 Well, to begin with, an invitation to discuss Nézonie of Gange, as such, is like an invitation. Why don't you give us an hour's lecture on Shakespeare? Shakespeare? You mean Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet? No, Shakespeare, everything. Well, you can hardly do that for Shakespeare, and I would argue it's absolutely impossible to do that for Nézonie. We're the 12th century poet of Azir by John, and the English poet from late 16th century England have something in common. One could argue, and it has been pointed out, is that both in their respective civilizations created literary characters that came to be believed as absolutely real by the entire imagination of their respective cultures. For example, Romeo and Juliet, scholars know that Shakespeare took the story from an earlier English poet who himself took the story from a 16th century Italian novellista who himself took the story from earlier Italian stories that one can trace back to the early 14th century, and does anybody, since Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, read Romeo and Juliet in any of these earlier versions? Of course not. Even scholars first think of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and then Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet lives its life with such vigor, such power, that not only do French or Russian musicians use Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, or the US with Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story refer to Romeo and Juliet. In fact, they don't even have to refer to Romeo and Juliet because it's understood that, of course, they're talking about Shakespeare's play. And even Italians don't look at the Italian sources of Romeo and Juliet. They look at Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and maybe some scholar will come up with Bandello's version. For example, well, one can argue that the same thing happened with Nizami. Nizami created lovers. They existed, of course, in previous tradition, but it is safe to say that nobody in Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, India refers to Leilio Majnun, except first through the archetype created by Nizami at the end of the 12th century. This means that for the entire imagination of what one can call the Eastern Islamic world, Nizami's position ranks with that of Shakespeare's in the culture of the Western world. And as such, let me see. Do I know how to manipulate this machinery there? Now, when we look at a page like this, this was created for the Sultan of Herat in the 1490s. It's a beautiful manuscript of Nizami's complete poems, which is right here in the British Library. And it already gives away many of the things that we actually should know about the poet who had died in his native Azerbaijan in 1209. And nearly three centuries later, what do we read? We read in the name of God, merciful and compassionate, there is a key to the treasure. The treasure, ganja, of course, is a reference to the poet's hometown, ganja, which means really the treasury, not the youthful place, the treasury, the treasury of which he is the guardian, he is the master, because he is the master of the treasure of words. And we shall see even farther that he is the dragon king. He compares himself to the magic, sleepless dragon, which preserves the treasure and keeps it away from those who are unworthy, but yields it to those who are worthy. Hence, the extraordinary dragon imagery that we're going to be exploring in Nizami's works. And here, the calligrapher, who is Sultan Ali Mashadi, who in the late 1480s, 1490s, was considered to be the greatest master of Nasta the calligraphy in the entire Eastern Islamic world, adds two lines above and below. Mahzami, gan khusro shireen ne'aad, kufle on ra, leiliu majnun gushaad, meaning the treasure, which the king khusro and his lovely queen shireen set up. The key to it is opened by the other great loving couple, leiliu majnun, as a way of reminding us that every work of Nizami casts light on other works of Nizami. And that these poems were read the way reread Shakespeare and Dante, whereby to understand one line of Dante in paradiso, we sometimes have to plunge to the very depths of inferno. And so with Nizami. So here we have these two couples, leiliu majnun, painted in India in the early 18th century, and khusro shireen, painted by master Sheikh Zarday, pupil of Bezad. I didn't mean to do that. Here we are. And already these paintings are telling us so much. If we take the painting on the right, which dates from 1527, 1528, we see King Khusro riding in the mountains, searching for his beloved. And his beloved is the lovely Christian queen from the Caucasus, bathing in a pool in the middle of the mountains. Once upon a time, that pool was silver. Even the artist knew that after a few decades, the silver would turn black. So what? My king will see it as silver. The lady bathes in the pool, and she suspended her quiver of arrows, her sword, and her bow to a wonderful tree, which is a plain tree in autumn, a chenar, why? Because in Persianite painting of the 15th and 16th centuries, such