ORIGINAL TITLE: Golestan

PRONUNCIATION: Rose Garden

MATERIAL: Hand-Written/Painted

TYPE: Manuscript

DIMENSIONS: 170 x 120mm

COMPONENTS: 183 leaves, perhaps missing ten original leaves, these skillfully replaced in manuscript facsimile and volume thus textually complete, single and double column, 9 lines elegant black nasta’liq, chapter headings in gold, with interlinear translations in Chagatai, decorated headpiece with calligraphic panel above the first text-page, colophon to recto of last folio, catch-words, leaves ruled in black and gold, verses marked with clusters of three red dots.

CONDITION: Some early annotations and commentary to margins, a few light spots and scuff marks, else bright copy, modern black morocco, re-sewn and re-cased.

NOTES: The first manuscript of this kind offered on the open market in years.

LANGUAGE

Farsi Chagatai

ITEM ID: 4523

Illuminated Manuscript in Chagatai

Religious

Islam

DATE

Decade: 1530s

Century: 16th (1501-1600)

Notes: Dated 940 AH (1533/34 AD)]

A rare 500 year-old manuscript written in Chagatai.

Written in Persian with a Chagatai (Old Uzbek) translation in smaller script between the lines dated. It was written in Central Asia-possibly Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan, and the subject matter is “The Rose Garden” by the revered Persian poet Sa’di Shirazi.

Scholar François Clément de Blois commented, “Chaghatai is what is now also called Old Uzbek. Your manuscript contains the Persian text of Sa’di’s book, with a Turkic translation in smaller script between the lines.”

ARTISTS

Name: Muhsin al-Din Sa’di Shirazi
Type: Poet
Born In: Shiraz, 1210 AD
Artist Information: Sa’di Shirazi is thought to be one of the most revered poetic and prose writers of the classical form in Persian history. This is his most influential collection of poems and short stories, the Golestan (Rose Garden). He is also remembered as a great sufi mystic leader, whose works and teachings transcended national and linguistic barriers, and were translated across the wider Middle East. The present volume is written in the lost Turkic language of Chagatai that was the main literary language in Turkemenistan and widely spoken throughout central Asia. It was used by the early Mughal rulers, but started to dwindle in importance in the early twentieth century, and was subsequently replaced by modern Uzbek and Uyghur.

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