Shahnameh

Categorized as Terms

Shahnameh

Roxana Zenhari

Related Terms:

  • Colophon (brief statement about a book’s making)
  • Naqqash (painter) 
  • Pardeh and pardeh-khani (cloth painting and picture recitation)

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Farshid Emami, “Coffee and Coffeehouses in Ottoman and Safavid Lands, 1500-1800,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 9 February 2021.

Emine Fetvacı, “Ottoman Illustrated Histories,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 28 August 2020.

Ayşin Yoltar-Yıldırım, “The Birth Scene of Iskandar (Alexander the Great),” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 9 February 2021.

References:

Chelkowski, Peter. “Narrative Painting and Painting Recitation in Qajar,” Muqarnas 6 (1989): 98–111. 

Grabar, Oleg. “Why Was the Shahnama Illustrated?,” Journal of the Association for Iranian Studies 43/1 (2010): 91–96. 

Grabar, Oleg and Sheila Blair. Epic Images and Contemporary History: The Illustration of the Great Mongol Shahnama. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980. 

Hillenbrand, Robert, ed. Shahnama: The Visual Language of the Persian Book of Kings. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 

Khaleghi-Motlagh, Jalal and Shapur Shahbazi. “Ferdowsi, Abul-Qasem,” in Encyclopedia Iranica. Consulted online on 27 November 2021.

Melikian-Chirvani, Assadullah Souren. “Le Shāh-nāme, la gnose soufie et le pouvoir mongole,” Journal Asiatique 272 (1984): 249–337.

Citation:

Roxana Zenhari, “Shahnameh,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 23 April 2024.

Roxana Zenhari is a lecturer and research fellow at the Georg-August University, Göttingen. She is a historian of Islamic art whose work explores the relationship of texts and images with dominant cultural and political discourses in the premodern Persianate world. She wrote her PhD thesis on a fourteenth-century manuscript of Samak-e ʿayyār, now published under the title The Persian Medieval Romance Samak-e ʿayyār: Analysis of an Illustrated Inju Manuscript. Her most recent publication, Mirzā ʿAli-Qoli Khoʾi: The Master Illustrator of Persian Lithographed Books in the Qajar Period, written with Ulrich Marzolph, provides a study of illustrated lithographed books containing popular and religious stories printed in Iran during the first half of the nineteenth century.