a tree appears to mark the manifestation of the most beautiful human being on earth at any one time. The great Spanish mystic so much read in the Iranian and Central Asian Caucasian worlds, Ibn Arabi, wrote in the early 13th century when the entire universe became manifest, it was like a single tree. And when the universe as a tree beheld the perfect human being in some karmil, then the universal tree trembled in all the multiplicity of its colors, in the multiplicity of its colors. And here the tree rises over Shirin and proclaims, she is the lady. She is the manifestation of divine wisdom. The prince, and then king Khosrow, will spend the entire romance earning her, becoming worthy of her. She initiates him into higher wisdom, and ultimately he will wed her. At the very end of the romance. And she's one of these characters so characteristic, truly, of what Nizami does. And here, again, we can compare him to two other great European poets, Dante and Racine, for whom the protagonist is a female. This is not to say that Nizami was a feminist. By no means did he live in a society which recognized anything like equal rights for women. If anything, it was a society in which women were regarded, certainly in the upper classes, as secret treasures to be guarded. And this, in effect, exasperated the mystical symbolism of the civilization into thinking of the woman to be wedded as the most desired thing in a young man's life. In fact, one of the main lines that we see in Nizami's work is borka ze jamole khis bar daust. She lifted the borka from upon her beauty. The most exciting moment in the life of any young man in this traditional culture was finally to behold the face of his bride on the wedding night, followed by matrimonial ecstasy, to such an extent that the culture calls the moment of mystical knowledge kashful mahjub, the unveiling of that which is veiled. If we take the other great love story that Nizami became so famous for, the love of a Bedouin boy for the girl of another tribe that he was not allowed to marry, and he became mad for love for her. He became known as Majnun, the mad one. And he went into the desert screaming her praises and calling her, in effect, the divine beloved made manifest as a lovely woman. And here we see the Indian artist, further to demonstrate how widespread was his fame, representing the lady as a great mogul princess and Majnun before her as her naked dervish and worshiper. She is not only a queen because she has these marvelous pearls and an extraordinary headdress, but even a kerchief in her fist. Now, you could ask, what is so special about a handkerchief in the hand? Just watch. Here is one of the earliest depictions of the poet that we have. It is by the great artist Bezad of Herat. He painted this in about 1490. So it is, of course, an imaginary portrayal. I would ask our friends in Azerbaijan and Iran why these sorts of pictures are not made more popular, since we do have these very old representations of the poet. Here represented rather as a youngish man with a brown beard and who is instructing his son. Here. In fact, every single one of Nizami's poems is first addressed to his son, Dar Nassihate Farzan Dichesh, in admonishment unto his own child. And then the poem is presented to the ruling king. As if the king and indeed every single reader were the child of Nizami, who is instructed by Nizami. This is, in fact, a very common medieval literary trope. And when the genre of tales within tales was first translated from Arabic into Latin in 12th century Spain by Petrus Alfonsi, the converted Aragonese rabbi who became a Catholic and who translated these things, he began the whole work as Arabs castigavit philium, meaning an Arab sage admonished his child. Here is another representation, again, by Bezad of what we're talking about, of the poet as schoolmaster. It is an illustration to the great love story of Leilio Majnun. We see that we are in a school set up in a mosque. How do we know it's a mosque? Because it says so, who are called in Yusallif al-Mehrab, upright as he who prays towards the Mehrab. Boys and girls together in school, I loved to show this picture in Afghanistan. Here, a young Arab boy is already signaled to us as being a very holy character because you have the great tree in autumn foliage, rising from the water of life, the evolution found. And why is Pace dipping his pen into his stylus to write his first love poem as he is becoming mad with love? Majnun, it's because there is a schoolgirl who is sitting in the Mehrab. You can see that it is the niche of prayer of the mosque. Very often in 15th and 16th century Persian, Turkish, and then in later Urdu poetry, the very eyebrows of a lovely girl will be compared to the arches of a Mehrab, the niche of prayer. Of course, she sits in the niche of prayer. She is the mishkot ul-anwar. It is a mystical vision of the tabernacle of lights. And this is where Nizami writes, Burqa ze jamal-i-kheesh bar-gausht, uplifting the Burqa from her beauty. And Qais sees this and begins to write. Because he begins to write, he has recognized that her face is the