Great Mongol Shahnameh

The Great Mongol Shahnameh is an illuminated manuscript of the Shahnameh, the long Persian epic of kings, heroes, and dynastic rise and fall. It was produced in the Ilkhanate around 1330, most likely at court, as a version of that poem rather than a new text. In its own day it would have been handled as a bound book. What remains is a scatter of large painted and written leaves.

The Ilkhanids ruled Persia as part of the Mongol imperial world, about a century after the conquest. By the time this manuscript was under way the dynasty was near its end. Commissioning a Shahnameh on this scale was not a casual act of patronage. It placed Mongol rulers inside a Persian historical imagination that stretched back through legendary kings, and it did so in the established visual language of the Persian miniature, pushed to an ambitious size.

Scholars reconstruct the original plan only in outline. The complete book was never securely described before it was dismantled. It is thought to have been intended as two volumes of roughly two hundred and eighty folios with around one hundred and ninety illustrations, and it is also thought that the project was never finished. Those figures are working estimates, not a surviving contents list. The uncertainty matters: every claim about sequence, missing scenes, or the balance of text to image rests on comparison of the dispersed leaves rather than on an intact codex.

The manuscript stayed in Persia until the early twentieth century. In Europe it was broken up by the dealer George Demotte, who sold leaves as freestanding works. In that market a full page of painting was easier to place than a heavy two-volume epic, and the book was treated accordingly. Many pages were altered to look more complete or more saleable once separated from their neighbours. The result is that the object known today as the Great Mongol Shahnameh — also called the Demotte Shahnameh or the Great Ilkhanid Shahnama — exists as individual pages distributed across collections, including the Freer Gallery of Art, the Department of Islamic Arts of the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One inventory number attached to the group is Per 111.

Because the leaves are large, closely worked, and now isolated, each museum page tends to be read as a picture first and as part of a book second. That is an accident of modern dispersal. In the 1330s the paintings answered the verses beside them, and the verses carried a continuous royal narrative. Recovering that continuity means reading across institutions, and accepting that some joins, some losses, and some later repairs will never be fully settled.