Lives of the Prophets: The Illustrations to Hafiz-i Abru's 'Assembly of Chronicles'.

• Author: Milstein, Rachel
• Position: Book review

Lives of the Prophets: The Illustrations to Hafiz-i Abru's 'Assembly of Chronicles'. By MOHAMAD REZA GHIASIAN. Studies in Persian Cultural History, vol. 16. Leiden: BRILL, 2018. Pp. xv + 343. $159, [euro]132.

The volume under review, specifically concerned with images, is profusely illustrated with color plates, about which see below, and black-and-white sketches. Its subject-matter treats one work, Majma' al-tavarjkh (Assembly of Chronicles), by the Timurid court historiographer Hafiz-i Abru (d. 1430). He was ordered by his patron, Shahrukh, to find and restore remnants of Rashid al-Din's world history, Jami' al-tawarikh, which had been copied and partly illustrated in Tabriz in the early fourteenth century. The production of Rashid al-DTn's manuscripts had ended with his execution in 1318, and all the copies found by the Timurid historian were incomplete. Hafiz-i Abru therefore assembled fragments of unrelated manuscripts and replaced the missing parts with the text of his own history. He also asked Herati painters to fill the empty spaces in the hybrid volumes with illustrations in the spirit of original fourteenth-century manuscripts. Wherever illustrated episodes were found in the ancient remnants, they were used as models for the new replacements; in other cases, the Timurid painters introduced new iconographical schemes, which better reflected their contemporary artistic preferences. Their efforts resulted in a specific style, archaic in comparison with the new artistic taste at the turn of the fifteenth century, which has been coined "the Timurid historical style" by historians of Islamic art.

One of these hybrid volumes of Rashid al-Din's cum Hafiz-i Abru's illustrated text is conserved at the Topkapi Sarayi Museum Library (Hazine 1653) and another--a manuscript that is now dispersed--has been identified as such for the first time by Mohamad Reza Ghiasian. Hazine 1653, an autograph of Hafiz-i Abru, combines his own account of the pre-lslamic period with a section of Rashid al-Din's second volume. This section recounts Islamic history up to the fall of the Abbasids, and includes contemporaneous non-Muslim dynasties. The manuscript, which bears the earliest known Timurid colophon (829/1425) detailing the circumstances of its production, comprises in all: a fragmented Ilkhanid copy of Jami' al-tawarikh; another fragment from a lost Ilkhanid copy (which Ghiasian calls "the divided copy"); the Shahrukhi section transcribed by Hafiz-i...