Page from Tales of a Parrot (Tuti-nama): text page

The script is rendered in a fine, black ink applied with a brush, producing crisp, tightly packed letters that maintain legibility despite their compactness.

The script is rendered in a fine, black ink applied with a brush, producing crisp, tightly packed letters that maintain legibility despite their compactness. The background pigment, a pale ochre, has aged to a yellowish hue, and the ink shows slight feathering where moisture has migrated, creating faint blurred spots. A thin red pigment line, likely derived from vermilion, delineates the page edges.

The folio originates from a manuscript tradition that circulated in the Islamic world during the medieval period, though the exact date and place of production remain uncertain. It entered the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art as part of a larger acquisition of Persian and Central Asian manuscripts, where it is displayed alongside other pages from the same work.

*Tales of a Parrot* belongs to a genre of didactic literature that uses animal protagonists to convey moral lessons. In manuscript culture, such texts were often copied by professional scribes for elite patrons, emphasizing the elegance of the script and the quality of the materials as markers of the work’s prestige.