Calligraphy

Description

Akbar, the third Mughal emperor of India, commissioned an illustrated copy of the Chingiz-nama, a historical text written in Persian during the early 1300s by a Jewish scholar who converted to Islam. The Chingiz-nama is an account of the conquests of Akbar’s ancestors, the Mongols, who swept across the Asian continent from Siberia to the Mediterranean Sea during the 1200s. This page describes the final momentous defeat of the caliph of Baghdad, the religious head of Sunni Islam and political leader of the Abbasid dynasty, with the names of all the caliphs who came before him listed in red at the top.

Provenance

Demotte; (Heeramaneck Galleries, New York, NY, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art) (?-1947); The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (1947-)

Calligraphy

Basavana

c. 1596

Accession Number

1947.502.b

Medium

Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper

Dimensions

Image: 34 x 20 cm (13 3/8 x 7 7/8 in.); Overall: 38.5 x 25 cm (15 3/16 x 9 13/16 in.); with mat: 49 x 36.3 cm (19 5/16 x 14 5/16 in.)

Classification

Calligraphy

Museum

The Cleveland Museum of Art

Cleveland, United States

Credit Line

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund