Focus on the Shanama

In 2010 we will celebrate the millennium of the Shahnama. To commemorate the occasion, the Islamic Manuscript Association (TIMA) has sponsored the John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester to digitise a complete, illustrated Shahnama manuscript, dating from the Safawid period. The high resolution images are now freely accessible for purposes of research, teaching and learning via the Rylands digital image collections.

Previous digitisation projects have concentrated on the highly visual, i.e. the illustrated pages of a manuscript. This project closely adheres to TIMA’s ambition to open access to textual resources, offering new opportunities for codicology and textual criticism.

Rylands Persian MS 932

“This beautiful manuscript of Firdousi’s immortal poem was the finest in the library of the King of Oude”; thus was Rylands Persian MS 932 described by Turner Macan in a note on folio 1a of the manuscript. It is dated to year 949 of the Hegira (CE 1542). There are 604 folios, with 4 columns of 23 lines to each page. In addition to beautiful illumination, there are 38 miniatures in the Shiraz style. The text of this manuscript is of particular significance as it was one of the copies used by Macan when collating the first European edition of the Shahnama. The digitised version will provide free international access to this manuscript for Islamic scholars wherever they are based.