Lives of the Prophets

An Illustrated Islamic Manuscript

BARBARA SCHMITZ

A survey of the Islamic manuscripts in the Rare Book and
Manuscript Library by this writer and a colleague from
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Dr. Rachel Milstein,
revealed a copy of Qisas al-Anbiya (Lives of the Prophets) dated
A.H.982/A.D. 1574 with thirty large miniatures. Part of a 1904
gift by James Dyneley Prince, James Speyer, and Jacob H. Schiff of
twenty-two illustrated and illuminated Persian and Arabic manu¬
scripts from the Reinhard collection, the manuscript is today only in
fair condition, but its program of illustrations, the majority showing
stories of prophets of the Old Testament, makes the codex of more
than routine interest.

The manuscript consists of 228 folios of thick polished paper .
measuring 12 V2 x 7 V4 inches with a ruled text block, 9 'A x 5 Vi 6
inches. Each page has twenty-one lines of prose text written in
nasta'liq script by the calligrapher Malik Muhammad ibn Darvish
Muhammad al-Katib, a scribe whose name is otherwise unre¬
corded. Folios 1 and 2 are nineteenth-century replacements. The
miniatures cover two-thirds to six-sevenths of the text block and
extra space is sometimes gained by extending the miniature and its
frame into the outer margin of the page. Special features of the min¬
iatures, such as towers, may disappear behind the writing and reap¬
pear in the upper margin.

A future detailed publication of the twenty-five known illustrated
copies of the Qisas al-Anbiya—including discussion of their various
authors and texts, illustration cycles, iconographic and stylistic
sources, and relationship to other illustrated Islamic texts of the lives
of the prophets—is planned by myself and Dr. Milstein. For an
English translation of one of the Arab versions of Qisas al-Anbiya see
Wheeler Thackston's The Tales of the Prophets of Kisa'i (Boston,
 

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