The long tradition of asceticism in India has an extensive iconography. It usually represents a poor and emaciated man, living on his own, occasionally with wild animals for company. Hindu and Muslim art and literature contain many such scenes, but female ascetics or yoginis only rarely appear. However, there is a seventeenth-century miniature in the Rietberg Museum which depicts the well-known subject of a young disciple visiting her guru. Seated together in a landscape in front of a thatched hut, they are surrounded by precisely painted Ustad Mansur-style flora and fauna. It was customary practice in Indian workshops for artists to copy original works by their masters, and to make versions using a stencil or charba. This particular miniature has been recreated several times. In the earliest, the two yoginis are placed in the same setting with their modest possessions. The topos remained popular until the end of the eighteenth century when a change occurred: the disciple of the old yogini disappeared, having been “swallowed up” by a tiger. Instead of two mystics talking together, the scene depicted is that of a tiger near a hermit, a typical Ragamala image known as Bengali Ragini. These new compositions were readily acquired by European collectors. A final version also exists that derives from the original Mughal topos which depicts the three: hermit, tiger, and…disciple.

One of the classical features of landscape in Persian manuscript-illustration is a stream of water. Painted in silver, it winds its way through a picture in a manuscript, punctuating the ground with verdant green on either side, even though the stream itself may have tarnished with centuries of exposure to the air.

Among a small group of paintings kept in several of the celebrated Hazine albums in the Topkapi Saray Library in Istanbul, the group that Ernst J. Grube, in 1980, had called ‘Chinese People’, one stands out, the cover-illustration to an exhibition in London in 2005. There entitled ‘Enthronement Scene’, it is unlike its closest companion-parallels, which have unpainted grounds but no naturally occurring water in the landscape: it has a surface almost fully covered in pigment; but at its very bottom can be seen the tarnished remains of ‘a silver stream in the foreground’.

Placed variously on a continuum stretching ‘between China and Iran’, since about 1972, the prevailing attribution has been to Aq Quyunlu Tabriz around 1480. Given ‘the silver stream in its foreground’, this article re-examines that attribution and proposes that it may be as much as a century earlier but ‘modernised’, given a fully painted landscape, at Ya'qub Beg's court in Tabriz.

This article discusses a number of nineteenth century playing boards for the Sufi form of the traditional Indian board game of gyān caupar̩ (the Chaupar of Gnosis), from which modern Snakes and Ladders derives. Usually comprising 100 squares inscribed in Persian, the playing area conducts the players hazardously upward from lower spiritual states to the final goal of heaven, according to the throw of dice and sudden demotions or promotions through snakes or ladders. Most surviving examples are held in British collections, including that of the Royal Asiatic Society. Detailed attention is given to a unique, expanded version of the standard Sufi board which came to light a few years ago. Innovative and elaborate in its structure, method of play and nomenclature, it seems however to have been a late and short-lived experiment.

The name Ilqāy appears on small monetary weights for 1251 and 1252 in Cairo at the beginning of Mamlūk rule. This person was a high official in the treasury, responsible for regulating monetary transactions. However, the name is not Arabic but Mongolian—and at this point, the Mamlūks and Mongols were contesting the Middle East. This article traces the meaning of the unique name and its appearance in Mongol history. It then discusses the hypothetical way in which Ilqāy developed Mongol coinage in his early career. The violent purges of the Mongol civil war may have forced him to escape and enter Egypt's financial system. This biography is hypothetical since there is no literary evidence for mint activity and personnel at this time. Nevertheless, the unusual name and timing create a mystery that invites special consideration.

The article sets the discussion of Islamic art within the very animated discussions of the last few decades by many prominent scholars that have sought to pinpoint its nature and that have highlighted the twin dangers of over-generalisation and too narrow a focus. Given that the parameters of the discussion have undergone radical change, and the need to revise traditional paradigms, the article confines itself to Islamic art in the medieval period and the central Islamic lands, especially through the prism of nature. Problems of definition and of the usefulness of medieval texts, and the roles of abstraction and contemplation, are reviewed in turn and the article ends with an attempt to define more closely the aesthetics of a single branch of Islamic art, namely medieval Persian book painting.