human mirror of the invisible divine. And so the tree of all existence has recognized him. And here we have the schoolmaster, the schoolmaster who is teaching all of us to understand the meaning of Nizami's poem. Now, we look at that particular schoolmaster and watch this. We see a repetition and a meditation of the motif of Leili, in the niche of prayer, done 100 years later by master Muhammadi of Herat. And here Muhammadi gives it all away. Leili, Leila in Arabic pronunciation, is truly the queen of heaven. She sits in the mishkot ul-anwar. She sits in the niche of prayer. See what happens? She is crowned. She holds in her hands Narcissus, which we're called in classical Arabic mysticism, Abhar al-Arshikin, the Narcissus of the lovers. And the Narcissus is a symbol of the human eye. This is a mystical notion, which the school of Ibn Adhabi very much popularized. And when Nizad and then Muhammadi were painting, of course, Ibn Adhabi was part of the absolutely fundamental curriculum of higher religious studies, especially since commented upon by poets like Jami. And the idea is the human eye is the eye through which the divine looks upon the divine. This is an extremely daring, bold image, which again emphasizes that the focus of the lover's yearning is the divine made manifest in human form. And this form in Nizami is the lady Leila, Leili, or the lady Shirin. Now, here is another painting by Nizad, which is one of the most important in the canon of the art. It dates from 1488, and it is, theoretically, an illustration to the bustain of Saadi, theoretically. We have the general story here of a beggar craving admittance to a mosque. And the caretaker of the mosque refuses admittance to the humble beggar. And the beggar, this being Saadi, can quote classical Arabic and says, [? mandaq al-daq, ?] from sata halabu, he who knocketh upon the door, it shall be opened unto him. Oh, sorry about that. In you come. He goes in, and we see all sorts of strange characters above. Just as in the former painting of Rayleigh Ledgeman in school, there's always a character of sleep who doesn't understand what's going on. Here on the upper left, this was a marvelous thing to discover in tiny script a signature. This is self-portrait of Nizad himself. But now we have another character who is here. Now, if you look at that character, who doesn't seem to be mentioned in the text, we just have him sitting next to the niche of prayer. You saldi fir maherab. And if we look back, there he is again. Who is he? Well, a third painting gives it away. This one, this famous painting done in 1486 by one of Nizad's fellow workers in the Royal Workshop in Herat, Qasem Ali, tells us who this figure is. This figure is Nizami himself. Nizami at the very center of the world of the great poets. This painting is one of the single most important paintings for our understanding of all Islamic art. Why? It is an illustration to the book of poems of the prime minister of the Kingdom of Herat, who's represented here, Mir Adişer Navoyi, who is dreaming. This is all a dream vision. He is being presented to the great Persian language poets of the past. He writes in Turkish. These poets all note in Persian. Here, the master, the prime minister of the Kingdom, is being introduced to all these painters by Jo Ami. Now, Jo Ami and Mir Adişer Navoyi, when this was painted in 1486, were both alive. This means that the prime minister of one of the most important Sunni kingdoms, Sunni kingdoms in all Western Asia. And his spiritual advisor, Jo Ami, recognized not only as the most glorious Persian language poet of his day, but as one of the greatest commentators on Ibn Arabi as the grand sheikh of the Naqshbandi order. And in his day, the single most prestigious Sunni theologian in all Western Asia. So prestigious that the Sultan of Turkey, Bayezid II, tried to invite him to come and be appointed the sheikh of Islam in Istanbul, which Jo Ami refused. He preferred to stay in Herat. Now, we ask the question, how was it possible that these two gentlemen, so prestigious, could be portrayed in the life by a painter in a civilization which is supposed to ban figurative art? Something very wrong here. This is not an out of the way picture by some clandestine group. This is official art. And what does this official art show? It shows the prime minister of Herat himself humbling, hiding his hands in the sleeve of his capang, of his kaftan, bowing, while Jo Ami presents him to who? To the ghost of Nizami. Nizami with his hands outstretched, welcoming Navoi. Welcoming him, the Turkish poet, now to take his place among the great Persian poets of the past. So we have Nizami, Amir Khusro, Nehravi, Saadi, Ferdowsi, Sanoi, Khokoni, Anvari, and Asang of Delhi. Quite a gathering. Those of you who read Dante will recognize a very similar scene where Dante is introduced by Virgil to the ghosts of Homer and the great Greek and Latin poets of the past. You write in a new language, Italian. You are worthy to join our group. So Navoi is worthy to join our group. And just as Homer appears in Dante's divine comedy as L'Aquila, the eagle, who flies