Basil Gray: La Peinture persane, Genève 1961 Skira, 191 pages, 80 coloured miniatures, general index, index of Μ SS, chronological bibliography, map, 4°
This work is of particular interest for Turkish art historians, not only because it deals with the history of book-painting in neighbouring Persia to which historical and cultural ties link Turkey, but also because the area covered by Mr Gray includes a milieu in which Turkish art developed. For this reason, while reviewing this new contribution to the history of Islamic art, I will take the liberty to add a few considerations from a Turkish point of view.
In attempting to outline the history of Persian book-painting, the author is faced with an initial difficulty: to our present knowledge, there is no pictorial evidence of the existence of an ancient tradition of book-painting in Persia and there are only scant remains of wall paintings. The author is thus brought in his own words to reconstruct “à partir d’indices incertains qu’appuient parfois de rares données écrites, l’histoire de la peinture persane antérieure à taoo" (p. 13). After assuming that certain passages describing the paintings of royal palaces in the Shahnâmah apply to Sassanian Persia (others such as Coyajee[1], have associated some Persian kings of the Shahnâmah with the Parthians), the author concludes that Sassanian painting must have existed (p. 12). He suggests that it could have had a partly hellenized local style similar to Parthian painting and searches around the boundaries of Persia for possible analogies.
Central Asia where an important school of painting, extending from West Turkestan to Kansu, flourished and left numerous splendid works, dating from the third to the twelfth century (the earliest and latest periods in East Turkestan also), is an evident searching ground for those elements in Islamic painting that are not Near-Eastern. In Central Asia however, the path of the historian of Persian art crosses the steps of those who are looking for the artistic manifestations of the Scythians, the Saka, the old and the new Kushans, the Tocharians, the Soghdians, the Eastern and European Huns, the White Huns, the Western and other Turks such as the Uygurs, in short, of various peoples who for thousands of years have lived in or crossed the Central Asian area. We may cite here the archeologists Tolstov[2] and Okladnikov[3] who have both expressed the belief that the gradual infiltration of the Eastern Huns and of the Turks in Central Asian Scythia as far as Khwarazm, has started possibly earlier and certainly not later than the fourth century before the Christian era (the period of Pazifik). This fact gives, from the fourth century B. C. onwards, a complex local character to Central Asian art. Thus when the author of La Peinture persane attempts to define what Sassanian painting might have been like, by noting the common elements between the fifth century painting of Dukhtar i-Nûshirvân in Afghanistan, the paintings of Panj-kent in Soghd (p. 13-4), the red grounds used in Tun-huang in Kansu, he is according to our point of view, only attesting the homogeneity of Central Asian painting, from its western Turkestani regions to its eastern Khatayan borders. The red grounds that the author indicates as having been propagated İn the fourth and fifth centuries from Persia to Tun-huang were also a feature of Khwarazmian kurgans before the Christian era,[3] and of the third century A. C. Eastern Turkestani Buddhist temple of Miran. Red and blue are colours having symbolic significations in Uygur cosmology[4] which, might have borrowed these concepts from earlier traditions. In short, the author’s definition of Sassanian art may as well apply to Central Asian art.
The paintings of Panj-kent, as well as the paintings not mentioned by the author in Toprak Kal’ah, Varakhshah, and Balalık-tepe, are the specimens of the western branch of Turkestani painting. The style and colouring of the western Turkestani wall paintings, as well as the figures with their slanted eyes and their braided “à la turque” hair, are certainly related to the paintings of East Turkestan. In what concerns Balalık-tepe, A. Albaum has compared the costumes and cup-holding rites of some figures to the Turkish balbals. Mr Gray cites certain scholars who thought to recognize in some Panj-kent representations, the Iranian Central Asian myth of Rustam. Others identify another group with the Western Turks[5].
