Posted 9 years ago
theeccentr…
(5 items)
Illuminated manuscript on vellum. Any info would be helpful. I have look for similar people, animals and characters but I have had no luck finding anything similar. Measures 11 by 7 3/4 inches. Please let me know if you can help. Thanks! Sorry the pics are sideways, they aren't saved that way on my computer and I can't correct it on this site.
very interesting, whatever it is!
I contacted a site that sells these types of items but he said he had never seen anything like it and it may have just been something made for the tourist trade. He wasn't 100%.
They are fantastic! LOL - I wonder if that is where J.K. Rowling got her Owl Mail idea for Harry Potter? It has something to do with written communication. Are there two of them, or only one on two sides?
I knew it look middle eastern- I was thinking Assyrian, But it is possibly Iranian. The creature with the dog head and bird tail looks like a Simurgh - that is associated with communication, and is female.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simurgh
Most of the white birds look like Ibis to me.
Thanks for all your comments Celiene. The one thing that I have focused on are the characters, looking at a ton of alphabets. I have found anything similar. I just looked up the Assyrian alphabet and it's not it.
When the person from the website told me that it may be something from made from the tourist trade, I thought that it would have letters from a known alphabet, not something some unusual.
No - not a smurgh. It's fantastic, though! So many different images there is the cross in the upper left... The people look Middle Eastern to me, though. The birds look like Ibis. The creature seems to have a bird head as it's tail. The people's hands are bizarrely HUGE!
The most unusual animal is the cat like animal with the bird tail. I haven't seen anything like it.
It is double sided. One unique thing about it is that it have gold metallic paint, which is something that has been around since BC times.
I had this for a while and I was going to hang it up and I wasn't sure what to do with a double sided piece of art, so I started looking closer at it and realized it might be something really special!
Do you live near a museum?
I am by many museums, but I am not sure which would be able to help with something like this. I just decided to email a couple of professors of Middle Eastern Studies, Language and Anthropology. I will post anything I find out!!
It's so weird - it is Middle Eastern and also European (or Western). I'm dying to find it what it is. Look up the Marduk - but I can't find a single creature with a bird-head tail.
"The dragon made of chrome brick on the Ishtar Gate from ancient Babylon was an emblem of Marduk (Museum of the Ancient Near East, Berlin). The dragon is a composite creature with the head of a fire-spewing dragon, body and tail of a serpent, front feet of a feline, and back feet of a bird. This provides a good illustration of the apocalyptic imagery found in the Old Testament prophets and the book of Revelation. "
Here is a Pre-Columbian Dragon with a bird head tail! Ut your piece is NOT from the Americas!
http://www.trocadero.com/stores/HDENTERPRISES/items/1275261/item1275261.html
I got a response from a profession about the piece. Here's what he said!!!
"This is probably from a fable called Kalila and Dimna. The two dog-like animals on both sides of the man are jackals. One is called Kalila and the other Dimna. They're the main characters and narrators. They tell stories to the lion, the king of the jungle. The stories are symbolic, like all fables. Some have political, spiritual or social undertones. Many of the stories have human characters.
The fables are Indian and Persian. They are referred to in Indian heritage as the Panchatantra. They can be traced to the 2nd or 3rd century BCE. They became really famous when they were translated into Arabic by Ibn Al-Muqaffa' in the 8th century.
The script doesn't seem to be in Arabic. It could be Coptic, which is the language used by ancient Egyptian Christians. That'd be close to Greek combined with some kind of cursive hieroglyphics. I can't confirm that though."
I'm running out the door right now but I will do more research when I return home.