‘Made my eyes open so wide I felt I’d been caught up to the sphere of the fixed stars’ – Marina Warner The Art Newspaper

Consulting the position of planets; casting horoscopes or interpreting dreams; the art of divination has been a universal practice for centuries.

In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Iran and Turkey, one of the most splendid tools to gain insight into the unknown was a series of illustrated manuscripts known as the Falnama (Book of Omens). Popular at court and on the streets of Isfahan and Istanbul, only four ‘monumental’ copies of these exceptional works remain. They are notable for their impressive scale and brilliantly painted images of prophets, heroes, villains and signs of the zodiac.

With their encouraging or dire omens, they represent some of the most original manuscripts associated with Safavid Iran and Ottoman Turkey.

This, the first publication ever devoted to the Falnama as a genre, features intact volumes as well as folios and illustrations now dispersed. These images and their prognostications shed new light on the Safavid and Ottoman artistic, cultural, political and religious landscape. The first ever translations of three of the four copies provide insight into a vivid and enduring aspect of human concern – the unknown.

Essays by scholars of Safavid, Ottoman and Byzantine history, culture and language, complemented by full-colour illustrations, offer detailed analysis of the form, content and meaning of these rarely seen works of art.

Know and be aware. . . .

Massumeh Farhad, chief curator and curator of Islamic art at the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and Serpil Bagcı, professor of history of art and departmental chair at Haciteppe University, Ankara, provided the art historical chapters. The catalogue section also includes entries by Julia Bailey, former editor of Muqarnas. Other chapters have been contributed by Maria Mavroudi, professor of history, University of California, Berkeley; Cornell Fleischer, Kanuni Suleyman professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish studies, University of Chicago; and Kathryn Babayan, associate professor of Iranian history and culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr., former professor of Persian, Harvard University, and Sergei Tourkin, professor, St. Petersburg State University, Russia, were responsible for the translations of the Falnama texts.

Also of interest
The Splendour of Islamic Calligraphy
The Tsars and the East: Gifts from Turkey and Iran in the Moscow Kremlin
Islamic Art and Architecture World of Art series
The Ashkenazi Haggadah: A Hebrew manuscript of the mid-15th century
The Macclesfield Psalter