Beschreibung:

Nur ad-Din Abd'ul Rahman Jami, Haft Awrang, comprising 4 parts only, in Farsi, illuminated manuscript on paper [Timurid Persia, second half of fifteenth century] 4 parts in 1 volume, 180 leaves (plus 2 flyleaves), uncollatable, lacking at least 6 leaves, 4 columns, 21 lines fine black nasta'liq, 4 illuminated chapter headings for each of the sections, in blue, turquoise and gold, with headings in white eastern kufic script, 8 illuminated miniatures in the text, lightly rubbed and faded in places, illuminated headings and miniatures offset to facing pages, a few scuff marks, 3 leaves torn with loss and a few closed tears to 4 other leaves, catch-words throughout, ink inscriptions and ex libris stamps to upper pastedown, 232 by 170 mm.; eighteenth-century morocco, ruled and tooled in blind with centrally stamped cartouches also in blind, spine chipped and rubbed with slight loss to leather, corners bumped Provenance: Hagop Kevorkian collection, their number 550 on label on upper pastedown. Text: The present manuscript includes 4 chapters from Jami's famous Haft Awrang including Yusuf wa Zulaikha, Leili wa' Majnun and Khardnama Iskandari. This manuscript presents something of a chronological enigma. The texts are apparently dated 813 (being either 410 in Hijri years of 1435 in Shamsi years) at the end of each major section; yet this is a few decades before modern scholarship agrees the text was composed. Certainly the present manuscript is of the fifteenth century, and thus among the very earliest manuscripts to survive, perhaps produced within the author's own lifetime. It should be noted that the hand of these dates is not that of the main scribe, and may have been that of a near-contemporary who perhaps added these dates to denote an erroneous record of the text's copying or even its composition.