For many, Persian painting evokes fine manuscripts of poetic texts with brilliant illustrations—whether epics such as the Shahnama, whose complex images depict valiant heroes battling demons, or lyric tales such as Nizami’s Khamsa, with romantic scenes of lovers swooning in verdant gardens. This informative monograph, volume 16 in Brill’s Studies in Persian Cultural History, addresses a lesser known side of the field: prose chronicles illustrated in a simpler, more linear style. A reworking of the author’s PhD dissertation at the University of Bamberg, it focuses on the so-called “Assembly of Chronicles,” compiled by the Timurid court historian Hafiz-i Abru (d. 1430), and on the illustrations in it depicting the prophets.

The book opens with a brief introduction (pp. 1–5) that succinctly summarizes the contents. The first chapter (pp. 6–24) outlines the political, religious, and cultural contexts in which the text was assembled. Although based mainly on secondary sources, it provides a readable summary of the time and sets the focus for Chapter 2 (pp. 25–44), in which the author focuses on book production in the workshop of Shahrukh, Timurid ruler of Khurasan (r. 1405–47). Eight illustrated manuscripts survive from his reign. Five are historical, two are poetic, and one is religious. The lopsided distribution of their subject matter underscores the patron’s interest in history and in using it to disseminate his image. It also sets the stage for Professor Ghiasian’s investigation of this particular historical text.

Chapter 3 (pp. 45–107), the heart of the book, further hones in on the Majmaʿ al-tawarikh and on surviving copies of it. Hafiz-i Abru, the first Timurid historiographer from eastern Persia whose works have survived, assembled a universal chronicle that followed the model of the Jamiʿ al-tawarikh compiled a century earlier by the Ilkhanid historian Rashid al-Din (d. 1318). The most important manuscript of Hafiz-i Abru’s chronicle is his autograph copy with Shahrukh’s seal, now in the Topkapı Palace Library in Istanbul (Hazine 1653). Ghiasian’s close examination of the manuscript reveals it to be a composite volume, which contains fifteenth-century folios written by Hafiz-i Abru, as well as fourteenth-century ones from Rashid al-Din’s Jamiʿ al-tawarikh. Ghiasian thus dubs it the Majmaʿ-Jamiʿ al-tawarikh. The importance of this autograph copy is shown by the numerous copies of it. One illustrated manuscript, which also bears Shahrukh’s seal and must therefore date from that era, has been cut up, and its folios have been dispersed around the world. Hence, Ghiasian dubs it the “Dispersed Manuscript.” The autograph copy, Hazine 1653, served as the model for six other copies, now in St. Petersburg and Tehran, that have an identical opening and the same incomplete text at the end. Unlike the two copies from the period of Shahrukh, the spaces for paintings in these later ones are still blank, and were never completed.

By carefully examining the autograph manuscript—not only its text, but also its materials and other aspects of codicology—Ghiasian was able to reconstruct how it was assembled. Shahrukh’s scriptorium apparently had access to copies of Rashid al-Din’s Jamiʿ al-tawarikh that were acephalic, so when Shahrukh ordered it completed, Hafiz-i Abru supplied a new version of the missing first volume, as well as a few passages missing from other sections. One of Ghiasian’s important discoveries was that the autograph copy (Hazine 1653) contains parts from not just one, but from two different copies of the Jamiʿ al-tawarikh, both from the early fourteenth century. The first one, used for large chunks of text in the Timurid composite chronicle, has been known since the time of Richard Ettinghausen’s foundational article on this manuscript,Footnote ¹ but Ghiasian discovered the second one. He dubbed it the “Divided Manuscript,” as folios from this hitherto unknown copy of Rashid al-Din’s Jamiʿ al-tawarikh were also used to fill out the other “Dispersed Manuscript” of Hafiz-i Abru’s chronicle. Having established the origin of the text folios in the autograph copy, Ghiasian then turns to the question of illustration, neatly parceling out the sixty-nine paintings from the fourteenth century and the forty-seven done in Shahrukh’s scriptorium, in addition to the twenty-seven pages with depictions of Chinese emperors.

Having sorted out the complex composition of the autograph copy of the Majmaʿ-Jamiʿ al-tawarikh (Hazine 1653), Ghiasian turns to the even more complex history of the “Dispersed Manuscript,” a contemporary copy of the same text. A government seal dated 1300/1882–83 shows that it was exported from Iran in the late nineteenth century. It was included in the International Exhibition of Persian Art in Philadelphia in 1926, but almost immediately afterwards was divided between two collector/dealers, Emile Tabbagh in Paris and M. Parish-Watson (Ghiasian is slightly wrong here in calling him Parish Watson) in New York, who offered individual leaves for sale. Gathering and examining as many of them as possible, Ghiasian was able to divide the paintings in the “Dispersed Manuscript” into three groups: those contemporary with the assembly of the manuscript in the distinctive style identified by Ettinghausen as the “Historical Style of Shahrukh” (i.e. Timurid), and more than fifty examples painted on top of text passages, imitating either that style or the style of the fourteenth-century originals.Footnote ² Paintings of Chinese emperors were also pasted on irrelevant text pages. These additions were carried out some time before 1926, likely in the early twentieth century, to increase the number of illustrated folios that could be offered for sale.

