دست کاری های دلالان آثار هنری در نسخۀ پراکندۀ مجمع التواریخ

نسخۀ پراکندۀ مجمع‌التواریخ یکی از هشت کتاب مصوّر شناخته شده‌ای است که برای شاهرخ پادشاه تیموری کتابت شده است. در حقیقت، بخش تاریخ پیش از اسلامِ آن، مجمع‌التواریخ حافظ ابرو و سایر بخش‌های آن جامع‌التواریخ رشیدالدین را تشکیل میدهد. این کتاب در اوایل قرن بیستم به دنیای غرب راه یافته و در سال 1926 به صورت کامل در نمایشگاه بین‌المللی هنر ایران در موزۀ پنسیلوانیا به نمایش در آمده است. شواهد نشان می‌دهد که بلافاصله پس از آن نمایشگاه، نسخه مُثله شده و روند فروش برگ‌های مصوّر آن آغاز شده است. پراکندگی اوراق این کتاب در بیش از پنجاه مجموعۀ خصوصی و عمومی در سراسر جهان اگرچه سبب شهرت آن شده، اما مجال بررسی دقیق متن و تصاویر آن را از محققان گرفته بوده است. پس از هفت سال جست و جو، 146 برگ از 150 برگ مصوّر نسخه شناسایی شده است. از طریق مقایسۀ متن و تصاویر این نسخه با کتاب دیگری که به دست‌خطِ حافظ ابرو برای شاهرخ تولید شده، سه سبک متمایز را می‌توان در نقاشی‌های نسخۀ پراکنده تشخیص داد. این نوشتار با بررسی سبک شناختی این نقاشی‌ها نشان می‌دهد که حدود نیمی از صفحات مصوّرِ آن توسط دلالان طمع‌کار آثار هنری خلق و یا دست‌کاری شده‌اند.

Manipulation of Modern Dealers of Oriental Arts in the Dispersed Manuscript of the Majmaʿ al-Tawarikh

The bibliophile character of the Timurid ruler Shahrukh (r. 1405–1447) and his patronage of historical, religious, poetical and scientific books in Herat are well known. He commissioned his court historiographer, Hafizi Abru (d. 1430) to compose a series of historical and geographical works. Hafizi Abru was also commanded to complete several fragmentary copies of the Jamiʿ alTawarikh, which had been transcribed for Rashid alDin (d. 1318) in the early fourteenth century. One of these Jamiʿ alTawarikh manuscripts is preserved in the Topkapi Palace Library with the inventory number of “Hazine 1653” and is in part an autograph of Hafizi Abru. Since the preIslamic part of Hazine 1653 was missing, Hafizi Abru replaced the missing part with the first volume of his own Majmaʿ alTawarikh. Some years later, a further manuscript was copied from Hazine 1653 and nowadays is known as the “dispersed manuscript.” The contents of these two manuscripts are almost identical and thus their preIslamic sections comprise the first volume of Hafizi Abru’s Majmaʿ altawarikh and their other sections consist of Rashid alDin’s Jamiʿ altawarikh. These two manuscripts are the only surviving illustrated copies of the Majmaʿ altawarikh. The Dispersed Manuscript is one of the eight surviving illustrated books produced for Shahrukh. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the manuscript was transferred to the West, and for the first time, as a whole was included in the International Exhibition of Persian Art in the Pennsylvania Museum in 1926. Evidence shows that immediately after the exhibition of 1926, the manuscript was divided into two fragments and found its way into collections of Emile Tabbagh in Paris and Parish Watson in New York. These two dealers of oriental art dismounted the manuscript and started to sell the illustrated leaves before 1928. The dispersal of the codex in more than fifty public and private collections around the world restricted the opportunity for its careful examination by scholars. The book once had 407 folios, of which one hundred fifty are illustrated. Presently, 238 unillustrated folios of this manuscript belong to the Art and History Trust Collection, and the illustrated leaves are widely dispersed. After seven years of research, 146 illustrated folios have been identified. By means of comparison of the text and images of this codex with Hazine 1653, which was copied by Hafizi Abru, three distinct groups of painting can be discerned. The first is the established “historical style of Shahrukh,” but the second and the third styles posses several problems. Careful examination of the text and image shows that these paintings have been executed over the text, and as a result, at the location of these miniatures a considerable amount of the text is missing. Moreover, in most of the cases, these repetitious or stereotyped compositions bear no relation to the text. This paper, which surveys the history of the manuscript, shows that approximately half of the illustrated leaves of the dispersed manuscript are manipulations done by the greedy European dealers of oriental art in the early twentieth century.