Cleveland Museum of Art

Page from Tales of a Parrot (Tuti-nama): text page

Date: c. 1560
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
Object ID: 137844

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

The book of the Tuti-nama from which this page comes consists of 341 folios, or 682 pages. The 52 tales told by the parrot Tuti to his mistress Khujasta and the overarching frame story about Khujasta herself are all written in Persian. Here the form of the script is called naskh and is read from right to left. The word in blue means “cut,” which indicates that the prose narrative will cut to a poetic verse. The Tuti-nama was written in 1329–30 by a Persian-speaking Sufi scholar and author from Central Asia. He based it on an earlier Persian work that recast a collection of Sanskrit fables from ancient India and other Persian tales. The blending of cultures and ethnicities long pre-dated the Mughals in India.

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Provenance & credit

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Credit line: Gift of Mrs. A. Dean Perry
Provenance: ?–1959: Estate of Breckinridge Long [1881–1958], Bowie, MD | 1959–1962?: (Harry Burke Antiques, Philadelphia, PA) | 1959?–1962: (Bernard Brown Agency, Milwaukee, WI, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Purchased with funds from Mrs. A. Dean [Helen Wade Greene] Perry) | 1962–: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH