A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

136 A history of Inner Asia
almost legendary proportions.His professional life falls into two halves:
the years of apprenticeship and prime florescence in Herat (from the
1480s to 1510), and those of later maturity and old age in Tabriz
(1510–1537).Otherwise little is known of his personal life; even his
ethnic identity is uncertain, for the customary assumption that Bihzad
was an Iranian – perhaps fostered by what must have been a pseudonym,
“The Well-born One” – is not necessarily correct, and he may have had
Turkic ancestry.It is significant that to his contemporaries, whether
Timurid, Safavid, Ottoman or other, this did not matter; matters of
ethnic pride had a different ring then, and the special case of Navai’s
and Babur’s predilection for Turki should not mislead us.Bihzad was a
painter cherished by the elite and courted by rulers of any linguistic or
even denominational persuasion, from the Timurids to their rivals the
Shaybanids to the latter’s arch-enemies the Safavids.Like other Muslim
painters of his time, Bihzad concentrated chiefly on book illustration,
but separate scenes and even portraits on loose sheets and medallions
have also survived: thanks to him we thus have pictures of such personalities
as Sultan Husayn Bayqara and the Uzbek ruler Muhammad
Shaybani, and what may have been a self-portrait.In general, however,
most of his work consisted of illustrating such classics of Persian literature
as Nizami’s Khamsa or Sadi’s Bustan.Bihzad is praised for a mastery
both of attention to details such as facial expression and of superb composition
depicting dramatic battle scenes and tender romances, besides
a tasteful combination of color with a special role assigned to blue.The
Timurid painter’s almost proverbial fame served as a symbol for the
excellence of the book arts of his time, and for the legacy he left through
his disciples and influence, especially in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury
Bukhara and Tabriz.
Our discussion of the highlights of Timurid civilization could logically
conclude with Zahir al-Din Babur (1483–1530) and his great autobiography,
the Baburname.Let us first glance at the political and social
evolution of Transoxania and the rest of Inner Asia in the course of the
fifteenth century.
We have already mentioned Abu Said, a nephew of Ulugh Beg and
thus Timur’s great-great-grandson (1424–69), who by 1451 emerged as
the victor in the contest for Ulugh Beg’s succession in Transoxania,
partly thanks to the help he had received from the Uzbek khan
Abulkhayr.Quite naturally Abu Said wished to inherit the totality of the
Timurid realm, besides coveting Herat as the most prestigious city.He
lost the prize to his cousin Abu l-Qasim Babur, but he resumed the strug-