This precious manuscript comprising 435 pages with red foliation is a copy of Nizami’s Khamsa, one of the most important poetic works of Persian literature. The manuscript was created in about 1500 at Shiraz during the time of the Turkmen dynasties. It is illustrated with miniatures and connects with a group of illustrated manuscripts of the school of Shiraz which represent the transition from the late Turkmen to the early Safavid style. The date and the name of the calligrapher Sams ad-Din bin Giyath ad-Din al-Kirmani is mentioned in the colophons.
The dimensions of the book are 242 x 170 mm, with the written part of the pages extending over 165 x 97 mm. Calligraphy and miniatures are painted on thin, yellowish, shining paper, which is damaged and glued in many places. The script is in nasta`liq and arranged in three columns. Two columns have fourteen lines each, the third has thirty two inclined lines, quasi forming a frame.

An illuminated double-sided page embellishes the manuscript at the beginning and small decorated fields start each chapter. The manuscript is illustrated with twenty-nine miniatures. Most of them cover a half-page but there are several which cover almost an entire page. The borders are richly decorated and individual motifs of the miniatures often overlap the margin. Most of the miniatures are in very good condition. The painting technique and the pigmentation show a consistently uniform style, thus suggesting a single master’s hand. In the sixteenth century, a Safavid painter undertook some alterations.

Khamsa, in Arabic five, represents the magnum opus of the famous Persian poet Nizami, and is a collection of five independent epic poems which he wrote between 1174 and 1209. The different epics of the Khamsa are: “The Treasury of Secrets”, an ethnical-philosophical work about secular and other- wordly life, “The Love Story of Khusrau and Shirin” and “The Story of Layla and Majnun” ( a Romeo and Juliet theme), “Haft Paykar”, the biography of the Sasanian king Bahram-i Gur, and “The Book of Alexander”. The miniatures of the Vienna Khamsa show scenes from these stories.
 

Based on the German text by Elisabeth Wassertheurer

Bibliography:

Duda, Dorothea, Die illuminierten Handschriften der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek (Katalog). Reihe I: Islamische Handschriften, Bd.4: Persische Handschrifte. Wien 1983.

Sims, Eleanor, Peerless Images – Persian Painting and Its Sources. New Haven and London 2002.

Binyon, Laurence, The Poems of Nizami. London 1928