Comparative Study of Two Pages of the Gulshan Album in the Golestan Palace in Tehran and the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin

  The Gulshan Album (Muraqqa'-e Gulshan) kept in the Golestan Palace in Tehran, is one of the most significant and intact remaining albums from the Mughal Emperor Jahangir’s workshop, though other pages of this album are dispersed throughout the world. One of these pages is the only page of the Gulshan Album kept in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin which may be connected to the mentioned album. Whereas the folios of this album are kept separate from each other, the order of their arrangement is very important. In order to appreciate and study this manuscript more thoroughly, its separate pages should be rearranged along with other pages. Therefore offering a logical explanation of the facing folios, in the rearranged order of the album’s folios, would be highly influential. Since one of the pages of the Gulshan Album in the Golestan Palace, seems very similar to the page of the Chester Beatty album at first glance, the question is whether these two pages can be considered as facing folios?
  The goal of this paper is to help identify some of the scattered pages of Gulshan Album and their order of arrangement. Therefore using comparative and descriptive- analytical methods, with reference to the original works, these two pages were introduced and compared in both similar visual elements including ornamentations and depicted motifs, and the text they contain, also the way these pages related to each other as facing folios were articulated. Lastly it is concluded that these two pages related to each other and can be considered as facing pages.