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Holy Figures Portrayed in the Edinburgh Fragment of Rashīd al-Dīn’s World History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Robert Hillenbrand
Robert Hillenbrand*
Affiliation:
School of Art History at the University of St Andrews and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Edinburgh
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Abstract

This paper has two purposes. One is to look carefully at the way that the stories of Sālih and Samson are told in the Edinburgh fragment of Rashīd al-Dīn’s World History and its accompanying illustrations, and the messages that these convey. The second is to explore the interplay of text and image in what might be termed “the Moses cycle” and to consider the motivation for the unusual textual and pictorial emphasis on Moses. Several aspects of the cycle are analyzed: Moses as an antetype of Rashīd al-Dīn himself, the impact of the Qur’anic text and Moses as a precursor of the Prophet Muhammad.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 6: Visualizing Iran: From Antiquity to the Present , November 2017 , pp. 843 - 871
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2017

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Footnotes

I should like to express my warm thanks to the anonymous reader who provided penetrating comments on this article; and also to Dr. M. R. Ghiasian for so generously sharing his own findings on Rashīd al-Dīn’s text.

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