It is not only after 728 that Turkestan was turkicized (p. 14). At the time of the Arab conquest even Khorassan had a Turkish character[5]. In the country beyond the Amu-darya which was already significantly called Turkestan (the land of the Turks), separate communities of Turks and Iranians, as well as mixed groups, mostly governed by Turkish princes, are mentioned in early Moslem sources. The ancient Iranian title of Ikhshid was born by a Turkish family as corroborated by the name of the founder of the Egyptian branch, b. Togaç[6]. According to tradition, the Arabs arrived to Bukhara in 674 and found there a Turkish dynasty who had the pretension of having reigned for twenty two generations in the area[7]. The queen regent Kabaç (or Kayıg) Hatun has allegedly been represented amongst the paintings of Qusair ’Amra. In Soghd where the Arabs arrived in 709, there reigned a Turkish Tarhan[8].
Mr Gray remarks that the interpenetration of Persians and Turks in the Shahnâmah may reflect the events at the time of the composition of the poem. A theory advanced by some scholars that the Turanians were also another category of Iranians and that the Turk Afrasiyab was in reality an Iranian has been disproved by Turkish sources. The eleventh century Kutadgu-bilig, the Divân of Kaşgarlı Mahmud, and other texts have confirmed the Shahnâmah in establishing the Turanian Afrasiyab (in Turkish Alp-er-tunga) as a legendary Turkish hero known to most Turks and whose adventures and aphorisms were repeated since many generations.
Mr Gray finds the origin of Persian book-painting in the land of the Uygurs. It may not be unnecessary to outline here briefly the history of Uygur painting[9]. The Uygurs who had succeeded to the Tukiues in Mongolia had lived in the region of Kara-balgasun. They adopted Manicheism in 763 from the Chinese. In 811 they settled in Turfan where one witnesses the development of Manichean and Buddhist Turfanese Uygur art. They spread to the regions of eastern Tienshan where between the ninth and twelvth centuries they painted mostly Buddhist and Nestorian Christian paintings. One branch, called the Yellow Uygurs, was established in Kansu, this cradle of the Turkish race[10]. Strzygowski[11] and Diez have shown the contribution of the Uygurs in the paintings of the Tunhuang Mingoy. In relating the destruction of the Uygur kingdom by the Mongols, in the thirteenth century, Juwaini[12] attests the continuation of the artistic tradition of the Uygurs, by describing a representation of the genealogical tree of the Idikut. Rubruck also saw the works of art of the Uygur monks. Some turcologists consider the Oğuz epos in Uygur script of the Paris Bibl. Nat. and consequently its illustrations, as works of the thirteenth century. After the thirteenth century, the Uygurs were disseminated to the east and to the west of their home, carrying to other centers of art the tradition of a five centuries old school of painting. In Turfan, a group of book-illustrations were discovered, dating approximately from the sixth to the tenth centuries, containing texts in Soghdian, in middle Iranian as well as in Uygur Turkish languages and scripts. The earlier works are generally attributed to pre-Uygur local Manicheans, while the later book-paintings are Uygur[13]. Mr Gray suggests that these Manichean book-paintings are the work of Sassanian Persians who had been chased from Persia by the Arab conquest. Admittedly we know very little of what went on in the artistic formation of Eastern Turkestan, in the cross currents of Tocharian, Hunnic, Turkish and Chinese elements. Including the Shahnâmah and Dost Muhammad, most Islamic sources indicate that the miraculous paintings of Mani originated in Khitay or on the borders of Khitay, or in the land of the Çigil[14] (a Turkish people according to Kaşgarlı Mahmud). One may wonder if the pre-Uygur Manichean book-paintings could not be linked with Eastern Turkestani wall-paintings to which, as Le Coq notes[13], they are stylistically related. The Eastern Turkestanis had been amongst the first, after the Chinese, to make paper[13] (they have also practiced and perhaps invented xylography and even a primitive form of printing)[15]. The above suggestion does not exclude possible foreign influences, such as that of illumined “äw(a)-nglion”s (Uygur word for Bible) brought in by the Eurasian Christian Turks.
