One Vessel, Many Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange in a Fourteenth-Century Persian Manuscript and the Enduring Memory of a Sacred Mountain
The miniature depicting Noah’s Ark (MSS 727, folio 45a) belongs to the Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh (“Compendium of Chronicles”), the monumental universal history commissioned by the Ilkhanid vizier Rashid al-Din Fadlallah (c. 1247–1318). The manuscript was produced in Tabriz between 1305 and 1315, during the reign of the Mongol Ilkhan Öljeytü (r. 1304–1316). The Khalili folio, measuring 14 × 25.5 cm, is executed in ink, translucent and opaque watercolour, gold, and silver on paper. Together with the companion fascicle in Edinburgh University Library, it represents the earliest surviving Arabic version of this work. The manuscript later belonged to the Timurid ruler Shahrukh, whose seal appears on folio 11a.
Rashid al-Din, a Jewish convert to Islam from Hamadan who trained as a physician before entering the service of the Ilkhan Abaqa (r. 1265–1282), established his multi-functional funerary complex, the Rabʿ-i Rashidi, at Tabriz. This complex included a scriptorium dedicated to producing and distributing copies of his works. The Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh was conceived in four parts: the history of the Mongols; a universal history from Adam to the Prophet Muhammad and the caliphs; the “Five Dynasties” of the Arabs, Jews, Mongols, Franks, and Chinese; and a geographical compendium. The illustrated world history—now divided between the Khalili and Edinburgh fascicles—was the principal visual section, recording the histories of the non-Mongol peoples of Eurasia.
The very possibility of compiling such a work reflects the cosmopolitan culture of early fourteenth-century Tabriz. Latin, Arabic, Persian, Syriac, Mongolian, Chinese, and Sanskrit texts were available, and visual sources ranging from Chinese handscrolls to Old Testaments and Gospels from northern Europe served as illustrative material. This was an environment in which knowledge was treated as borderless, and the histories of diverse peoples were considered equally worthy of preservation.
The Noah’s Ark folio is a concentrated visual record of this cosmopolitanism. Four distinct cultural traditions converge within a single composition. The depiction of the deluge employs foamy, stylised waves that derive from Chinese pictorial conventions rather than from the mountainous, violent seas described in the Qur’anic narrative. The figural arrangements in the Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh more broadly echo the constructions of historical Chinese handscrolls. Artists working in the Rabʿ-i Rashidi made extensive use of chinoiserie motifs, and their use of wash and line—rather than fully opaque watercolour—produces a superficial similarity to Yuan dynasty tomb paintings excavated in Inner Mongolia. The Chinese visual vocabulary was not merely decorative; it shaped how the biblical narrative was rendered, translating a Near Eastern story into a pictorial idiom legible across the Mongol Eurasian sphere.
The Ark itself is depicted not as a biblical vessel of ancient Near Eastern type but as an Indian Ocean dhow, complete with a double steering oar and a fluttering sail. This maritime technology belonged to the commercial world of the Indian Ocean, a region with which Ilkhanid Iran maintained extensive trade relations. The choice to render the Ark as a dhow situates the biblical narrative within the lived maritime experience of the Mongol empire’s southern commercial networks.
The figures of Noah and his sons are rendered with elongated proportions, expressive features, and mannered gestures that belong to the tradition of later Byzantine painting. Silver, now oxidised, was used to model faces and features, a technique that is conspicuously un-Chinese and points instead to Byzantine or eastern Christian models. This suggests that the artists had access to illustrated Christian manuscripts—perhaps Gospels or Old Testaments from northern Europe or the Byzantine world—which they adapted for Islamic narrative purposes.
The entire project was conceived and executed within the Ilkhanid Persianate sphere. The text is in Arabic, the patron was a Muslim vizier of Jewish origin serving a Mongol court, and the manuscript’s programme aimed to integrate the histories of Arabs, Jews, Mongols, Franks, and Chinese into a single universal chronicle. The Noah’s Ark miniature thus operates simultaneously as an Islamic sacred history, a Mongol imperial project, and a visual synthesis of Eurasian artistic traditions.
The Armenian engagement with the Noah narrative is inseparable from the geography of the Armenian Highlands. In the Armenian tradition, the Ark came to rest on Mount Masis—known internationally as Mount Ararat—the highest peak of the Armenian Highlands. By the beginning of the fifth century, the theologian Jerome, translator of the Vulgate, affirmed in his commentaries on Isaiah that Noah’s Ark rested “in Armenia, in the region of Ayrarat, on the highest mountain rising above the Ararat valley, where flows the Arax river.” This identification was echoed in Armenian sources from the fifth century onward.
Armenian tradition preserved the memory of the Ark through both historiography and popular narrative. The village of Arguri, located near the northeastern base of Ararat, was said to be where Noah planted grape vines after the Flood. According to one widely transmitted account, an angel appeared in a dream to a monk named Hagop, who had retreated near the mountain peak, and left beside him a wooden fragment of Noah’s vessel. This relic became an object of veneration within the Armenian Church. Nineteenth-century travellers reported that Armenians believed the peak to be guarded by angels who watched over a fully intact Ark hidden from human view.
