"The Besotted Iranian Camp Attacked by Night", Folio 241r from the Shahnama (Book of Kings) of Shah Tahmaspca. 1525–30
Iranian warriors, careless after a night of drinking, are caught in their tents by a surprise attack from their Turanian enemies. More about this work
About this work
Iranian warriors, careless after a night of drinking, are caught in their tents by a surprise attack from their Turanian enemies. The episode belongs to the long wars between Iran and Turan that run through Ferdowsi’s Shahnama, and it is a lesson in the cost of overconfidence. The page comes from the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, made at the Safavid court in Tabriz in the 1520s and 1530s, whose painters excelled at crowded, many-layered compositions in which tents, horses and fighting figures are fitted into a densely patterned whole.
Written by Ochre Editions.
How it was made
- Opaque watercolour
- Watercolour made opaque with white or chalk and laid in flat, even layers. Persian and Indian painters ground their colours from minerals, applied them with the finest brushes and burnished the finished page.
- Watercolour
- Pigment in gum arabic, thinned with water and laid in transparent washes. Nothing white is painted: the light is the paper showing through.
- Ink on paper
- Ink made from soot and animal glue, ground with water on an inkstone. A single brush can give a hair-fine line or a broad wash, and nothing can be corrected.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Met has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1970.301.36
- Credit
- Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Type
- Codices
- Department
- Islamic Art
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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