A Thousand Words: Joshua’s Conquest

BRITISH LIBRARY OR 13704, F. 15R / PUBLIC DOMAIN

Between the 17th and 19th centuries, a little-known literary and artistic tradition reached its peak in Persia: the production and illustration of Judeo-Persian manuscripts. Texts generally fall into two categories: Hebrew transliterations of great Persian literary works, on the one hand; and original Judeo-Persian poetic compositions, on the other. The language used in these works is a dialect of Persian heavily influenced by Hebrew and Aramaic and written using the Hebrew alphabet.

The manuscript shown here, dating to the late 17th or early 18th century, is a copy of the Fath Nama (“Book of Conquest”), originally written around 1474 by the Jewish-Persian poet Imrani of Isfahan. The text is a poetic paraphrase in Judeo-Persian that aims to render on an epic scale the great biblical narratives in Joshua, Ruth, and Samuel.

A key component of the Judeo-Persian manuscript tradition is the use of miniature illustrations to accompany the text, such as those that appear in this manuscript. Miniature art of this type flourished under the Safavid dynasty (16th–17th centuries) and gained wide-spread use in subsequent periods. This image depicts Joshua and the people of Israel preparing to cross the Jordan River with the Ark of the Covenant. They are dressed in late 18th-century Persian garb. Joshua is in the center at the top, presiding over the crossing; his head is ringed with a stylized halo. Below and to the left, the ark is being carried over the water.