The Persian Anthology: Reading with the Margins

We invite you to explore this family anthology, originally collected by a religious judge (qadi) in the second half of the seventeenth century. The manuscript’s date—1688 CE/1078 AH—appears in the main text on folio 23 recto.

Here, the anonymous judge collects legal documents in Persian, with Arabic formulas for resolving cases of family law—including marriage, divorce, and inheritance—as well as sales and rental contracts and peace agreements. These were tools he used to settle the everyday disputes brought before him in Isfahan.

Alongside these professional tools, the judge records his favorite verses and collects model friendship letters and talismans, writing his personal life into the codex. At some point, probably in the mid-nineteenth century, the anthology was sold in the bazaar and repossessed by new owners, who wrote upon its folios to make it their own. A date of 1872 CE/1289 AH appears in the margins of folio 22 recto. Turkish, a third language, appears on folio 19 verso, making this a multilingual codex. Multiple seals, inscriptions, and dates mark the life of the anthology as it passed from one hand to another well into the twentieth century, when lithography and print took over Isfahan’s economy of the book.

The torn edges of folio 1 recto were pasted onto a larger sheet of paper to preserve the folio and stitch the remaining leaves together. The body of the main text seems to be in the hand of the judge, who writes consistently in Persian using nastaʿlīq script. When Arabic formulas and Qur’anic verses are recorded, naskh is used, either by a scribe or by someone more learned in Arabic who could vocalize the text with diacritics.

Catchwords at the ends of verso folios accurately connect the text throughout the codex until the final two folios, which, like the first folio, are preserved on new paper. The judge recorded the main text sometime between 1688, dated on folio 23 recto, and 1715, dated on folio 15 verso. His hand and those of subsequent owners also populate the margins, with dates including 1690 on folio 55 recto, 1708 on folio 3 recto, 1718 on folio 1 verso, 1728 on folio 18 verso, and 1872 on folio 22 recto. These and other dates are presented in the manuscript timeline.

Particularly striking is the red ink used to mark rubrics in both the main text and the margins. This parallel technique of rubrication may indicate the codex’s continued use for adjudicating law. We may never know exactly how many folios were added to the “original” codex or how many are missing. When the codex entered the registry of the Malik Library in 1972, the anthology was shelf-marked as Majmūʿa 2551 and consisted of seventy-two folios. Its binding is new.

The religious judge was probably a Persian or Turkish speaker with a rudimentary knowledge of Arabic. He may have attended a maktab, where he learned the basics of writing in Persian and reading or reciting the Qur’an in Arabic. The first nineteen folios of the codex consist of copies (ṣūrat) of legal documents with which the judge ruled his cases in Isfahan. Some cases are formulaic and feature stock characters also found in legal works. Historical figures—including the Safavid courtier Hātam Beg Urdubadi and ʿĪsā Khan Beg, a member of the extended Safavid family—appear alongside Isfahan residents such as Muhammad Zamān Birinjī. These figures animate sample court cases, sometimes accompanied by dates that may indicate contemporaneous cases over which the judge himself presided.

New content appears on folio 19 recto: a petition to the Imams and an essay on Turkish grammatical rules. It is difficult to determine whether this entry was inscribed by a different hand. We can surmise, however, that its owner was a Turkish speaker who wanted to study Turkish grammar formally.

The inclusion of a petition to the Imams dated 1574 CE/982 AH reveals the owner’s piety and access to a text composed more than a century before it came into his hands. The entry offers evidence of textual circulation and of the process of becoming Shiʿa in seventeenth-century Isfahan. The owner confirms his desire to serve and honor the Imams through pious pilgrimage to their graves (ʿatabāt) in Iraq, as well as through visits to the tombs of Safavid descendants in Ardabil.

Multiple subjects follow, ranging from copies of amorous and friendship letters on folios 36 verso through 48 recto to talismanic prayers on folio 51 verso. These materials frame cases involving divorce, temporary marriage, and vows of surrogate friendship.

The codex ends with talismanic prayers and poetry written in the lower margins by a hand that attributes the verses to Mir Uvays Afghan, a former governor of Qandahar. The poetry appears on folio 69 recto. In 1709 CE/1121 AH, Mir Uvays took advantage of the weakness of the last Safavid shah, Shah Sultan Husayn, and declared his allegiance and service to Ashraf Gilzay (Shah Ashraf), the Afghan chief whose rise marked the end of the Safavid dynasty. The poem in the margin of the codex’s final folio affirms Shah Ashraf’s status as Shah of Iran and refers to his minting gold coins to legitimize his sovereignty:

From the grace of Shah Ashraf, whose slogan is Truth (ḥaqq),
in gold the four-part (chār-par) coins were minted.