University of Heidelberg

June 30, 2011, 06:00pm to 08:00pm  

Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”
Karl Jaspers Centre
Voßstraße 2, Building 4400
Room 212 (Second Floor)
69115 Heidelberg     

Poster Pdf

The emperors of the Mughal dynasty (ruled in India from 1526 to 1858) stand out for their artistic patronage where they drew inspiration from the most diverse sources in order to develop a symbolic and allegorical “multilingualism”, as a means to address the widest possible audience, to legitimate themselves in the widest possible context as ideal and universal kings.
The Mughal emperors and their theorists (mardum-i sāhib-i wuqūf, men of superior knowledge, as Jahangir calls them in one of the rare instances where their input is acknowledged ) had not the slightest problem with selectively taking from Central Asian, Indian, Persian, ancient Near Eastern, and European ideas whatever served their purpose. On the contrary.
Shah Jahan's father Jahangir (1605-27) had himself celebrated as a second Solomon in the decoration of his palaces, best preserved in the fort of Lahore. I have discussed this in my article "Jahangir and the Angels". On the facing of the façade of the fort and in the vault of the tower pavilion, called today Kala Burj, appear painted and tiled paris and jinns. In accordance with the Europeanising fashion of Jahangir’s court, a group of paris appear as Renaissance styled putto angels. The key to the reading of the programme are the paris subduing the jinns which lead us to the iconography of Solomon flying through the air on his throne with his retinue. The paris and the jinns carry the Solomonic household, to which belong also animals.
The elaborate and unmistakable expression of the theme of the Solomonic retinue which evokes the ruler as a second Solomon on his flying throne helps us in retrospect to decipher less clearly expressed earlier versions of this iconography. 
Priscilla Soucek has done so in her interpretation of the sculptural decoration of the Umayyad palace Khirbat al Mafjar where she referred to my reading of the iconography of Lahore to identify the mysterious figures and animals as Solomonic beings, in attendance of the Umayyad caliph who built the site in the first half of the eighth century. 
With Lahore in mind we can identify any isolated winged fairy or jinn in Islamic art, which carries an animal or an object of princely life, as a Solomonic attendant.

¹The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India, trans., ed. and annot. Wheeler. M. Thackston (New York 1999), pp. 98-99, Persian text Jahāngīrnāma:Tūzuk-i Jahāngīrī, ed.  Muhammad Hāshim (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Bunyād –i Farhang-i Īrān, 1359 [1980), f. 61a.
²Priscilla Soucek, Solomon's Throne/ Solomon's bath: Model or Metaphor, in Pre-modern Islamic Palaces, special issue of Ars Orientalis 23 (1993), pp. 109-34.