Faridun’s sons meet King Sarv of Yemen and his daughters, from the Book of Kings (Shahnama) by Firdausi

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Faridun’s sons meet King Sarv of Yemen and his daughters, from the Book of Kings (Shahnama) by Firdausi. King Sarv of Yemen sits in the centre, with his three daughters on the left, and the three sons of Faridun on the right, in a palace courtyard with garden landscape beyond. Sarv begrudgingly accepts that his daughters may now marry the Iranian princes, because the boys have solved his riddle. On the upper right, a woman (the girls' mother) sits alone on a balcony, and there is an empty nest in the plane tree overhead. Folio, ink, colours and gold on paper, Persian text in nasta`liq script, with painting (on recto) and illuminated rubric ("Faridun tests his sons", both on verso), with gold-painted borders, from the Book of Kings (Shahnama) by Abu al-Qasim Firdausi (d. 1020), attributed to the early reign of Safavid Shah `Abbas I (r. 1587-1629), Qazvin, Iran, undated, c. 1590-1600. This is one of twenty-two folios in the Chester Beatty, all from the same partial copy (possibly never fully completed) of Firdausi's Shahnama: ten folios are in a modern binding, twelve are mounted separately. Most of these folios are not directly sequential, and fall into three sets, narrating the earliest kings, Faridun and his descendants, and Rustam.