Calligraphy (c. 1596): Art, History and Details

Calligraphy (c. 1596) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Basavana (Indian, active c. 1560–1600); Sur Das (Indian).

The work and its context

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

Akbar, the third Mughal emperor of India, commissioned an illustrated copy of the Chingiz-nama, a historical text written in Persian during the early 1300s by a Jewish scholar who converted to Islam. The Chingiz-nama is an account of the conquests of Akbar’s ancestors, the Mongols, who swept across the Asian continent from Siberia to the Mediterranean Sea during the 1200s. This page describes the final momentous defeat of the caliph of Baghdad, the religious head of Sunni Islam and political leader of the Abbasid dynasty, with the names of all the caliphs who came before him listed in red at the top.

Object facts

• Title: Calligraphy
• Date: c. 1596
• Creator attribution: Basavana (Indian, active c. 1560–1600); Sur Das (Indian)
• Culture: Mughal India, court of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605)
• Type: Calligraphy
• Technique: Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 34 x 20 cm (13 3/8 x 7 7/8 in.); Overall: 38.5 x 25 cm (15 3/16 x 9 13/16 in.); with mat: 49 x 36.3 cm (19 5/16 x 14 5/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1947.502.b

A detail from the museum

This fortified city in the heart of Kurdistan, now called Irbil, is in Iraq.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.

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.