A much briefer Chapter 4 (pp. 108–31) analyzes the Timurid-period paintings in the two fourteenth-century copies of the Majmaʿ-Jamiʿ al-tawarikh (forty-seven paintings in Hazine 1653, and seventy in the “Dispersed Manuscript”), along with related ones in Hazine 1654, another chronicle in the Topkapı Library that contains large portions from a fourteenth-century copy of Rashid al-din’s Jamiʿ al-tawarikh. Ghaisian’s many line drawings in the chapter flesh out his somewhat statistical discussion of figures, architecture, battles, and enthronements. Since these manuscripts also include original fourteenth-century paintings, the Timurid ones echo that style—with limited colors, flat compositions, and reduced pictorial elements against a plain ground, all set in a horizontal format. These prose chronicles were primarily meant to be read, and the role of the pictures was to support the textual narrative. Perhaps the most unusual part of the author’s narrative is a direct quotation from the Majmaʿ-Jamiʿ al-tawarikh (p. 113) in which Hafiz-i Abru lays out his own theory of color, a rare contemporary commentary on the meaning of colors.

These four chapters are supplemented by a long catalog (pp. 132–217), analyzing in detail the twenty illustrations of the prophets from the two Timurid copies of the Majmaʿ-Jamiʿ al-tawarikh. Each catalog entry contains a synopsis of the text, with a translation of the relevant text around the painting and comparison to related images. The Timurid paintings are often directly inspired by Ilkhanid versions of the same scene, usually from the Arabic copy of the Jamiʿ al-tawarikh dated 714/1314 and now divided between Edinburgh University Library and the Khalili Collection in London. The author has carefully collected reproductions to support his comparisons, but the publisher’s layout has severely failed the author. Images that are meant to be compared are often set on two sides of the same leaf, or on two contiguous right or left pages, making it impossible for the reader to see the two images at the same time. It would not have occupied any more space to set the images on facing pages, but it required a thoughtful editor to supervise layout.

A very brief conclusion (pp. 218–22) recapitulates the import of the study, arguing that the illustrations of these Timurid histories exemplify painting in service to the state—images meant to promote Shahrukh as padishah-i Islam. Four appendices round out the volume. The first (pp. 223–82) gives a full translation of the illustrated episodes of the lives of the prophets from Adam to the early life of Muhammad, based on the autograph copy (Hazine 1653). A second appendix (pp. 283–310) enumerates the headings and illustrations in that manuscript. The last two appendices (pp. 311–16) turn to the “Dispersed Manuscript,” listing the locations of all paintings so far identified as later additions in the two distinct styles. These appendices provide a convenient way of incorporating large amounts of data that supplement, but do not interrupt, the author’s narrative.

This tightly conceived and clearly written study is, as Charles Melville states in the preface (p. x), a masterpiece of “forensic detective work” in unraveling the complex history of Hafiz-i Abru’s universal chronicle. It will readily interest art historians who work on Iran and its neighbors, from Mongol times onwards. The autograph copy of Hafiz-i Abru’s chronicle (Hazine 1653) was copied or refurbished in Ilkhanid, Timurid, Safavid, and Ottoman times, and the “Dispersed Manuscript” continues the subject to the present. The book thus casts a wide chronological net. It also underscores the role of the market in the sale and dismemberment of illustrated manuscripts.

But the author’s careful study has much information that will also interest historians and historiographers. For example, as the author notes (pp. 80–81), the various copies of these universal chronicles, all made in court scriptoria, provide evidence for changes in Iran’s foreign relations from the early fourteenth century to the early fifteenth. Rashid al-Din, compiling his universal chronicle at Tabriz in the early fourteenth century, was keenly interested in the West and India. In Hazine 1654, a manuscript that contains mostly folios from his Jamiʿ al-tawarikh copied in his scriptorium, the history of the Franks contains fifty-five illustrated pages with more than 300 spaces allotted to Frankish kings, and the history of India had at least twenty-three illustrations. By the fifteenth century, with the shift of the capital from Tabriz to Herat, the relevance of the West and India had waned. In the autograph copy of the Majmaʿ-Jamiʿ al-tawarikh (Hazine 1653) compiled at Shahrukh’s scriptorium in Herat, the subsection on the history of the Franks has shrunk from sixty-six pages, fifty-five of them illustrated, to a mere twenty pages with a single illustration. Similarly, the number of illustrations in the subsection on India dropped to two in the Timurid version, Hazine 1653. In contrast, the subsections on the Turks and the Chinese maintained their high rate of illustration in the “Dispersed Manuscript,” copied in Shahrukh’s workshop.Footnote ³ Varying rates of illustration can thus be a source of historical information, complementing surveys based on textual sources alone, such as Peter Jackson’s magisterial study of Mongol relations with the West.Footnote ⁴ Here it is important to distinguish the layout of a manuscript, in which spaces indicate the significance of a particular subject to the original planners, versus the style of the paintings, which can often be added, sometimes at a much later date.

Lives of the Prophets is not an easy book to absorb, particularly because of the overlapping names in it, and the reader needs to be vigilant in distinguishing between Hazine 1653 and Hazine 1654, or the “Dispersed Manuscript” and the “Divided Manuscript.” To ensure clarity, Ghiasian often repeats and summarizes. He is sometimes reluctant to draw conclusions, especially when citing more established scholars. For example, in his discussion of Shahrukh’s choice of Herat over Samarkand as capital (p. 8), he cites Beatrice Manz’s argument that Transoxiana was more vulnerable to attack while Herat was safer, as well as the argument put forward by Maria Subtelny and Anas Khalidov that Khurasan was a deliberate choice as a center of Islamic learning. Ghiasian does not indicate which view he finds more convincing, nor does he argue for a combination of both. These are traits of a young scholar, but to judge from this impressive book, he is a very promising one, as his mongraph provides a model of how to conduct research on a very complex set of manuscripts and their illustrations.