Description
This sheet is one of thirteen leaves of Ottoman Turkish manuscript acquired by the Whipple Museum from Istanbul in 1998. Intriguingly, onto each sheet has been added a medical or scientific illustration, hand-painted over the top of the manuscript text below. Confusingly, the images appear to bear no relation to the text onto which they have been added.

Investigation by several experts in the history of Ottoman and Islamic science has revealed these images to be forgeries. The manuscript sheets are original documents from the 18th and 19th century (letters or pages torn from religious and poetic books), but the images were likely added shortly before the sheets were acquired. The intent was clearly to deceive. Each image carries a date from the late 17th or 18th century, supposed owners' stamps, and 'nonsense' annotations have been added to give the air of scientific diagrams. (These annotations are 'pseudo-writing' - written by someone who evidently could not read Arabic or Persian or Ottoman Turkish!)

All of the images on the Whipple Museum's 13 sheets are modern copies or interpretations of earlier medical or scientific drawings. Some of the original images upon which these copies are based are of Persian or Turkish origin, whilst others are European. As such, these images need to be treated with great care. The forger's intent was clearly to present 'typical' Ottoman scientific imagery in a way that would appeal to a non-expert buyer; but the images themselves are not reliable sources for understanding the practice or visual culture of Ottoman science and art.
19/02/2018
Created by: Josh Nall on 19/02/2018

Description
[This is an old label containing errors - now redundant]
While the text of this manuscript dates from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the illuminated images were painted much later in the mid-eighteenth century. It is likely that the images were produced as part of a growing eighteenth-century tourist trade interested in scientific manuscripts from the Islamic world. The manuscript pages were torn from their original volume and provided the background for the applied illustrations. The subject of the text does not coincide with that of the illuminations. The text is written in both Ottoman Turkish and Classical Arabic, and outlines the practical and liturgical ritual for a person to become ritually pure. In the Islamic world, trusts were set up by pious wealthy individuals in order the serve the community on their death. They were often in the form of hospitals, schools, libraries and institutions of learning, and the inscription suggests that this manuscript is a translation of an important religious text that was part of this trust system. The text promotes the edicts of the hanafi school of law and was likely produced in Anatolia, a non-Arabic speaking part of the Ottoman state, where hanafi law was promoted in its educational establishments. The eighteenth-century illustrations are astronomical or cartographic in nature. One depicts an astrolabe that stylistically resembles Moorish design, which would have been unfamiliar to sixteenth-century Islamic astronomers. The night sky represented is a post-Herschel vision of the heavens and closely resembles photographic images taken through a telescopic lens.

08/07/2014
Created by: Allison Ksiazkiewicz on 08/07/2014