The rider of Nishapur in Khorassan, said to wear a possibly Turkish belt is depicted by the author. The works of Lashkari Bazar and Gaznah in Afghanistan are also mentioned. The illustration by Chinese painters of a Kalila and Dimna MS, belonging to the Samanid Nasr II, is quoted. One may here introduce a parenthesis, concerning the use of the term China (Sin or Hitay) in the Moslem Middle Ages. According to Kaşgarlı Mahmud who, as an Eastern Turkestani Turk, is perhaps the most qualified author on this subject, Sin or Hitay includes the land of the Tavgaç (the Topa who were a people of Turkish stock and ruled Northern China under the name of Wei), the country of the Uygurs and the province of Kaşgar[16]. Sharaf al-Zamän Tahir Marvazi (of Marv) also divides China in three regions: Sin, Khitay and Yugur (Uygur)[17] Almost all Islamic authors of the Middle Ages assimilate the non-Moslem Uygur Turks to the Chinese. The term Chinese or Khitayi is given indifferently to the Chinese, to the non-Moslem Turks and sometimes to the Mongols or to the Kara-Khitay. The caution with which the word Khitayi or Sini mutt be interpreted, applies also to the translations of the word ‘Ajam, used both for Persians and Turks by the Arabs who called the foreign “barbarians” ‘Ajam.
In ‘Abbasî Iraq where our author's search for the origins of Persian book-painting takes us also, we are reminded that the cities of Moslem Iraq, Bagdad and Samarra were under the sway of Sassanian art (p. 15). These cities founded in a land of ancient autochtonous civilization were also in close contact with the Central Asian and particularly the Turkish world. The city of Samarra was founded by the Turk Ashnas in 836. In Samarra there was a Turkish quarter and streets bearing Turkish names[18]. H. Gluck has established Turkish motifs and techniques in the ornamental décor of Samarra, his views being supported by several Austrian and German scholars[19]. There were in, Abbasî Iraq, not only Turkish soldiers and princes and princesses, but also members of the learned classes, such as the celebrated philosopher and musician Farabi al-Turki, the various astronomers of the Amagur lineage, as Abu al Q. al b. Magur al-Turki[20] whose forefather had come to Bagdad as the ambassador of the Turkish Kaan. Mr Gray mentions the auto-da-fe of gold illumined Manichean books, attributed to Persian Manicheans, in 943, in the city of Bagdad. A similar event occurred in 841, when the Afshin of Usrushanâ, a Central Asian Turkish prince (Tabari mentions that his great-grandfather’s name was Kara Bugra[21], Turkish for Black Camel) was prosecuted, amongst other accusations, for the possesion of idols and of a gold and silver illumined and enriched, non-Moslem religious book. When the judge questioned the Afshin about the origin of the book, the Turkish prince answered that he had inherited it from his “barbarian” fathers, that is from Turkestan. The Afshin added that the judge himself possesed such a book, a Kalila and Dimna[21]
The Selçuk school of book-painting is analyzed in its Iraqi aspect. Mr Gray links the Galen and Dioscurides MSS, as well as the illustrations of the Topkapı Warqah and Gulshâh[31] to Iraq. Holter Connects the Vienna Galen with Turkish art. After remarking that the Bagdad school of book-painting had been founded by the Selçuk Turks, Diez also finds many resemblances between the Iraqi Selçuk and the Uygur book-paintings[22].
The author touches another subject of special interest for Turkish art by connecting the figural drawings representing star groups in the illustrations of the Abu ’Abd al-Rahmân al-Süfî manuscripts with the Samarra figures. The Library of Süleymaniye posesses such a manuscript written and most probably illustrated with the same pen, by Hibbet-Allah b. Abd al-J. b. I. b. S. b. A. b. Y. b. B. al-Jîlî (or al-Khottali), called Suwar al-Kawâkib and numbered Fatih 3422. The work was composed in 529 A. H. in the castle of Mardin, that is in Turkey, in the Turkish Artıkoğlu (Ortokid) period. Mr Z. Oral has related İn his communication to the Vlth congress of Turkish history that al-Sûfî had dedicated a book to the fourth Artıkoğlu king, Kara Arslan. Strzygowski had considered the Artıkoğlu surrounding as a probable center for the propagation in the Near East, of the Central Asian motifs brought by the Turks[23]. Together with the twelfth century illustrations of automata dedicated to the Sultan of Diyarbakr[24] and the paintings of Nâsir at-Din Sivasi’s treatiese on sorcery dated 1272, composed in Aksaray and in Kayseri (Bibl. Nat. Persan 174), the Al-Sûfî book offers some of the earliest book-illustrations that one may associate with Anatolian Turkish painting. The figures represented in this group have a special graphic style and more elongated proportions than the usual Selçuk personages. In the Aksaray MS, the astrologie figures present curious combinations between the many headed and armed bodhisatvas of Uygur Koço and the angels of Byzantine art. Some of these figures were to remain unchanged prototypes, repeated in Anatolian books on sorcery and astrology, such as the D'awatnâmah of the University of Istanbul Library.
