A Folio from the Hamzanama

The Hamzanama tells the adventures of Hamza ibn Abdul-Muttalib, an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, though the stories themselves are legendary rather than historical. The narrative is episodic: battles, enchantments, narrow escapes, romantic interludes, demons, and heroes. It belongs to a long oral tradition, performed by professional storytellers across Persianate cultures. Written versions in Persian existed by the eleventh century, but the story continued to be adapted, expanded, and retold in performance.

In 1562, the Mughal emperor Akbar, then nineteen years old, commissioned an illustrated manuscript of the Hamzanama on a scale never attempted before. The project took fifteen years and involved more than a hundred artists, many of whom signed their work or are named in workshop records. The manuscript originally contained around fourteen hundred folios, each painted on cotton cloth in opaque watercolour. Fewer than two hundred survive today, dispersed across collections worldwide.

The scale is part of the point. These were not intimate book paintings to be examined by a single reader. They were large enough to be held aloft, shown to groups, used in conjunction with oral recitation. The size of the cloth, the brightness of the pigments, and the density of incident within each composition all suggest an audience, not a solitary scholar.

The style is deliberately composite. Akbar's workshop brought together painters trained in Persian traditions with artists from India, and the results reflect both. The compositions often use the tilted ground plane characteristic of Persian manuscript painting, where space is organised by stacking figures vertically rather than receding into depth. But the palette—reds, ochres, greens—is more saturated than typical Persian work, and the modelling of figures sometimes shows knowledge of European techniques. By the 1560s, Jesuit missionaries and Portuguese traders had brought prints and paintings to the Mughal court, and some Hamzanama folios include distant landscapes with atmospheric perspective, a device borrowed from European art.

The project was a workshop production. Individual artists are named for specific folios: one might design the composition, another paint the figures, a third complete the architectural details. This division of labour allowed the immense manuscript to be completed within two decades, but it also means that individual folios vary in style and quality. Some are meticulous, others more summary. The manuscript is not uniform—it is the accumulated work of many hands over many years.

Most of the Hamzanama was destroyed or lost, though when and how is not documented. By the eighteenth century, the manuscript had been broken up, and folios began to enter European and American collections in the nineteenth century. What survives is fragmentary, but it remains the largest illustrated manuscript project of the Mughal period and one of the most ambitious painting programmes of the sixteenth century anywhere.