Historical Perception and Artistic Agency in the Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh: A Transcultural Perspective

This paper re-examines the Ilkhanid conception of “history” as articulated through both historical writing and painting in the Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh (Compendium of Chronicles). Focusing on the visualization of concepts such as tārīkh (history) and waqt (time), I analyze the pictorial intelligence of Ilkhanid artists and their engagement with the broader pictorial tradition across the world painting history. Noticing figures depicted as writers and observers in the Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh, I closely engage with these recurring individuals who are neither indicated in the accompanying texts nor acknowledged by the main protagonists in the depicted scene. I interpret them as witnesses to history and authors of historical writings, including Rashid al-Din himself and the authors of the sources he referenced.

By combining these visual insertions with textual sources on the roles of the historian, the writer-ruler relationship, and theories of time and history in premodern Iran, I argue that these “recorders and observers” are strategically embedded by the Ilkhanid artist into the pictorial scene in a montage-like manner. Their presence creates a visual implication of anachrony, thereby constructing a sense of “history” that symbolizes an awareness of a synchronic and transcultural historical concept shared by both Rashid al-Din and Ilkhanid artists. This concept functioned as a method for composing both the text and images of this universal history book by mediating diverse textual and visual citations, including the Persian Shāhnāma, the Islamic conception of history in the Qur’an, salvation history in the Old Testament, and the mirror-of-princes tradition found in both Persian and Chinese historiographies.