Four Leaves from the Jam-e Jam of Auhadi Maraghai

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Probably Mashhad or Herat, c. 1550
33cm high, 21.5cm wide

These four leaves on different coloured papers and with coloured, gold speckled borders, come from a Safavid copy of the poet Awhadi Maraghai's (d. 1338) mystical mathnavi, Jam-e Jam, or the “Cup of Jamshid”. The hand is a beautifully even nasta'liq that can be dated to the mid-16th century. Though the illuminated cartouches for the chapter headings - left blank here - are in a generally Safavid style and cannot be attributed to a particular area, the borders probably indicate that the manuscript was made in Khurasan, the area comprising modern Eastern Iran and Western Afghanistan. For a group of manuscripts with similar borders made around the mid-16th century and attributed to the two main cultural centres in Khurasan, Mashhad and Herat, see a treatise on official correspondence (insha') completed in 1563, a Divan of Shahi, and a copy of Jami's Salaman va Absal, all in the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris (Francis Richard, Splendeurs Persanes, Paris, 1997, nos. 111, 113, 119).