Firdawsi’s Shahnama (Book of Kings, completed 1010) preserves a wondrous tale wherein the daughter of the poor townsman, Haftvad, bites into an apple to find a worm inside it. When she nurses the tiny worm, it grants her good luck so that she spins more yarn than ever before. As she and her family continue to nourish the creature, their fortunes increase along with the worm’s size, eventually leading to the rise of Haftvad as a warlord. By this point, the colossal worm demands a cultish entourage to feed it rice, milk, and honey. In this scene, Ardashir I (r. 211-224), the heroic founder of the Sasanian dynasty, goes undercover to slay the giant worm that terrorized the land and threatened his power. Posing as a merchant of sundry goods, he offers to feed the worm for three days. However, instead of its expected meal, he feeds the worm molten lead to quell this growing threat. Here, the worm receives this deadly brew in a giant cistern, which once shone silver before its painted pigments oxidized with age.

In an unusual twist for the Shahnama, the tale highlights the role of a common woman, a disregarded daughter who spins yarn to help her struggling family before this miraculous discovery elevates her to become a guardian to the mighty worm. This strange tale circulated even prior to Firdawsi’s famous retelling of pre-Islamic Iranian history, most notably in Pahlavi texts written during the Sasanian dynasty and the highly rationalized version in the history of al-Tabari (d. 923). As illustrated Shahnamas gained favor at Persianate courts centuries later, artists typically re-envisioned these tales to reflect their contemporary settings. Therefore, paintings like the episode depicted here mirror rich details of Timurid and Turkman architecture. In particular, the tower behind the worm’s pool prominently features banna’i brick designs, wherein glazed bricks were alternated with plain counterparts to create patterns with a distinctive, almost “woven” appearance. Additionally, the ceramic tile panel above the doorway offers a common title taken up by rulers of the period: “the just sultan,” possibly alluding to the original patron of the manuscript.

Only a handful of Timurid Shahnamas, produced prior to the 1430s, survive 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.