above all others. So we are reminded that for classical Persianite civilization at its zenith at the close of the 15th century, Nizami is the central poet, which is why I really would invite many more reproductions of this picture with all its implications in publications today. This is how we can interpret this wonderful painting by Master Muhammad Ali of Golconda, Shi'i Golconda in the very early years of the 17th century. They have very close diplomatic relations with Shi'i, Iran, and were carrying on many of its traditions. You have the influence of European Renaissance shading brought through the Portuguese missions. But we see the same archetype of the supreme poet. And we have, in fact, the exact, how should I put this, description of who this character really is. In fact, this is a visual rendition of the sage as described by Avicenna himself. Avicenna writes in the High Ibn Yaqzan, it seemed to me that a wonderful sage appeared before me, beautiful in his person, with all the majesty of old age, but none of the infirmity of old age. And I recognized him as my master. Who is this master? In Avicenna's 11th century treatise, the master is a configuration of the active intelligence, the ray of light, which emanates from the divine and illuminates our minds, appearing in the imagination of Avicenna as this wondrous, majestic old man. And it's extraordinary to see, either through the Arabic or through the Persian renditions that we have of this image, that the great sage becomes configured as Nizami himself. I don't think we can raise higher praise to the rank of the poet than with images of this kind. So let's carry on. Here is a completely different image of Nizami, which was done by an Hindu artist, Kim Karam, working for Emperor Akbar in the very closing years of the 16th century. What we find in a picture like this is another aspect of the poet. This was the complete works of Nizami that were commissioned by Emperor Akbar in 1595, 96, here in the British Library now, for his son, Daniel, whom he expected to become the next ruler of the Mughal Empire. Poor Prince Daniel drank himself to death and died of cirrhosis of the liver, so he never made it to become the next emperor. But that was not known at the time. And in any case, young Prince Daniel is represented as if he were the Shirvan Shah, the ruler of the Caucasian region, whereas her by John is as if he were the ruler to whom Nizami, shown here, is presenting his book. This is, again, a warning that the poems of Nizami were of all other works of Persian literature, with the exception of the Shalameh of Ferdowsi. The most sumptuously illustrated of all books of poetry, because they were presented to kings and to princes, in which princes were supposed to become the child of the poet, Darnasihate Farzan Dihesh, in the admonishment to his child, in which princes were supposed to learn the ethics by which they should properly govern. So the books of Nizami very much form part of what was called mirrors for princes genre, the kind of book that princes had to know and meditate. And here we see the poet with his son, so he teaches his son, but he also teaches the prince. And behind him, if we leave out the mogul courtier in red, we have four bearded sages. Nizami tells us something very interesting in the beginning of his Haft Paikat. You can see those four bearded sages behind. Nizami says, your majesty, there have been unto the great kings of the past four great counselors. Alexander, the great, had Aristotle. And then the first of the two great Khosrowees, Khosrow, kings of Sasanian, Iran, 6th century, early 7th century, Khosrow, Anusharvani, Odil, Khosrow of the immortal soul, the just, had as his counselor, Bozorg Meir, the great wise advisor. And then Khosrowees II had as his advisor a singer and a poet, Borbad. And then in our recent times, we had the ruler who truly established Turkish power in the Near East, Sultan Malik Shah, the Seljuk. And he had, as his minister, the great Nizam ul Mulk. And I, Nizami, am the fifth. Even if you do not read me in the life before you, you can read me through my books. We are told by the chroniclers of the poets that Nizami, contrary to many other literary figures of his 12th century period, did not frequent royal courts. In fact, lived an extremely sober, almost ascetic life. We are even told that while he stayed in Ganje, where he says, I remain enclosed by the walls of Ganje like a treasure in the treasure box. And it was kings who came to visit Nizami. And one king apparently said, I came to visit this gentleman since he wouldn't come to me, and I was told that he never comes to visit kings. So kings have to go and visit him. And at first I saw a pleasant old gentleman sitting in front of his humble little house with his chief of papers and his writing implements. Then I closed my eyes, and I opened them. And I saw a wondrous old man sitting on a glorious, heavenly throne surrounded by angels in attendance. Then I closed my eyes, and I opened them again. And there was the humble poet. Quite a recognition of what Nizami himself says of his poetry and of