The Mongol, İlhanlı and Calayirh periods are placed by Mr Gray under the sign of Chinese and Near Eastern Christian influnces. Buddhist Central Asian influx under the reign of Argun is noted. The importance of Central Asian painting as a component element of Islamic book-painting is particularly evident if one remembers that the Mongols had adopted the script, the Buddhist faith and the culture of the Uygurs, that they had brought groups of Uygurs to the Near East and that the Uygurs had since the eighth to the twelfth century produced book-painting in East Turkestan. Prof. Togan has published in vol. Ill, fase. I of the İslâm Araştırmaları Enstitüsü Dergisi, a Waqfnâmah regulating the staff of Rashid a!-Din’s center for arts and crafts in Tabriz.[25] The names of twenty Turks are given who are said to be engaged, amongst other occupations, in painting and calligraphy. With the exception of one, these names could be non-Moslem Uygur names. Three men bear, in addition to their Turkish names, the surname of Khitayl (Ayaz, Altın Boka, Suiti).
The above mentioned Uygur and pre-Uygur Turfan book-paintings, the Kara- khoto astrologic illustrations, the Al-Balkhi treatise on astrology dated around 1240 (Bibl. Nat. Arabe 2583), the two miniatures on p. 60 verso in Album H. 2152 of Topkapı to which Dr Ettinghausen finds “a Turco-Mongol flavour[26], the Jâm’i al-tawârikh of the Royal Asiatic Society, made in West Turkestan and the Demotte Shahnâmah related by Diez to Uygur painting,[26] the Athâr al-bâqıyah of Edinburgh and the Jam’i al-tawârikh H. 1654 of Topkapı about which Kühnel[26] makes a similar observation, and also the ninth to twefth century Uygur wall-paintings provide important materials on the influence of Central Asia on Near Eastern painting. We have to remark also that in the fourteenth century, to disentangle Persian painting from Turkish painting is as difficult as to decide whether Charlemagne was a German or a Frenchman. The Inner Asian Turkish populations driven by the Mongols were settling in Adharbayjan and establishing a natural unity with their congeners in Anatolia. The rule of the Near Eastern Mongols extended over parts of Khorassan, Adharbayjan, Iran, Iraq and Anatolia. The Manâf'i al-Hayawân of the Morgan Library written in Maragha in 1298 is dedicated to Gazan Han, King of kings of the Turks, of the Arabs and of the ‘Ajam (non Arab). Mr Gray attempts a detailed and informative description of important manuscripts and notes the appearance of an epic style characteristic neither of Chinese nor of Persian art. May we add that this epic style is observed in all centers where Turkish artists have worked and is seen to culminate in Ottoman art. The peaceful influence of Buddhism had transformed the epic spirit of the Uygurs in mysticism. Forceful expressions are yet common in Uygur literature :
Kalan kayık müyüzü tag, atıng küüng kötlürgài !
(May thy name and renown be as the horn of the storming unicorn!)[27] The potential strength of the Turkish spirit has brought into the Ottoman genre pictures an expressionism sometimes bordering to the extreme. The epic spirit defined by Mr Gray may be the contribution of the Turks or the Mongols, while the Iranian apport could be the poetical atmosphere so characteristic of Persian painting and literature.
