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ROBERT
HILLENBRAND
THE SHAHNAMA - "The
Book of Kings" - is the Persian national epic.
Completed in 1010 by the poet Firdausi, who collated
and refashioned earlier written and oral versions of
its hundreds of stories, it is the core work of medieval
Persian literature. Thousands of Persians have large
sections of its text by heart, and it is the staple
of popular professional storytellers who ply their trade
in cafés.
It has spread
far beyond Iran to Central Asia, Afghanistan and northern
India, to Turkey and the Caucasus; and there are even
Arabic translations. It has become an icon of national
identity, which operates at the interface of myth and
history, and serves alike as a guide to statecraft,
as wisdom literature and as an ethical code. Yet its
stories - part historical chronicle, part myth and fantasy,
part adventures and romances - are restricted to pre-Islamic
Persia, just as its language has been obsessively purged
of Arabic elements. Islam, then, is conspicuous by its
absence.
From 1999,
a 5-year project funded by the AHRB, with joint directors
and research assistants in Cambridge and Edinburgh,
digitised as many as possible of the uncounted extant
images from hundreds of Shahnama manuscripts in public
and private collections. This labour has also necessarily
involved close study of textual variants (no two manuscripts
of the Shahnama have exactly the same text) with the
long-term view of establishing an online text which
records all known variants. Finally, the individual
break lines, each of them the textual trigger for an
image, have been recorded, along with the complete page,
illustration included, on which they occur.
All this information
has been entered onto a database whose life is intended
to continue long after the end of the project. The popularity
of the Shahnama has ensured that the entire history
of Persian painting (most of which has taken the form
of book illustration) can be studied through this database.
Already more than twice the number of images previously
listed (which was around 4,000) has been assembled,
and most of the pages containing images have been entered
onto the database and will be searchable via a series
of fields.
The database
has made possible the accurate identification of scenes
formerly described only in generic fashion (e.g. “hunt”,
"battle", “reception", “enthronement”);
the exploration of detailed links between text and image;
and the analysis of iconographic cycles and their evolution
over time. Indeed, it promises to move the centre of
gravity in modern art-historical scholarship from the
individual painting to the cycle. Above all, the assembly
of a critical mass of data allows techniques of statistical
analysis to be deployed, and thus makes it possible
to approach old problems (e.g. of dating, provenance
and length of pictorial cycles) to be approached from
dramatically new angles. It has already been demonstrated
- for example in the case of the celebrated Great Mongol
Shahnama - that these new methods can supplement and
often correct findings previously determined on the
basis of style alone.
Future work
on illustrated Shahnamas, it is already clear, will
be based on a much larger body of material, both textually
and pictorially, than hitherto, and it will be possible
to explore cognate topics like page layout and calligraphy
as well as to make better sense of incomplete illustrated
Shahnama manuscripts.
Based
on an article that appeared in
the
CHB News in 2003.
Robert Hillenbrand was formerly Professor of Islamic
Arts
at
The University of Edinburgh.
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