Page from Tales of a Parrot (Tuti-nama): text page
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art. Free to download, adapt and use — no permission needed.
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 from ancient India and other Persian tales. The blending of cultures and ethnicities long pre-dated the Mughals in India.
Cleveland Museum of Art’s own description
