The siege of Arbela in the era of Hulagu Khan

Sur Das Gujarati (16th century)

Item type:

painting

Date of creation:

ca. 1596

Height:

34.0 cm  (13 3/8 in.)

Width:

20.0 cm  (7 7/8 in.)

Technique / Medium:

opaque colour on paper

ink and gold on paper

Place of creation:

Bhārat [India]

Description

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. There are a group of musicians to the right of the siege playing a tikara, a trumpet, and kartals.

Instruments [MIMO Code] (notes)

End-blown trumpet [6556]
Kartal [6037]
Tikara [2906]

RIdIM images

Image URLs

image link 1

Notes

From a Chingiz-nama (Book of Chingiz Khan) of the Jami al-tavarikh (Compendium of Chronicles) of Rashid al-Din (Persian, 1247–1318)

RIdIM record id

5184