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Page from Tales of a Parrot (Tuti-nama): text page

Unknown

1560

unspecified

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Mughal Painting Renaissance Renaissance

Dominant colour

Page from Tales of a Parrot (Tuti-nama): text page is a 1560 unspecified by Unknown, a Mughal Painting work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Unknown
When & what style?: 1560 · Mughal Painting
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

You see a page of Persian writing in black ink, with one word in bright blue at the top. This isn’t just any book—it’s from a famous collection of parrot tales told to keep a woman from sneaking out at night. The blue word means “cut,” like a scene change in a movie, shifting from prose to poetry. The script is neat, read right to left, and was made for Emperor Akbar’s royal library. To see more pages like this, look up the court of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605).

The story of this work

Overview

The book of the Tuti-nama from which this page comes consists of 341 folios, or 682 pages. The 52 tales told by the parrot Tuti to his mistress Khujasta and the overarching frame story about Khujasta herself are all written in Persian. Here the form of the script is called naskh and is read from right to left. The word in blue means “cut,” which indicates that the prose narrative will cut to a poetic verse. The Tuti-nama was written in 1329–30 by a Persian-speaking Sufi scholar and author from Central Asia. He based it on an earlier Persian work that recast a collection of Sanskrit fables…

Read the full account in the museum source.