (New York, 2002), 37-61 (esp. 54-55).

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