The Summary of
Calligraphers of the Golshan Album
Hamidreza Ghelichkhani
The Golshan Album is the most valuable album about calligraphy in Iran at present which Jahangir, the king of India, ordered to prepare it and called it "Moragha Jahangir" at first. Ms. Badri Atabai introduced this album in one of the catalogues of the Royal Library of Iran (Golestan Palace in Tehran) which include some general introduction about bibliography. She also printed only some few papers of this album up to now. This album has 262 pages and half of all pages are in Nastaliq style of calligraphy and the margin of the whole calligraphy section papers are miniatures in Indian-Iran style. We know 43 leaves of this album are from another album which is called the "Golestan Album". In this investigation, photographs of all papers were taken in 2004 and the context and style of calligraphies and calligraphers were studied. This article contains these cases: 1. Brief description about "Golshan Album" containing names, number of pages, measures, languages, painters, styles of calligraphy and etc. 2. Poems of Kalim-e Hamedani about this Album and epigrams. 3. Transferring it from the Royal library of India to Tehran and studying about all kind of seals (stamps) on its papers. 4. Investigating the preface scripted by Mohammad Husain Kashmiri in 1610/1019 A.H. 5. Introducing the calligraphers who have some works in the Golshan Album. The number of these calligraphers is fewer than ten. One of them is Indian and others are Iranian, such as: Jafar Tabrizi (Baisonghori), Azhar Tabrizi, Soltan Ali Mashhadi, Abd-ol Rahim and Mir Ali Al-Kateb (Heravi). However, all of them were speaking in Persian.
The signatures of Mir Ali's works are: Ali/ Faghir Ali/ Mir Ali/ Faghir Mir Ali/ Mir Ali Al-Kateb/ Ali Al-Kateb/ Ali Al-Kateb Soltani/ Mir Ali Al-Kateb Soltani. Mir Ali wrote the largest portion of this Album and these works were written between 1521/928 to 1545/951 A.H. We know that he lived between 1528/935 to 1545/951 A.H. in Bokhara. It is interesting that we have not seen any work of Mir Ali Tabrizi (who is the originator of Nastaliq style) at all and Jafar Tabrizi just mentioned him at the end of one paper of this album. Except than him, we can see master pieces of five geniuses of Teimori and Safavi schools. This paper will have at least 15 images from the Golshan Album.
