Document of the Month 6/26: Timurid Epistolary Collections
Document of the Month 6/26: Timurid Epistolary Collections as a Source for Social History
by Danielle Zwarthoed
This article explores some ways in which epistolary collections can serve as a source for the social history of the premodern Islamicate East, especially the Timurid period (9th/15th c.). Inshāʾ and other epistolary collections are of interest because very few Timurid documents are accessible to historians, if they survived at all. Insofar as epistolary conventions and inshāʾ style tended to endure over time, there are opportunities for comparing Timurid inshāʾ collections with their predecessors, and with documents of the Invisible East corpus.
The Timurids (1370-1507) were the last famous dynasty to come from the Central Asian steppe to subjugate Khurasan and Transoxiana (Figure 1). This dynasty is better known for the fierce military campaigns of its eponymous founder, Timur (or Tamerlane), and for the so-called Timurid “Renaissance”, that is, the splendid artistic, architectural and literary achievements created under its princely patronage. Little is known, however, of the history of Timurid subjects “from below” (Thompson 1963, 8–11), partly because the bulk of Timurid archives and documents has not survived to the present day. Although there is evidence that the Timurid bureaucracy produced numerous decrees and petitions and kept a copy of them in registers called daftar, these records have since vanished. Various hypotheses have been put forward to explain this scarcity of archives from pre-modern Muslim administrations (Paul 2018). Timurid chanceries were nomadic and followed the sultan in his campaigns, which increased the likelihood of losses. During political instability and succession crises, archives were probably looted and the precious paper sold on to be reused or burnt as fuel in an arid region where wood was (and still is) scarce.
Fig. 1: Map of the Timurid empire at its greatest extent, c.1405. Wikimedia, public domain. CC BY-SA 3.0
Timurid inshāʾ collections
Social historians can however draw on the sources that most closely resemble the missing archives, namely, epistolary collections (Paul 1995). Timurid epistolary collections may be divided into three categories. The first two categories belong to the inshāʾ literary genre, the art of composition (Paul 1998).
Firstly, we have collections of documents produced by the Persian-speaking dīwān (chancery ) of the Timurid administration, which dealt in particular with finance and taxation, as opposed to the Turkic dīwān responsible for military administration. These documents were copied to serve as templates for apprentice secretaries. We also have inshāʾ collections of private letters. These were copied because of their literary merit or the fame of their author. Manuscripts containing inshāʾ collections display distinctive features.
Standard format
In these carefully crafted manuscripts intended for educational purposes, red ink is often used – as it is in many other manuscript genres – for the text of rubrics (headings) or quotations, such as quotations of Qur’anic verses or Persian poetry. This helped readers to easily distinguish one letter from another. The script is fairly legible, with dotted letters. The Timurid period is when the nastaʿlīq script, which emerged in the second half of the 8th/14th century in Tabriz and Shiraz, is said to have been systematised by Herati calligraphers such as Mīr ʿAlī Tabrīzī (active ca. 800/1400) (Hanaway and Spooner 2007; Fażā’ilī 2012). Written with a swift hand and requiring little space, this script is regular, relatively easy to read, and aesthetically pleasing (Figures 2 and 3). From the late 15th century onwards, nastaʿlīq became the Persian script par excellence from Ottoman Turkey to Mughal India. Thus, it is important to understand that the layout and style of writing differ between the original letter and its reproduction in an inshāʾ collection. Meanwhile, the insignia — monogram, signature, seals — that authenticate a chancery letter and lend it authority, disappear entirely from the inshāʾ copy. Moreover, copyists often decided to omit parts of the letters they deemed uninteresting. As they attached more importance to rhetoric, they sometimes eliminated sections of letters containing factual information, which, unfortunately, would have been of great interest to social historians. Some letters reproduced in inshāʾ collections are significantly altered, and some might even be forgeries. Historians have to account for these limitations when using inshāʾ collections as a source.
Fig. 2: Folio from a copy of Niẓāmī's Khosrow and Shirin with calligraphy in nastaʿlīq. Tabriz, c. 1400. Freer Gallery of Art, F1931.37 (image in public domain).
Fig. 3: Folio from a manuscript of the Munshaʾāt by Sharaf Munshiʾ. Iran, 1486. Harvard Art Museums collections online, 31.2015.32.
Al’bom Navoi
Historians of the late Timurid period are fortunate because they can also make use of a third category of epistolary sources, which amounts to one collection of original letters that does not strictly fall within the inshāʾ genre proper. This is the Majmūʿa-yi murāsalāt (“Collection of Letters”), known by Russian-speaking historians as the Al’bom Navoi. This late 15th-century manuscript, preserved in Tashkent (Uzbekistan), contains autograph letters written by famous members of the Naqshbandiyya, a powerful Sufi brotherhood closely connected to Timurid sultans. Authors include the Sufi poet ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492) and the Sufi shaykh Khwāja ʿUbayd Allāh Aḥrār (d. 895/1490), an important landowner in Transoxiana who became involved in the political life of Samarqand. These letters are requests, petitions and supplications, addressed predominantly to the Timurid court in Herat, and in particular to the foster brother and very close adviser of Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bayqara (r. 874-911/1469-1506), the famous poet who wrote in Chaghatay ʿAlī Shīr Nawāʾī (d. 906/1501). These letters have been edited with facsimiles and partly translated into English and Russian (Aḥrār 2002; Jāmī 2019).
By contrast, in inshāʾ manuscripts, the material aspect of Al’bom Navoi suggests that it was not produced for didactic purposes. One might wonder whether it was really intended to be read at all, because of its unusual layout. This manuscript contains 46 folios on which 594 letters are compiled, that is, an average of 13 letters per page, whereas a carefully produced manuscript of inshāʾ may devote an entire page (or more) to each letter. The letters in the Al’bom Navoi have not been copied, or rewritten. Rather, they are autograph letters written in various scripts (riqʿa, naskh, shikasta), pasted horizontally or vertically onto the pages of the codex, so as to fit as many letters as possible onto a single leaf. No clear classification system emerges from the arrangement of the letters. The purpose was to save paper space, rather than to make the documents easy to read. Why were these letters kept in such a way? Asom Urunbaev and Jo-Ann Gros, who edited the collection, found some clues in the Chaghatay Turkish translation of Jāmī’s collection of Sufi biographies, the Nafaḥāt al-Uns (“Breaths of Intimacy”), by Nawāʾī to whom the letters are addressed (Aḥrār 2002, 58-59): Nawāʾī recounted that he kept these letters as objects of adoration, almost as relics.
