Introduction

The passage I have selected is from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and tells the story of Sekandar’s encounter with the speaking tree.  In the text, Sekandar  and his entourage arrive in a desert city where they are told of a mysterious tree with two trunks which speaks in two voices. The trunks are differentiated by gender; the male trunk speaks in the daytime, and the female trunk speaks at night.  Sekandar and his party journey to see the tree.  The male trunk tells Sekandar that his reign will soon end, but the female trunk tells him not to give up hope, but to accept his fate and make the preparations for his death.  Sekandar and his party return to the desert city where they receive many lavish gifts, but the gifts do nothing to alleviate Sekandar’s sadness, and he leaves the city “weeping bitter tears as he went.”

The artifact(s) I have selected to illuminate this monster are several pages from persian books, two of which are from books of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.  Each of the three pages contains an element of the story of the tree; one is a drawing of Sekandar speaking with birds on a mountain (again, contemplating his mortality), the second is an illustration of an unrelated tale, but it features a beautifully drawn tree in the background, and the third is a page from a Persian book of poetry involving the moon visiting various constellations, which have been rendered in monstrous human-like forms.