Perhaps one of the most fearsome warriors of Firdawsi’s Shahnama (Book of Kings, completed 1010) was Isfandiyar, the crown prince who briefly bested the hero Rustam in one of the longest battles of the epic. Before Rustam enacted his revenge by mortally wounding his nemesis with an arrow through the eye, Isfandiyar undertook seven “labors” or exploits that earned him a celebrated place in this literary imagining of pre-Islamic history in Iran. The adventure depicted on this folio is “How Isfandiyar Slew the Simurgh.” Fresh from his earlier successes, Isfandiyar celebrates with his compatriots, only to receive a new challenge to slay the simurgh in its mountainous lair. The painting captures the height of the action as Isfandiyar charges at the simurgh in his armored vehicle, eventually striking the creature until it and its chicks perish in a bloody death. True to the fashions of the period, the fiery simurgh takes the form of a Chinese phoenix, reflecting the rich cross-cultural exchanges leading up to the production of this manuscript that stoked a range of Chinese-inspired works.

Simurghs play a significant role in the Shahanama, most notably as the guardian of the family of Zal, the albino ruler of Sistan and father to the great hero Rustam. Since Zal was reared by a simurgh after his father abandoned him in the Alborz Mountain, the creature bestows upon him one of her feathers so that he may call upon her protection by burning it whenever he encounters danger or injury. He does so twice: First, when his wife Rudabah encounters difficulties giving birth to Rustam, the simurgh arrives to counsel Zal on how to perform a caesarean section and use her feathers to heal the wound. Secondly, much later, when Rustam sustains severe injuries after his duel with Isfandiyar, the simurgh pulls the arrows from his body and again wields her feathers to mend his wounds along with those of his horse, Raksh. The simurgh then gives Rustam advice on how to defeat Isfandiyar by crafting an arrow from the tamarisk branch to shoot in his eye. For a later rendering of that battle scene, see M.2009.44.4. In the episode depicted here, a separate simurgh suffers at the hands of Isfandiyar, perhaps prompting the guardian of Zal’s family to aid in hastening this warrior’s downfall.

Only a handful of Timurid Shahnamas, produced prior to the 1430s, survive intact to this day. Yet the production of Shahnamas from the latter half of the century escalated so that close to fifty illustrated copies remain today. The vast majority of these manuscripts originated from the prolific workshops in Shiraz, which the Timurids lost to the Turkmans in 1452. Under the patronage and support of the city’s new Turkman rulers, Shirazi artists fused Timurid and Turkmen styles to create distinctive works that would continue to develop, attracting patrons well into the sixteenth century. Illuminated motifs and compositional elements of this folio (and others likely from the same manuscript), draw on earlier Timurid examples, including the Shahnama of Ibrahim Sultan (d. 1435), the devoted princely patron of manuscripts who governed over Fars, the province encompassing the administrative center of Shiraz. Though the patrons of these Turkman manuscripts from late fifteenth-century are seldom named, their workshops may have catered towards wealthy commercial buyers or commissions from regional courts. This work marks one of five folios from the same Shahnama now residing at LACMA.

The relaxed, though brief, diplomatic relations between the Ming court in China and that of the Ibrahim Sultan’s father, Shahrukh (r. 1405-1447), opened the door to a renewed wave of chinoiserie production that shaped the depiction of the simurgh here. The form of the phoenix marks just one of the many Chinese motifs that filled the visual repertoire of Timurid and Turkman artists. Other motifs include dragons, qilin (a one-horned quadruped with dragon-like features), stylized clouds, among other imagery found across media. Yet the phoenix in particular offered a fresh way of envisioning creatures that had inhabited the imaginations of Arab and Persian writers for centuries. The phoenix quickly become the preferred form for representing the Persian simurgh found in epics, like the Shahnama, and in mystic poetry, like ‘Attar’s Conference of the Birds.