Illustration of horse and rider “Zal meets Rudabah” from the Princeton Shahnama Project, an archive of book paintings — commonly known as Persian Miniatures — that illustrate scenes from the Persian national epic, the Shahnama (the Book of Kings), a poem of some 50,000 couplets composed in the late tenth to early eleventh centuries.
The core of this archive is a fund of 277 illustrations bequeathed to Princeton by Clara S. Peck and by Robert Garrett, a member of the Class of 1897. Princeton’s Near East Collections contain some 170,000 books and manuscripts in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish. The Program in Near Eastern Studies provides students in any department the opportunity to study the languages, modern history, contemporary institutions, and problems of the Near East.
Photo courtesy of Princeton University Library
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