The ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt illustrated manuscript tradition in Iran

Record summary

Persian illustrated manuscripts of Wonders of Creation preserve images of dragons, giant birds, angels and other aerial or hybrid beings. Early twentieth-century museum catalogues and manuscript studies made several of these objects identifiable by collection, provenance and illustration. They are useful for comparing textual creature descriptions with visual conventions and for tracking how museum audiences encountered “unknown” beings. The images should be treated as manuscript art within a cosmological genre. Questions of dating, interpolation, restoration and attribution are more important here than claims about literal observation.