Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh: Provenance

Eleanor Lucy Deacon

Synopsis:

In this talk, Lucy Deacon explores the provenance of the substantial fragment of Rashid al-Din’s Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles), dating to the early 14th century CE and held by the University of Edinburgh’s Heritage Collections (Or Ms 20). She considers both the marks of custodial history within the manuscript and the biography of John Baillie of Leys, the Scottish East India Company official who brought it from South Asia to the UK in 1816. Deacon argues that the manuscript is likely to have been acquired during Baillie’s time as Political Resident at the court of the Nawwabs of Awadh in Lucknow. She opens the question of how Baillie’s marriage to Lulu Begam, a woman of the Awadhi court, may have been instrumental in his procuring this manuscript, and highlights the role of their Indian-Scots descendants as its custodians.

Online Resource:

Rashid al-Din and his Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh

The Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh manuscript in the Edinburgh University Library

References:

Baillie, Alexander Charles. Call of Empire from the Highlands to Hindostan. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017.

Blair, Sheila. A Compendium of Chronicles: Rashid al-Din’s Illustrated History of the World, Nasser D. Khalili Collection, volume 27, ed. Julian Raby. Oxford: Nour Foundation and Oxford University Press, 1995.

Kamola, Stefan. Making Mongol History: Rashid al-Din and the Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

Morley, William and Duncan Forbes. “Art. II.—Letters to the Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 6/1 (1841): 11–41.

University of Edinburgh Archives Online. “Manuscripts of the Islamicate World and South Asia,” Heritage Collections, Or Ms.

Citation:

Lucy Deacon, “Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh: Provenance,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 2 March 2024.

Eleanor Lucy Deacon is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). She is a specialist of Persian devotional drama. Her work with handwritten historical scripts pertaining to the Iranian Shiʿi passion play (taʿziyeh-khānī) led her into manuscript research, and an interest in the routes through which Persian and Arabic manuscripts entered the collections held in European libraries. Before moving to Fribourg to join the comparative project “Women, Martyrdom, & Religious Drama in the Abrahamic Traditions,” she was World Cultures Curator (Arabic and Persian) at the University of Edinburgh’s Heritage Collections, where she was instrumental in renaming the old “Oriental Manuscript Collection” as “Manuscripts of the Islamicate World and South Asia” (MIWSA) and creating the MIWSA collection’s online catalogue.