himself, all ye neyereib, the mirror of the unseen world. So this painting is a general meditation. And it's extraordinary also to take note that it was not painted by a Muslim, but by a Hindu. In fact, if you want to examine the wonderful Khamse of Nizami, which is preserved here in the British library, Emperor Akbar's personal copy, except with one single exception, all the painters were Hindus, showing the extraordinary influence of Nizami's poetry and appreciation for him, which Hindus had to have if they were going to be seriously entertained members of Akbar's court in late 16th century India. This by Jami, illustrated in the late 16th century in Mashhad, simply is an indication of the idea that the poet is inspired by angels. Here we have a case of a disciple of Saladi, who peers through the chinks of the door and sees the poet writing and beholds at night in ecstasy the very angels who are pouring inspiration down to the poet. It means that the poet, if he is truly inspired, sees the unseen world. And he writes what he sees so that other ordinary human beings can then discover it in the poetry. This is one of the paintings which most clearly indicates this huge prestige of the poet in the civilization. And then we come to one of the painters who was chosen by the Sultan of Herat twice over to illustrate the complete works of Nizami. This is Master Bezad. And this is the other Rosetta stone of Islamic art. We discussed it in connection with the Atar book. But we can go over this extraordinary painting again. It gives us many, many clues. For one, theoretically, this is an illustration to the bustin of Salih. Theoretically, it illustrates Salih's version of the tale of the prophet Joseph and the lady of Egypt. Everybody here has read it either in the Bible or in the Koran, Surah 12. The lady of Egypt tried to trap her servant Joseph with whom she fell in love. And he tore himself away from her adulterous embrace. And she was left clutching only a piece of his tunic. And she tried to trap him inside a beautiful castle. And all the doors, seven doors, flew open when Joseph escaped. So this is what Bezad has represented. And he even signed his name here. I'm not an odd Bezad. You've got this wonderful carpet page effect. And it was often suggested, since this was done in 1488, does it have anything to do with Jami's poem on the same subject written in 1483? And the answer is yes, because we discovered Jami's verses here and here. And Jami's verses indicate that this wonderful palace was built for your eyes by an artist so marvelous that if he painted the picture of a bird upon a stone, subuk, sangigiron, as jup, paridi, likely the very stone would take wings and fly, meaning Bezad, like the child Jesus, is a master of figurative art that Islam must accept. Because it is written in the Quran, Surah 5, verse 113, that the child Jesus, of which I have here, the only Christian representation I've ever been able to find of this particular miracle from a 12th century Romanesque church in Switzerland, the child Jesus molded clay birds, blew upon them, and they took life. This is from the so-called apocryphal gospels of the pseudo-Thomas. This tradition is received in the Quran and proposed to the meditation of Muslims with a central verse that when the child Jesus breathed into the bird and gave it life, it was the ifni, with my permission. We find in 150 years' worth of Persian, Ottoman, and Mughal Indian chronicles references to how John himself, as the sheikh of Islam of the kingdom of Erat, blessed the art of Bezad by calling it the nafase masihi, the Christ breath. And this was the overturning of the prohibition, meaning that Bezad, like the poet he illustrates, is a nub, a tablet. Upon this tablet appear the images of the unseen world, whereas the idolater will construct an icon that causes your eye to swerve away from the divine creator. The painter, like the poet, who is truly inspired, mirrors the unseen world for the benefit of lower class spectators, like we all are, including the sons of kings. This is why we are at the very heart of a cultural fulcrum between the late 12th century and Nizami's poetry and the late 15th century in Bezad's painting. We come to that zenith in Eastern Islamic creativity, where poetry and art become completely melded together and are fraught with the most profound spiritual meaning. Now, this picture, which is here in London, again, in the British Library, it's the copy of Akbar's great volume of the poems of Nizami. The book wasn't quite finished when Akbar died in 1605, so Jahangir, the next emperor, ordered that the book be finished. And what this painting shows, often reproduced, but I don't believe that its full significance has truly been weighed. This is the calligrapher, Abdul Rahim of Herat, known as the Anbarin Qalam, he of the Amber tribe. And directly before him, right by his side, equal in rank, is the painter, in this case, the Hindu Muslim painter Daulat, who finished the Nizami book. This is the call upon. This was considered to be one of the greatest treasures of the Mughal dynasty. The painter has painted