An Index of the Poets in the Istanbul Anthology of Quatrains Istanbul University Library, MS 1203
Document Type : pajoohesh
Author
10.22081/jap.2026.80498
Abstract
Istanbul University Library holds a manuscript of an early anthology of quatrains, catalogued as MS 1203. It contains 3,600 quatrains by 298 poets and bears a clear resemblance to Jamāl Khalīl Shirvānī’s Nuzhat al-majālis. Over time, the manuscript’s folios have fallen out of order, leaving its books and chapters in considerable disarray; its opening and concluding folios have also been lost. Consequently, no trace remains of either the work’s title or the identity of its compiler. The manuscript has no scribal colophon, but it was most probably copied in the ninth/fifteenth century. A comparison of this anthology with Nuzhat al-majālis indicates that its compiler had access to a recension different from the surviving manuscript of that work. He also added quatrains by poets who emerged after the compilation of Nuzhat al-majālis, including Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī and Sa‛dī, thus producing a new recension of the work. This revised anthology is estimated to have been compiled in the second half of the eighth/fourteenth century. The present article provides an index of the poets represented in the Safīna-yi rubā‛īyyāt-i Istanbul.
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