Cleveland Museum of Art

Calligraphy

Date

c. 1596

Medium

Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper

Culture

Mughal India, court of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605)

Department

Indian and Southeast Asian Art

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Akbar, the third Mughal emperor of India, commissioned an illustrated copy of the Chingiz-nama, a historical text written in Persian during the early 1300s by a Jewish scholar who converted to Islam. The Chingiz-nama is an account of the conquests of Akbar’s ancestors, the Mongols, who swept across the Asian continent from Siberia to the Mediterranean Sea during the 1200s. This page describes the final momentous defeat of the caliph of Baghdad, the religious head of Sunni Islam and political leader of the Abbasid dynasty, with the names of all the caliphs who came before him listed in red at the top. This fortified city in the heart of Kurdistan, now called Irbil, is in Iraq.

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