the calligrapher. He has even painted the little book here, which has both their names, Daulat and Abdul Rahim. It's what Persianate, this is what Persianate civilization in the 16th and 17th centuries called the two pens, both Qalam or kilk. The stylus of the scribe and the brush of the calligrapher and painter are, in fact, two equal instruments. And the painter is as holy as the poet. And both these instruments are the ways that God speaks through our minds and reveals the world. This is one of the wonderful rosettes, which punctuates the great Akbar edition of Nizami's Khamsa. And we'll just take a few images from the Mahzan al-Asrar, the Treasury of Secrets, which itself is a pun on Nizami's own name, because Nizami is the master of ganja, meaning he is the master of the treasure. And here are his secrets. Bizaad paints this. And we'll just play art history for a while. No mysticism, not much, just art history. Perfect Bizaad composition. Almost abstract geometry, flat planes, little figures dancing across, almost pure abstract art. What's the story? The caliph is in his bath. And his barber, who's shaming his head, and the poor man was considered to be practicing one of the lowest, vilest, most socially despised professions of the medieval world, because he handled nail cuttings and had to put cow dung into the oven to heat the bath. Only all this sort of thing. So he was a very lowly person. And here is the barber saying to the caliph, you really should recognize me as one of the very greatest masters of your kingdom. In fact, I demand that you give me your daughter in marriage. And Caliph is horrified. Arun Arashid himself. And he sort of holds himself back from exploding with wrath. He asks his wise minister, who's a mouthpiece for Nizami, and the minister says, your majesty, what I suggest is the next time the barber says this to you, just ask him to step one step aside and see what happens. OK? So the caliph is having his head shaved. And the barber again says, well, your majesty, what are you going to give me, your daughter in marriage? Caliph says, just step aside. One step aside. The barber moves, and at once becomes very humble and submissive. So the caliph wonders, how did this happen? And the minister explains, because hidden under where the barber was standing is a treasure, your majesty. And it's because of this wonderful royal treasure that the barber was speaking this way. So they open up the floor, and they find the treasure. And the caliph is very happy, and the barber is rewarded. And Nizami immediately says, but I am the true treasure. I am hidden, but my speech will reveal to you endless riches. In any case, Sultan Hussein Mirzal Baikara of Herat considered this story important enough to be illustrated. Every one of these pictures costs a fortune, so it's not something that you Jews do out of whim. This is an important commission. And this painting came into the British collections through Mogul, India. And it was exhibited in 1910 at the huge groundbreaking exhibition of Islamic art in Munich, where Matisse saw it and was completely blown away. The influence of what Matisse saw, notably illustrations of Nizami, had on Matisse's art, hence on all modern art, an impact as powerful as that of West African sculpture on Picasso. Oh, come on, you can't be serious. Watch. Here we're just looking at some of the abstract elements of the painting. And here is Matisse's Moroccans from 1916. But there's better to come. Now, influences go both ways. When Miss Skeen, a Hindu artist with Sufi-sounding Persianate name, the wretch, miserable one, was painting for Emperor Akbar, he was told to illustrate the story of the two competing doctors. And finally, the two doctors are going to try to outwit each other. Each one is going to compose a poison, which the other is going to have to drink with an antidote to see if he can survive it. So one doctor composes a horrendous poison. The other doctor drinks his antidote, drinks the poison, and feels fine. And then he picks the second, this doctor who survived, picks up a rose, pretends to breathe an incantation over it, gives it to the other doctor. The other doctor is so terrified that he has a heart attack and he drops dead right there. And then Rizami then goes into a mystical explanation of this fable about how appearances are not all they seem. And it's the way we look at the world, which influences the way we actually behave. And one person can drink poison and survive. And another person, just because of his imagination, can sniff a rose and drop dead. So Miss Jean represents the doctor dropping dead. And you can see all the European Renaissance influences. So we're in the late 16th century. So it's not just Islamic art to Matisse. Islamic art also absorbed many European influences. We can look at an earlier version, done by the very great master in Safavid Tabriz in the 1540s, or Mirac, same story in the classical Persianite idiom. Then this story is one of the most famous of the treasury of secrets and very much indicates the first level of Nizami's poetry, which is admonishment to kings to teach