Steppe-ing Across the Centuries: Alexander the Great in Illustrated Abū’l-Khairid (Shaybanid Uzbek) Manuscripts

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Dr. Jaimee Comstock-Skipp, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford
• Friday 13 October 2023, 14:00-15:00
• Keynes Hall, King’s College (and online).

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Said Reza Huseini.

There is a Zoom Link for this talk in case you wish to join online

I specialise in illustrated manuscripts of the Abū’l-Khairids (Shaibanid-Uzbeks) and their political and artistic exchanges with other Islamicate empires during the 16th century. My previous research focussed on productions of a Persian epic poem called the Shāhnāma (Book of Kings) composed by Firdausī, and how this work was conceptually and stylistically harnessed to create other historical and biographical chronicles of other dynasties in Central Asian workshops. Having dwelled on the single Shāhnāma title, my new project homes in on a single character within it—Alexander the Great, or Iskandar Maqdūnī [Macedonian] in Persian. I will look at Abū’l-Khairid painted works in which Iskandar features. They are mostly in Persian with some in Turki.

Visual forms and concepts for Alexander’s epic and romantic subject matter circulated in copies of these manuscripts made in 16th-century Bukhara, Tashkent, and Samarqand. Combining history, myth, and legend, the figure of Alexander/Iskandar carried particular significance in a Central Asian setting. The discussion will focus on the character’s esteem held by the two most powerful rulers of the dynasty, Muhammad Shībānī Khan and ʿAbdullāh bin Iskandar Khan. I speculate that each modelled himself as a successor to the Greek hero. The illustrated literature of their dynasty recounted Alexander’s exploits so as to visualise and concretise these connections.

About the Speaker: Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley in Near Eastern Studies with a specialty in Islamic civilizations, and the Arabic and Persian languages. She obtained a first MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art (Massachusetts, USA ), and a second MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art (London, UK), where she studied Mongol through Safavid book arts predominantly from Iran. She completed her PhD at Leiden University’s Institute for Area Studies: Persian & Iranian Studies (2022) writing a dissertation on illustrated epic and biographical manuscripts of the Abu’l-Khairids, and their diplomatic exchanges between courts within Central Asia and the broader Turco-Persianate sphere encompassing Safavids, Ottomans, and Mughals. She has held visiting fellowships at the Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre (Oxford, UK) and the Warburg Institute (London, UK). She will be a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford between 2024—2027.

This talk is part of the King's Silk Roads series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Keynes Hall, King’s College (and online)
• King's Silk Roads

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.