The Beginnings of Divination
In 16th-century Iran and Turkey, where Persian, the literary language of Iran, was also used at court, it inspired some of the most intriguing book paintings ever.
These were prompted by a peculiar literary genre, the Fal-Nameh, or Book of Omens, which took off around the 1560s and lasted at least until the early 18th century. The first exhibition ever on the subject, put together by Massumeh Farhad, chief curator at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, may, with luck, lead to discoveries that will throw some light on its mysterious emergence.
For the moment neither the admirable display contrived by Dr. Farhad, nor the highly important exhibition book edited by the Iranian scholar and her Turkish colleague Serpil Bagci, gives a clue to the fundamental enigma of the 16th-century Fal-Nameh production: how and why was the jump made from the brief additions to Koran manuscripts explaining in Persian how to use these for reading omens, to full-blown volumes of text with complex, large-size paintings? And how is it that so few of these volumes have come to our attention, suggesting that the production was extremely limited?
Of these, three, written in Persian, are considered by the authors of the exhibition book to have been created in Iran. The fourth manuscript, in Turkish, was clearly produced in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul. Sadly, the earliest of all, a Persian manuscript executed in the 1550s or the 1560s as demonstrated by the style of the paintings, was broken up by the time it reached Europe and the text apparently thrown away as was common practice in the 20th-century Western trade. From the passages surviving on the back of the paintings, it is clear that the version of the 1550s diverged significantly from one other Persian manuscript of the 1580s in the Topkapi Palace Museum, as well as from a third manuscript, the only one intact, now in Dresden.
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