them how to behave. Here illustrated by Mir Mousaver and his own son Mir Sayed Ali, who were great masters in Tabriz in the 1530s and 1540s, then they moved to Kabul at the invitation of the Mughal and ruler Humayun, who took them to India, where they founded the Mughal School of Painting after 1555. Anyway, this is the work that they were doing in Tabriz in the great Khamsav Nizami prepared for Shah Tawmas, which is another Nizami treasure right here in the British Library. Once upon a time, there was a great king. King Khosrow Anu-Shervan-e-Adil himself. Khosrow is the first of pre-Islamic Sasanian 6th century Persia. And he became separated from the rest of his hunting party with only his minister, Bozor Gmer, shown here. The king rides a horse, and the minister rides a mule, showing the difference in rank. Now, the king and his minister come upon a ruined village and owls hoot in the village towers. And the king is surprised to hear these owls. And he looks at his minister and said, do you understand what these owls are saying? And the minister says, yes, in fact, Your Majesty, I do understand what they're saying. And what are they saying? Well, actually, these two owls are talking about a marriage contract. And one owl wants the other owl to give his daughter to his son in marriage. And they're negotiating the bride price. And the bride price are ruined villages. Owls like to haunt ruined villages. And the bride price goes like this. You don't have anything to worry about. I can give you not only this ruined village. I can give you 100,000 ruined villages. Because as long as this king is the ruler here, people are starving to death. People are rushing away from his injustice. They're escaping his absolutely illegal taxes. They all want to go to India. They all want to leave this place. And so they're more and more ruined villages, and I'm happy to give you one. The king, of course, is horrified, understands the moral, strikes his head, and promises to be a good king. Of course, what Nizami is indicating is his mastery of a genre that seems first to have been developed in late antique India, which is known as mithishastra, counsel to princes. And since princes are very arrogant types, the best way to get a moral across to a prince is through animal fables and make animals speak. And maybe the prince will understand and amend his ways. And this type of animal-fable literature was so appreciated by the pre-Islamic Persians that they already had it translated from Sanskrit to Pahlavi in the 6th century AD. Then when the Abbasid Caliphs become the rulers in Iraq in the 8th century AD, these same fables are transmuted into Arabic. And when Arabic yields pride of place to Persian under the Seljuk rulers of the Near East, these tales revert to medieval Persian and ultimately thence into Turkish. And also we have to specify, they were very much translated from Arabic into Latin in 12th century Spain, once they profoundly influenced all Western European storytelling. Here we have a depiction of how important it was for kings to read this sort of story, even Haldun mentions the story in his Arabic. And we can see that this is one of the stories that is illustrated again and again with the idea that Nizami is a counselor to princes. So here we have an Indian artist, Manohar Hindu, working for Emperor Akbar, who shows the same story with a very Indian-looking ruined city and a very Indian-looking prince, Prince Daniel on horseback with the wise minister. The wise minister being, of course, Nizami himself, since Nizami is the fifth of the wise counselors. The other very, very famous story in the Marzano-Lastrar, so often illustrated, is supposedly the tale of Sultan Sanjar, the great Seljuk, who ruled from Central Asia all the way to Anatolia in the middle of the 12th century. And as he was riding along in this painting by Sultan Muhammad, done in the 1540s in Tabriz and also preserved here in the British Library. As he's riding along under his royal parasol, a humble old woman catches the hem of his coat and begs for justice against the injustice and the tyranny of the king's officers. And of course, the king and his ministers say, what time does the king have for a poor old woman like this? And the poor old woman, dragging on the king's coat, says, if you do not have time for one poor old woman in your kingdom, what business do you have being a king? And the king repents and gives her justice. And this, too, was considered a moral lesson, a nasihat, was, which every king had to hear. And this is why this scene was so often represented. Now, I want to watch a few more tricks here. Here we have another version done in the very same period, 1545 in Bohara. And in this case, the Sultan represented is a portrait of the Uzbek ruler himself, Abdullah Khan, meaning your majesty. We present Nizami's fables to you. And even though the names in the book refer to kings of olden time, like Khosrow or Sanjar, they are about you and take this to heart. And so it becomes a fashion in 15th and 16th and 17th Eastern Islamic art for the ruler in the paintings illustrating Nizami's books