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

The page comes from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot) produced circa 1560 in the Mughal Empire and is now held in the Cleveland Museum of Art under accession number 1962.279.296.a. It is attributed to an unknown artist. The available sources do not list any specific exhibition history for this particular page.

The work belongs to the Mughal period, created circa 1560 in the imperial atelier of the Mughal Empire. It forms part of the illustrated manuscript known as the Tuti-nama, a Persianate narrative cycle that was adapted in India under imperial patronage. The manuscript's production reflects the cross-cultural transmission of Persian literary and artistic traditions into the Indian subcontinent during the sixteenth century, combining Persian conventions with emerging regional sensibilities characteristic of early Mughal workshops.

Its presence in the Cleveland Museum of Art reflects the movement of South Asian artworks into Western collections.

This object is a single leaf from the manuscript known as Tales of a Parrot (Tuti‑nama). The page measures roughly the size of a typical 16th‑century codex leaf and is composed of yellowed paper bearing dense handwritten text. The script is rendered in black ink, framed by thin red and blue lines that trace the page margins, giving the leaf a decorative border.

The text appears to be a narrative or poetic composition, written in a language that follows Arabic‑Persian script conventions. While the precise content cannot be identified without translation, the title of the manuscript suggests a collection of stories involving a parrot, a common motif in Persian literary tradition that often conveys moral or didactic themes.