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Reading for Pleasure: Book of Kings

Article in British Medical Journal (Clinical research ed.) · October 1980

DOI: 10.1136/bmj.281.6245.933 · Source: PubMed

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BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL VOLUME 281 4 OCTOBER 1980
Strong P. Medical errands: a discussion of routine patient work. In:
Davies A, Horobin G, eds. Medical enicouinters. The experience of illness
and treatinent. London: Croom Helm, 1977: 45.
6 Shaw PM, Gath DH. Teaching the doctor-patient relationship to medical
students. British J1ouirnal of AMedical Edutcati'on 1975 ;9 :176-81.
7 Barnland DC. The mystification of meaning: doctor-patient encounters.
J Med Ediuc 1976;51 :716-25.
Boyle CM. Difference between patients' and doctors' interpretation of
some common medical terms. Br- MedJ3 1970;ii:286-9.
9 Helfer RE. An objective comparison of the pediatric interviewing skills of
freshmen and senior medical students. Pediatrics 1970;45:623-7.
Maguire GP, Rutter DR. History taking for medical students. 1
Deficiencies in performance. 2 Evaluation of a training programme.
Lanicet 1976;ii:556-60.
Reading for Pleasure
Book of Kings
JOHN LAUNER
I want to write not about books but about pictures. I am not
shirking my responsibilities as the writer of a book column, for
the pictures in question were once part of a great mediaeval
volume and this year a facsimile of this work has been published
in America. The Iranian Book of Kings ("Shahnameh") was
written around the tenth century by Firdausi. I speak not one
word of Persian and had never heard of Firdausi or his Book of
Kings until a few months ago, but it is worth pausing a moment
to talk about his poem before describing the great paintings it
inspired. The Book of Kings is like a hybrid of the Iliad and the
two Books of Kings in the Old Testament. Like the ancient
Greeks and the Jews, the Iranians had assembled a partly
mythical, partly historical account of the kings of antiquity,
ranging from the implausible Zahhak (who is punished for his
crimes by sprouting two snakes from his shoulders) to quite
reasonable kings, who play diplomatic polo matches with Roman
caesars or seek the hand in marriage of the daughter of the Khan
of China. Firdausi spent 35 years writing the 30 000 couplets of
the poem and dedicated it eulogistically to a certain Sultan
Mahmoud, who gave him so little thanks that he took his
miserable payment from the court and gave it to a bath attendant
and a sherbet seller. He died disillusioned, and one is reminded
of Samuel Johnson after a similarly unpatronised labour of love
800 years later:
I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished
to please have sunk into the grave, and success and
miscarriage are empty sounds: I thereforc dismiss it with
frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure
or from praise.
Nevertheless, as with Johnson, Firdausi's posthumous success
was not diminished by his patron's coldness. His epic became to
Iranian painters like a book of the Bible to the makers of stained
glass windows in Europe. Schools of miniaturists and calli-
Northwick Park Hospital, Harrow, Middlesex
JOHN LAUNER, MB, BS, senior house officer
933
Platt FW, McMath JC. Clinical hypocompetence: the interview. Ann
Intern Med 1979;91:898-902.
12 Verby JE, Holden P, Davis RH. Peer review of consultation in primarv
care: the use of audio-visual recordings. Br MedJ7 1979 ;i:1686-8.
13 Maguire GP, Goldberg D, Jones S, Hyde C, O'Dowd T. The value of
feedback in teaching interviewing skills to medical students. Psychol
Med 1978;8:695-704.
14 Pendleton D, Wakeford R. Training in interpersonal skills for medical
students: an evaluation study. Social Science Forum (in press).
13 Hopkins P. The time factor. In: Balint E, Novell J S, eds. Six minutes for the
patient: interaction in general practice. London: Tavistock Publications,
1973:142-53.
(Accepted 223July 1980)
graphers created illustrated versions for their patrons. The
greatest of these is said to be the volume begun in Tabriz in
1522 and completed perhaps 15 years later when the 258
masterpieces by 15 artists were presented to Shah Tahmasp.
