Volume 29, Number 15 · October 7, 1982
The Very Rich Hours of the Shah
By Michael Levey
The Houghton Shahnameh
introduced and described by Martin Bernard Dickson, by Stuart Cary Welch
Harvard University Press, Vol. II 564 pp., $2,000(the set)
Although it is at once both more and rather less than an exact facsimile of a supremely rich and richly illustrated sixteenth-century Persian manuscript, this publication of the Houghton Shahnameh puts one uniquely into the position of its first recipient, the Turkish Sultan Selim II. On the big scale of the original itself, it has impressive weight both physically and aesthetically, and enough blazing color to have warmed the winter's day in 1568 when it reached the Ottoman court. Brought from Tabriz to the sultan's island palace at Edirne, it was in fact only one of the array of 'rare and propitious gifts' the chroniclers describe as chosen and sent by the Shah Tahmasb of Persia and carried by thirty-four camels to celebrate the accession of the new sultan, son of the great ruler Süleyman the Magnificent.
Review, 3370 words
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