What is the Shāhnāmeh of Shah Tahmasp?

It is the most lavish illuminated copy of Ferdowsi's Shāhnāmeh ever produced: 759 folios with 258 full-page paintings, completed in Tabriz between c. 1522 and 1535 for the Safavid court. Begun under Shah Ismail I as a gift for his son and completed under Shah Tahmasp I, it is widely regarded as the supreme masterpiece of the Persian arts of the book.

Why is it also called the Houghton Shahnameh?

The 16th-century imperial manuscript passed from the Ottoman court into the Rothschild collection and in 1959 was bought by the American collector Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Houghton dismembered the book in the 1970s and sold individual folios to museums and private collectors — hence 'Houghton Shahnameh'.

In 1994 the bound remnant — 118 paintings and the textual core — was returned to Iran in a barter for Willem de Kooning's painting Woman III; it is now in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. The remaining 78 dispersed paintings are held by the Metropolitan Museum (78 folios), the Aga Khan Museum, the Sackler/Smithsonian and other public and private collections.

Who wrote the text it illustrates?

The Persian poet Ferdowsi of Tus completed the Shāhnāmeh in 1010 CE after 30 years of work. The Safavid manuscript reproduces his ~50,000-couplet text in a calligraphic six-column nasta'liq layout.

Can the dispersed folios be seen today?

Yes — the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds 78 folios and rotates them on display. Other paintings are at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, the Sackler Gallery in Washington, the Khalili Collection, the Sarikhani Collection and various European museums.

Is the manuscript still complete in Tehran?

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art holds the bound textual core with 118 of the original 258 miniatures intact; the other 140 are dispersed. The book has not been rebound since Houghton's dismemberment.

Tabriz · c. 1522–1535

The Shāhnāmeh of Shah Tahmasp

Two decades of work by the greatest painters of Safavid Tabriz — 258 paintings on Ferdowsi's national epic, and the supreme masterpiece of the Persian arts of the book.

Image: Folio from the Shāhnāmeh of Shah Tahmasp, Met Museum

Book

A royal commission in Tabriz

Shah Ismail I, founder of the Safavid dynasty, commissioned a monumental copy of Ferdowsi's Shāhnāmeh as a gift for his young son, the future Shah Tahmasp I. Work began in the royal kitabkhana (book-house) at Tabriz around 1522 and continued for more than a decade. The finished manuscript runs to 759 folios, each 47 × 32 cm, with 258 full-page miniatures — the largest cycle of paintings illustrating a single Persian text.

"No other Persian manuscript represents such a sustained and coordinated effort by so many of the period's finest painters, calligraphers, illuminators and binders."
— Sheila R. Canby, The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp (Met, 2014)

Artists

The painters of the Tabriz school

Principal painters of the Shāhnāmeh of Shah Tahmasp
Artist	Career	Famous folios
Sultan Muhammad	fl. c. 1505–1540	'The Court of Gayumars', 'The Feast of Sada'
Mir Musavvir	fl. c. 1525–1555	'Nushirvan and the Owls'
Aqa Mirak	fl. c. 1525–1560	Battle and court scenes; later Tahmasp's Khamsa
Mirza Ali	fl. c. 1535–1575	Son of Sultan Muhammad; refined court scenes
Muzaffar Ali	fl. c. 1530–1565	Cousin of Sultan Muhammad; landscapes
Dust Muhammad	fl. c. 1510–1564	Painter and the period's most important art historian

Sultan Muhammad's "Court of Gayumars" — depicting the throne of the world's first king under a turquoise sky alive with sprites — is regularly named the single greatest Persian painting.

Afterlife

Gift, dispersal, return

Shah Tahmasp sent the bound manuscript in 1568 as a coronation gift to the Ottoman Sultan Selim II. It remained in the Topkapı library for nearly three centuries before passing into European and then American collections. In the 1970s the collector Arthur Houghton broke up the book and sold individual folios; in 1994 the bound remnant returned to Iran in exchange for a Willem de Kooning painting.

759 folios

Each 47 × 32 cm

258 paintings

Largest cycle of any Persian manuscript

c. 1522–1535

Production in the Tabriz royal kitabkhana

1568

Sent to Sultan Selim II in Istanbul

1959

Bought by Arthur Houghton Jr.

1994

Bound remnant returned to Iran in barter for de Kooning's 'Woman III'

Gallery

Folios of the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh

Painted between 1522 and 1535 in Tabriz under royal supervision \u2014 258 surviving folios, today scattered across museums.

Comparison folio from the Bayasanghori Shahnameh (1430).Wikimedia Commons

Bahram Gur — a Shahnameh folio.Wikimedia Commons

Bahram Gur hunting with the harpist Azada.Wikimedia Commons

Bihzad — the Herat master who shaped the Tabriz atelier.Wikimedia Commons

Folio of a Timurid Shahnameh.Wikimedia Commons

Images shown here are served from the local media library.

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References

All imagery is sourced from Wikimedia Commons, public-domain museum collections (British Museum, Louvre, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Museum of Iran), or UNESCO World Heritage records. No AI-generated images are used. Scholarly text is synthesized from Encyclopædia Iranica, the Cambridge History of Iran, and peer-reviewed publications.