Although in his youth he had been one of the greatest patrons,
Tahmasp seems to have become like Firdausi's patron
Mahmoud, for he lost interest in his artists and gave the Book of
Kings in its splendid new edition to the Turkish sultan. It is not
recorded how the 15 artists felt, though many are known to have
emigrated, nor was there an outbreak of lavish ostentation among
bath attendants and sherbet sellers.
A new flurry of interest
The work remained locked away in Turkey until late in the
last century, when it was bought by a Rothschild, who locked
it away for another half century until the American collector
Arthur A Houghton jun bought it in 1959 and presented 78 of
the illustrations to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The
ravages of inflation may now be affecting the Houghton family,
for individual folios are being sold. This has coincided with a
flurry of commercial and academic interest which has brought
it to the attention of people like myself, who knew nothing of
the book or of its time or place of origin. Seventeen of the folios
were exhibited during July and August last year in Agnew's
gallery in Bond Street, and another 38 formed part of the
exhibition "Wonders of the Age" shown in the King's Library
of the British Museum from August to October, and which is
travelling to the United States. The entire Book of Kings was
published in reproduction by the Harvard University Press
this year.
The first point I want to make about these miniatures is how
great is the illusion of movement in them. Exuberant crimsons
and white and lapis lazuli spill out from the gold geometrical
borders, as though the characters and objects contain too much
life to be contained inside. Horsemen ride out of these borders;
rocks and trees burst through; and banners wave across them.
Pink and grey rocks, each mysteriously bearing the face of a dog
or monkey or human being, pour forth black waterfalls which
flow as rivers across plains of mauve or green. Valleys teem with
vegetation in minute and perfect detail. The palaces are adorned
934
with carpets and hangings and wall-coverings of stunningly
complex patterns. As the eye moves around these objects (helped
by the magnifying glasses which the British Museum thought-
fully provided) so the picture itself seems to acquire movement.
I wonder whether our habit of sitting every night to watch
electric pictures move of their own accord has made us lose the
skill which a yokel would have had looking at the tracery on a
Gothic cathedral or at Islamic geometry, of seeing vibration and
scintillation in stationary slabs and patches of material.
The pictures' story
Then there is the story itself. Even if these miniatures had
never been part of a written book, I should need no excuse for
writing about them under the heading of Reading for Pleasure.
They are pictures which need to be read, with subplots and
digressions as well as main plots and characterisation. In a
miniature showing how King Farudin disguises himself as a
dragon to try the mettle of his three sons, each son has different
qualities to be read into his demeanour as he whips his horse
into retreat or faces the dragon calmly and unarmed. A picture of
the same king crossing the river Tigris with his army shows an
overweight horse in the bottom right-hand corner swerving to
avoid the water-to the dismay and perplexity of his rider. Five
or ten minutes of intense, eye-straining scrutiny is often
insufficient to read all the details of a single miniature. Each of
them, crowded into an average size of 10 inches square, reveals
at second or third viewing some new and delightful nuance of
story. Looking at them brought to my mind an English teacher
at school who made us look at pictures and simply describe
everything we saw in them. His favourite text for this exercise
was W H Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts":
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
dully along:
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.*
Auden refers in this poem to Bruegel's Landscape with the
Fall of Icarus, but his comments would suit the Book of Kings
just as well. There is, for example, a miniature depicting how
the evil Zahhak meets his death, suspended by chains from the
roof of a cavern, his limbs spreadeagled, while one courtier in
the foreground plays a stringed instrument by a waterfall and
three others seem to be discussing the merits of a tame falcon.
Another miniature shows the moment at which the hero
Rustum ends his long search for a man suitable for the throne of
Iran, while a grizzly bear among the rocks above, quite indifferent
to the human actions below, lifts a great boulder to hurl on a
leopard who is pursuing another grizzly bear. In the finest of all
the miniatures, a masterpiece showing the legendary first king
presiding over his paradise, monkeys frolic quite independently
in an unobtrusive corner of the page.