to be a portrait of the actual ruler himself. Mutatis numinibus dete farula narratur, change but the names of thee, the story is told, said the Roman poet. Here we have a Mogul Indian version done for Emperor Akbar. So the ruler looks like a Mogul with the old woman. And then you have your atmospheric effects, which were the result of loud Hindu painter learning techniques from the Portuguese missions coming to Emperor Akbar's court. And here do you recognize the story? This is from Dante's purgatory, done in a painting from the 1470s, done for Duke Rodrigo de Montefetro of Urbino. Dante is in that part of purgatory where we should learn to humble our pride. This is why all the souls which were too proud bear a heavy stone upon their back. Dante is guided by Virgil, who is straight, but Dante bows because he too is guilty of the sin of pride. And the depiction is of the Roman emperor Trajan. So Dante says, and what happened to Roman emperor Trajan, the just ruler of ancient Rome? One day, he was writing forth to war, and he was accosted by a poor widow who tried to demand justice from the emperor. And the emperor's ministers told the widow, don't you think the emperor has more important things to do? And the widow cried out, if the emperor cannot give justice to one poor widow, what business does he have it of being emperor? And this story, reverberated in the Christian West, to such an extent that not only does, I'm sorry, what did I do wrong? I came all the way to the top. Sorry. Not only does Dante offer this as an example for the humbling of pride, but even if you go to the Ducal Palace in Venice, it is one of the scenes which is carved in the 14th century on the capitals of the pillars leading to the main entrance to the Ducal Palace for the doge of Venice to meditate upon. So we can, here, as in many other cases, point to a probable lost Hellenistic common source to the Nizami story and to the Dante story. And for a further exploration of the poet, we must, and this is my plea, to break down these grotesque walls that we have erected between our fields of classical and European medieval and Renaissance studies and Islamic studies, when, in fact, there is so much in common that we cannot account for the reappearance of these stories without going back to their common sources. So we'll take a final painting from Akbar's book because it represents Emperor Akbar himself. The story painted by Rukond, another Hindu artist, of the late 16th century, shows the emperor in his role, which you can just see right down the street in the British Museum. The Assyrians already show the king as the mighty hunter. The king swatters game to feed his people. And the king swatters lions to defend his people. And what you see in Assyrian art is carried through in Middle Eastern art and Indian art to the 18th century, the king constantly represented in this role as the mighty warrior on horseback who swatters game because he feeds his people. And here is Emperor Akbar himself as the emperor of Faridun of Nizami's story. One more implication, Nizami tells a story. It is addressed to me, the king, and I, the king, am represented in Nizami's story. What Nizami's story is extremely interesting because it says that the king saw a beautiful gazelle, forced his horse to run after the gazelle, shot his arrows at the gazelle, and the arrows refused to touch the gazelle. The horse, in fact, would not catch up with the gazelle. And the king was furious with his own arrows and with his own horse. What's the matter with you? Why don't you obey? And the arrow replied, fairytale, your majesty, your eye of majesty has fallen upon this poor gazelle. It has become worthy of your grace. Therefore, spare it. And the king repents. We remember that Akbar had a mystical seizure, probably an epileptic fit mystically interpreted, in 1561. He was hunting. He was swattering animals left, right, and center the way a good mogul king should do. And then he passed out. And he came to under a tree. And he said, no more hunting, no more killing, no more killing animals. And from now on, the king became a strict vegetarian and ordered all his court, if they wanted to please him, to abstain from eating meat, which is one of the very Hinduizing tendencies of Emperor Akbar. And it's very interesting that Emperor Akbar should have chosen that this be illustrated for him. As the story continues, Nizami specifies, the greatest thing that a king can do with mercy is to consider himself not a lord, but a servant. The king must be the servant of his people. And there's an expression in Persian for service, which is to bind a belt around your waist. It's called kamar-bastana. You bind the sash around your waist as a sign of being a good page, a good servant. And the king is called upon to be a good servant. And then Nizami says, even the dragon is a servant, because the servant, the dragon binds himself around the treasure like a belt. And I, Nizami, am the guardian of the treasure. And my treasure is service. So we could, and just on that note, but there is so much more. Give it up for Nizami. Give it up for Nizami.