Thesis Spotlight:

A Chance Meeting with a Former Instructor Leads to an Obscure but Essential Source

Kathleen Pike

The thesis director, David J. Roxburgh, professor of history of art and architecture, made the following observations of Pike’s thesis: “Working with existing scholarship on Iskandar Sultan’s patronage, Kathy has shown how the horoscope functions inside a broader program of manuscript commissions, which were intended to shape an image of the prince and to advance his political claims. She has also shown how it operates specifically as a uniquely powerful visual expression. This last aspect forms the core of her thesis and represents its most original scholarly contribution. Through her visual analysis of the painted double-page horoscope, Kathy has moved well beyond the contributions made by [previous scholars]. She has expanded their analysis of the science of astronomy and astrology by incorporating more recent publications on those branches of science and their practice at the Timurid courts, . . . and she is the first person to engage the visual composition of the horoscope.”

Elaheh Kheirandish, lecturer and research associate in the Department of the Classics at Harvard University, taught Pike in the fall 2004 course Science in the Islamic Middle Ages and introduced her to an obscure source that greatly enhanced Pike’s thesis. What follows are Kheirandish’s and Pike’s accounts of the experience.

In Elaheh Kheirandish’s Words

When Kathy Pike chose the fifteenth-century Persian mathematician al-Kashi for her case study in my course Science in the Islamic Middle Ages in fall 2004, neither she nor I thought we would be looking together at a rare manuscript of the same rough area and period two and half years later. But there we were, one late morning in March, leafing through the opening folios of a Timurid text decorated with beautiful colors and illuminations, with the thought of having a part of it referenced in Kathy’s master’s thesis.

The manuscript has been residing in the Burndy Library at MIT’s Dibner Institute through a gift from the late Professor I. Bernard Cohen, who taught history of science courses at Harvard in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Extension School for years. It came to my attention during my research residences at the Dibner Institute, now in its last days, along with its equally unique library. More than a year after Kathy was in my course I saw her in Widener Library, where she told me that she was conducting thesis research on fifteenth-century astronomy and astrology.

Reading an excerpt from her recently completed award-winning thesis, I think of that day, not just for the happy coincidence of seeing a former and gifted student, but also as a possible occasion for the rising star of an unknown manuscript and a promising historian at once. But as we shall see from Kathy’s own account below of the succession and combination of events, persistence and excellence are as much a part of that success story as coincidence.

In Kathleen Pike’s Words

Courtesy of the Burndy Library

The timing of a visit to England to examine relevant sources at the British Museum, the Wellcome Library, Bodleian Library, and the Keir Collection coincided with an exhibit at the British Museum of illuminated manuscripts from the European and Islamic bookmaking traditions. There an anthology produced for Iskandar Sultan was opened to a richly decorated page of text surrounded by a margin of gold with an inscription that would prove fortuitous for the final form and focus of my thesis. It read, “With the pen of Justice, Fortune has inscribed the signs of grace and bounty on your day’s page in both text and marginalia.” I had found the unifying element I needed to place the horoscope within the context of Iskandar Sultan’s book output and political aspirations.

Still, on-site research and exhaustive reviews would fail to provide one very important element of proof for my argument that Iskandar Sultan’s birth horoscope is unique in its format and program of illustration, as I was not able to find contemporary examples of other royal Timurid horoscopes to compare with Iskandar Sultan’s. A chance encounter with Dr. Kheirandish, and her mention of a horoscope manuscript in the Dibner Institute’s Burndy Library indicating that a figure with the last name al-Kashi had cast the horoscope, would prove invaluable in providing the evidence I needed. My slim hope would turn to excitement while viewing the manuscript during the last working days of the Burndy Library. Dr. Kheirandish’s reading of the poorly preserved manuscript folios revealed the date of its composition as 1419, making it a near contemporary to the Iskandar Sultan horoscope, completed in 822 ah (=1419 ad). And my excitement turned to amazement when her reading of the sequence of names in Persian transcription “Amirzada Rustam Bahadur b. ‘Umar Shaykh Bahadur b. Amır Timur Gurkan” revealed the horoscope’s subject as the grandson of Timur, Rustam, the brother of Iskandar Sultan as documented in Timurid genealogies and histories.

That this thin, previously unpublished manuscript could have such a close and integral association to my thesis was certainly more than I could ever have hoped for. Not only did this manuscript provide an example of a horoscope manuscript nearly contemporary with Iskandar Sultan’s but, because of its subject, it holds the possibility of expanding the existing knowledge we have of this otherwise little-known Timurid prince. Translation and publication of this manuscript may reveal it to be an important historical document in its own right, totally separate from its relationship to the better-known horoscope of Iskandar Sultan.