Reaching the Timur! period, Mr Gray establishes links between the school of Shiraz and the Central Asian schools of Samarkand and Herat. The Uygur M'irajnâmah of Herat (Bibl. Nat. suppl. turc 190) is contested as a Turkish work and placed in the line of development of Persian book-painting. In our view, apart from the fact that the main text is in turkish and in Uygur script, the illustrations bear many resemblances to the works of pre-Moslem Uygur artists : we will mention as an example a many-headed angel similar to the Uygur Avalokitesvaras of Koço[27] and Toyok, as well as the physical types and costumes, the flying belts, the flaming haloes, the lotus-hats and top-knots of other angels. Like most Timuri centers, Samarkand and Herat cultivated also Turkish art and literature. Around Timur and his artistically and poetically endowed descendants, as well as around the great Turkish poet Ali Shir and his father Kikine Bahÿi, who according to Haydar Mirza Doğlat were of Uygur stock, there were Turkish artists such as Günk, Abd al-Hay Musawwir of Tabriz,[28] Yusuf Naqqash, Muhammad Tabriz!, Mahmud Mudhahhib and Dervish Muhammad Türk. The first part of the Ali Shir compendium (Bibl. Nat. suppl. turc 316) was illustrated by Mahmud Mudhahhib. In the Mu'iz al-ansab (Bibl. Nat., ancien persan 68), the painter Haji Mahmüd (Mr Togan thinks that this may be Mahmud Mudhahhib) is called an Uygur.[28] Moreover, there are in the miscellany albums of Topkapı, Islamic works bearing Uygur inscriptions, in the same ink or paint, such as the series of Timuri médaillon portraits and the gold illumined hawk with the citation in Uygur script from the Muhabbal-nâmah, a poetical work in Central Asian Turkish. To return to the Uygur M'irajnâmah, one may consider the noble paintings of this manuscript as an islamized version of the religious fervour apparent in the Buddhist paintings of Koço and in the literature of the Uygurs. The M’irajnâmah is part of the Turkish heritage (some of its text is in Eastern Anatolian or Adharbayjan Turkish with Arabic letters. The MS was found in Istanbul). Linked in the past with Uygur art, its style continued in the religious paintings of the Ottomans.
Mr Gray touches also the subject of the drawings and paintings of undetermined origin in albums H. 2153, 2154, 2160 of Topkapı. Associating a group of miniatures with the Kara and Ak-koyunlu areas (p. tot), he seems to ascribe the animal sketches and the weird figures and animal demons attributed to Ustad Muhammad (Siyah Kalam) to a refined artist who had travelled in the Turco-Mongol steppe. The author mentions the painter Giyath al-Din who had been amongst a group of emissaries of Shah-Rukh to Khitay and had thus seen the paintings of Khotan and admired Buddhist works. But Mr Gray rejects the theory that these paintings may have originated in Timur! circles. In the opinion of Prof. Z. V. Togan who has studied more than twenty miscellany albums of Topkapı and looked for documents in the chronicles of the time, Ustad Muhammad must be the Turkish painter Haji Muhammad of Herat. This artist had also been in the Ak-Koyunlu court in Iraq and later returned and died in Herat. He had once tried to make Chinese porcelain[29]. It is difficult to accept the label of iranised Türkmen school suggested for these paintings by Mr Gray (p. 104). The Türkmens have very characteristic ways and costumes differing from those of the Kirgiz-Kazak world to which these paintings are nearer. In any case, Ustad Muhammad must have been a great Inner-Asian artist familiar with the habits and costumes of the black and white kams and with the tales of giants and animal demons of the Turks.
After studying the school of Bukhara, the author ends his study with the Safawi period. Here again, we will remark that in Qâdï Ahmad’s chronicle,[30] one reads the names of several Turkish painters who contributed to this school of Persian painting.
In short, one may say that to those who are interested in Islamic painting. La Miniature persane offers information and a sensitive analysis of the artistic merits of many manuscripts, as well as eighty excellent colour reproductions. As the earlier comprehensive works on the same subject are out of print, Mr Gray’s book has the additional merit of being available for those who would like to introduce to their libraries a new and important work on Islamic book-painting.
EMEL ESİN