Khamsa of Nizami
The Khamsa or Panj Ganj is the main and best known work of Nizami Ganjavi.
Description
The Khamsa is in five long narrative poems:Makhzan-ol-Asrâr, 1163 Khosrow o Shirin, 1177–1180Leyli o Majnun, 1192Eskandar-Nâmeh, 1194 or 1196–1202Haft Peykar, 1197The first of these poems, Makhzan-ol-Asrâr, was influenced by Sanai's monumental Garden of Truth. The four other poems are medieval romances. Khosrow and Shirin, Bahram-e Gur, and Alexander the Great, who all have episodes devoted to them in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, appear again here at the center of three of four of Nezami's narrative poems. The adventure of the paired lovers, Layla and Majnun, is the subject of the second of his four romances, and derived from Arabic sources. In all these cases, Nezami reworked the material from his sources in a substantial way.
The Khamsa was a popular subject for lavish manuscripts illustrated with painted miniatures at the Turkic, Persian and Mughal courts in later centuries. Examples include the Khamsa of Nizami (Tabriz, 1481) commissioned by the Aq Qoyunlu Yaqub Beg, or the Khamsa of Nizami (British Library, Or. 12208), created for the Mughal Emperor Akbar in the 1590s. A Khamsa manuscript created for Prince Aurangzeb, the sixth Mughal emperor, is now in the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art. Its illustrations of Bahram Gur depict the character as Aurangzeb.