An East African King Receives Three Emissaries, from a Khamsa of Amir Khusrau Dihlavi (c. 1450): Art, History and Details

An East African King Receives Three Emissaries, from a Khamsa of Amir Khusrau Dihlavi (c. 1450) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The text on this page discusses the wars between Morocco and Zang, a region of eastern Africa centered in present-day Ethiopia. In the painting the King of Zang meets three envoys. The dramatic gesture of the Zangi king, who stretches out one hand as he takes an enormous stride toward the envoys, identifies him as a powerful, assertive figure. This page is from the first known manuscript of a Persian literary text illustrated by an Indian artist, who had probably been trained in the Jain manuscript tradition. The figures are arranged on one plane in a straight line against a flat red background, typical of manuscript painting in India in the 1400s.

Object facts

• Title: An East African King Receives Three Emissaries, from a Khamsa of Amir Khusrau Dihlavi
• Date: c. 1450
• Culture: India, Sultanate period
• Type: Painting
• Technique: gum tempera and ink on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 28.6 x 21.6 cm (11 1/4 x 8 1/2 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1963.261

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Leach, Linda York. Indian Miniature Paintings and Drawings. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1986.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.