Page from the Manafi al-Hayavan

This folio depicting two stags comes from a dispersed copy of a medical text titled Manafi al-Hayavan (On the Uses Derived from Animals); a Christian doctor who was a court physician to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad wrote the original in Arabic in a.d. 941. In the late thirteenth century, the Mongol ruler of Iran and Iraq, Ghazan Khan, ordered a copy of the Manafi to be translated into Persian. Because this leaf was copied from that volume shortly after the Mongol conquest of Persia, there is a strong Chinese influence in the stylized clouds above the stags and in the treatment of the flowers.

Credit: Gift of Mr. C. C. Webber