Persian World Histories in the Mongol Era

This collection of essays brings together codicological, historiographical and art-historical studies of Medieval Persian history manuscripts. The main subject is Rashīd al-Dīn’s Jāmiʿ al-tavārīkh (Compendium of Chronicles). Considered the first ‘world history’, it was originally written in Persian in the early fourteenth century, when vast areas of the Eurasian continent were under Mongol rule. There is also a particular focus on Persian manuscripts preserved in India, which have heretofore been largely ignored. Though developed and sophisticated, Japanese studies on the Jāmiʿ al-tavārīkh remain mostly unknown outside of Japan due to the language barrier. In this volume, Japanese scholars offer their East Asian perspective on this and other West Asian histories for the first time in English, using not only Persian but also Chinese and Sanskrit sources. Through a comparative analysis of a number of manuscripts, the volume tackles various questions concerning the production of texts during the Ilkhanid and Timurid periods. It reveals valuable clues regarding the sources used in historical writings, the process of writing, revising and illustrating the manuscripts, and the production of copies and recensions in the Persianate realms under Mongol rule.