If I have whetted your appetite, and you have missed the
London exhibitions, there are the illustrated catalogues and a
couple of relatively cheap coffee-table books with selections, as
well as the expensive facsimile brought out this year. The
British Museum itself owns another manuscript, the Quintet
by Nizami, commissioned by Shah Tahmasp from the same
*Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd from Collected Poems by
W H Auden.
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BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL VOLUME 281 4 OCTOBER 1980
artists in 1539. Folios from it were on tour in America with the
Book of Kings, but will presumably return to London soon.
Bibliography
Persian Miniatures (catalogue of an exhibition at Thos Agnew
& Sons), London, 1979.
Welch SC. A King's Book of Kings. London: Thames, 1972.
Welch SC. Royal Persian Manuscripts. London: Thames and
Hudson, 1976.
Welch SC. Wonders of the Age. Cambridge, Mass: Fogg Art
Museum, 1979.
Welch SC, Dickson MB. The Houghton Shahnanieh, Cambridge,
Mass: University Press, 1980. Harvard.
MATERIA NON MEDICA
Donkeyless in the Cevennes
In the autumn of 1878 Robert Louis Stevenson walked the 120 miles
from Le Monastier to St Jean du Gard in 12 days, recording his
adventures in the classic Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenines. Early
last May, less ambitiously, I took two days from a motoring holiday
in France to walk short sections of his route between Fouzillac and
Le Bleymard.
The route is marked (roughly) by coloured arrows, and a bilingual
guide is published by the Stevenson Centenary Committee. The
Grande Randonn6e network of hikers' trails crosses and occasionally
coincides with Stevenson's path and their maps give a lot of helpful
detail.
Like Stevenson, I had to retrace my footsteps between Fouzillac
and Cheylard L'Eveque. In his case the problem was storm and
darkness. In mine the problem was more prosaic. Fortunately I had
been on my way for only about half an hour when I made the em-
barrassing discovery that I was still carrying my car keys and thus the
arrangements for my wife (with lunch) to drive around and join me
at Cheylard were in jeopardy.
Keys and car reunited, I returned rather breathlessly by the shortest
path through the woods to Cheylard, ignoring a recommended
scenic detour to the south. The village is picturesquely sited in the
valley of the Mercoire-Stevenson's "rattling highland river"-
and has probably changed little since his day. We did not share his
jaundiced view that "it seemed little worth all the searching,"
especially as our riverside picnic was enlivened by the appearance of
large, colourful, and quite unfamiliar butterflies. Later reference
proved them to have been a species rare to Britain-despite the
name, Camberwell beauty.
Having failed to find any arrows on leaving Cheylard I took several
wrong trails and eventually waded across another stream-the
Langouyrou-to reach the small hamlet of Les Pradels. Here a good
road took me across the plateau to the small town of Luc, with its
ruined castle crowned by the blue and white statue of the Virgin
Mary erected in the very year of Stevenson's journey-"Fifty quintals
of brand-new Madonna."
Next day started with a visit (by car) to the Trappist monastery of
Our Lady of the Snows. Stevenson had rested here overnight,
surviving the aggressive efforts of one of his fellow pilgrims at con-
version but deeply affected by the monks themselves, whom he found
friendly, hospitable, and "singularly sweet-tempered." In season, two
or three thousand tourists are said to visit here daily, buying the
monastery wine, honey, and other products. We were almost the
only visitors and found no commercial activity but managed to attend
midday prayers in the community chapel-a simple and impressive
ceremony.
A short stroll past meadows golden with wild daffodils lead to La
Bastide. Then by car again to L'Estampes on the slopes of Mount
Goulet for an afternoon walk over to Le Bleymard. The Camberwell
beauty appeared again but no traffic or pedestrians. Despite the
warm sun, remnants of snow edged the road near the summit, and
passing down to Le Bleymard the great bulk of Mount Lozere-the
next stage on Stevenson's march-loomed ahead still heavily snow-
clad. Another time perhaps ?-GILES KEANE (general practitioner,
Dartmouth, Devon).