Eland Antelope

Folio from a manuscript of Book of Pleasures for ‘Ala’(Nuzhatnama-yi ‘Ala’i) by Shahmardan b. Abi al-Khayr Razi

• Accession Number:AKM59
• Creator:Author: Shahmardan b. Abi al-Khayr Razi, Persian, active ca. 1072-1120
  Created for: `Ala' al-Dawla Khass Beg
• Place:Iran
• Dimensions:34.5 cm x 15.6 cm
• Date:ca. 1450
• Materials and Technique:opaque watercolour, gold and ink on paper

• This illustration once belonged to a manuscript of Nuzhatnama-yi ‘Ala’i, an early 12th-century encyclopaedic text on the “the characteristics, uses, and natures of man and the animals: carnivores, wild animals, and beasts, birds, reptiles, and insects; trees, plants, stones, gems, and substances.”[1] Named for its dedicatee—‘Ala al-Dawlah Abu Kalijar Garshasp, a prince of the Kakuyid line of rulers of the Iranian city of Yazd—the Nuzhatnama is a major work of medieval Islamic naturalism.

Further Reading

The painting depicts the “mountain cow” or “mountain stag” (gav-i kuhi), an animal that may be identifiable as the eland antelope (Taurotragus oryx), a bovine native to the savannahs of Africa.[2] According to the text, the eland is the enemy of snakes, and the author relates a tale of an eland which, while fleeing a pack of dogs, stops to kill a snake despite the risk to his own life. The author writes: “This is wondrous!”

Following a convention for scientific and historical illustrated manuscripts in the medieval Islamic world, the pictures in this copy of the Nuzhatnama portray animal and vegetal subjects in a somewhat flat, stylized manner, from single-point perspective, and occupying a horizontal band across the width of the page.

— Michael Chagnon

Notes
[1] Quoted from the text’s introduction in Anna Contadini, “A Wonderful World: Folios from a Dispersed Manuscript of the ‘Nuzhat-Nama’,” Muqarnas 21 (2004), 96.
[2] M. Schwartz notes that the old Persian word gav (cow) came to refer in general to animals, and that gav-i kuhi can be glossed as “deer.” See M. Schwartz, “The Old Eastern Iranian World View According to the Avesta,” The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 2: The Median and Achaemenian Periods, ed. I. Gershevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 645–6.

References
Contadini, Anna. “A Wonderful World: Folios from a Dispersed Manuscript of the ‘Nuzhat-Nama’,” Muqarnas 21 (2004), 96. ISBN: 9781433705359 
Schwartz, M. “The Old Eastern Iranian World View According to the Avesta,” The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 2: The Median and Achaemenian Periods, ed. I. Gershevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 645–6. ISBN: 9780511467738