One of the manuscripts we have recently digitised is the Dārābnāmah, an illustrated prose romance describing the adventures of the Persian King Darab, son of Bahman, and Alexander the Great, originally composed in the 12th century by Muhammad ibn Hasan Abu Tahir Tarsusi. Our copy unfortunately only contains the first part of the epic, ending with the story of the Macedonian princess Nahid, Darab’s newly-wedded bride and the future mother of Alexander the Great, being returned unwanted (she had bad breath) but pregnant to her father Faylaqus (Philip of Macedon).

Nahid, daughter of Faylaqus (Philip of Macedon), is presented to Darab in marriage (Or. 4615, f 129r)

Drawing on Iranian folk literature, this collection of tales reflects a tradition of storytelling which has parallels with Firdawsi’s Shāhnāmah, written at the beginning of the 11th century. At the same time it has developed quite independently, linking pre-Islamic Iranian traditions with those of Islam and the west. The second part of the work, missing from this copy, is devoted to Iskandar/Alexander the Great and forms part of the Alexander romance, well known in both Persian and European literature. The first part of the work, however, has been comparatively understudied, so our digital version will hopefully facilitate some profitable research into this neglected area.

Our copy was probably completed between 1580 and 1585 for the Mughal Emperor Akbar. Classed as ‘Grade Two’ in the Mughal imperial library, it originally contained at least 200 paintings, and presumably there was also a second volume. By 1828, probably looted or sold, it belonged to the Nawabs of Awadh whose seals are stamped on the final leaf. When the British Museum purchased it from Quaritch in 1893, there were only 157 paintings and many leaves, including the colophon, were missing.

Tamrusiyah, temporarily separated from Darab,  and her brother Mihrasb under the Waqwaq Tree (a mythical tree which grew human heads as fruit). Artist: Mukhlis  (Or.4615, f 44r)

The paintings, created at a time when Mughal art was subject to Iranian, Indian and European influences, are what really distinguish this manuscript. Nearly all of them are ascribed altogether to  43 individual artists, several of whom were singled out by Abu’-Fazl in his chapter on the art of painting in the Āʼīn-i Akbarī. They include some of the most famous artists of Akbar’s reign. Details of their work and four separate paintings are described in the catalogue to the British Library’s recent exhibition ‘Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire (Losty and Roy, 2012).

The plot of the Dārābnāmah is extremely complicated. The basic story tells of a prince, abandoned at birth and his subsequent adventures before he returns to Iran and claims the throne. His travels take him to kingdoms ruled by apes, one-eyed people, and others where he encounters all kinds of magical creatures including watermaidens, human-headed serpents and dragons.  In his article in Encyclopædia Iranica, William Hannaway gives a resumé, but unless some reader rises to the challenge, we’ll have to wait for the full details! Particulars of the manuscript and a list of all the miniatures with links to the images can be seen here and on our Digital Persian Project page.

Here are a few more paintings to illustrate the story:


Near the beginning of the book, Bahman, son of the hero Isfandiyar, and his horse are swallowed by a dragon, leaving his widow Humay as queen (Or.4615, f 3v)

Abandoned at birth and rescued from the river by a washerman, Darab eventually meets his mother, Humay. Artist: Mithra (Or.4615, f 7v)



Humay playing polo with her slaves. Artist: Sanvalah (Or.4615, f 11v)

Darab continues on his travels. Here he is shown fighting the dīv, Samandun (Or.4615, f 17v)

Darab meets and falls in love with the widowed queen Tamrusiyah who later becomes the mother of his son Darab/Dara. Together they continue travelling. In this scene Darab draws the mighty bow of Isfandiyar before Sangarun. The severed head of the son of the ruler of the Island of Katrun, beheaded because he failed to draw the bow, is fixed to the wall above. Artist: Bhagvan (Or.4615, f 25v)

Darab goes to the rescue of his mother Queen Humay who has been captured by the Caesar of Rum (ie. the king of Macedonia). Here they hurl rocks at the king's army. Artist: Ibrahim Qahhar (Or.4615, f 102r)

Humay watched by Darab as she dictates letters announcing Darab’s accession. Artist: Dharmdas (Or.4615, f 114r)

Further reading

Charles Rieu, Supplement to the Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum (London, 1895), no 385.
Norah M Titley, Miniatures from Persian Manuscripts: a Catalogue and Subject Index of Paintings from Persia, India and Turkey in the British Library and the British Museum (London, 1977), pp 8-11.
William L. Hanaway, “DĀRĀB-NĀMA”, in Encyclopædia Iranica.
J P Losty and Malini Roy, Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire (London, 2012), pp 32-7.
Zabīḥ Allāh Ṣafā (ed), Dārābʹnāmah-i Ṭarsūsī: rivāyat-i Abū Ṭāhir Muḥammad ibn Ḥasan Ibn ʻAlī ibn Mūsā al-Ṭarsūsī, 2 vols (Tihrān, 1965).
Marina Gaillard, Alexandre le Grand en Iran = le Dârâb Nâmeh (Paris, 2005).

Ursula Sims-Williams, Asian and African Studies

At the time of his death on 28 February 1969, Charles Dalrymple Belgrave had not set foot in Bahrain for more than a decade. Yet for over thirty years – between 1926 and 1957 – when he served as Adviser to the rulers of Bahrain, Sheikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa (reigned 1923-1942^[1]) and Sheikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa (1942-1961), Belgrave was an immensely powerful figure in the country and played an instrumental role in its development during this period.

Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa and Charles Belgrave, Bahrain, 1945. (Dmitri Kessel—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Born in England on 9 December 1894, Belgrave was educated at Bedford School and Oxford University. After leaving Oxford he joined the British Army and during WWI he served in Egypt, Sudan and Palestine with the Imperial Camel Corps Brigade. After the war, he served as an administrator in the Siwa Oasis in Egypt before becoming an administrative officer in the British mandate of Tanganyika Territory (formerly German East Africa).

In the summer of 1925, while on leave in London from his posting in Tanganyika, Belgrave saw an advertisement for a vacancy in the personal column of The Times newspaper that was to transform his life.

Young Gentleman, aged 22/28, Public School and/or University education, required for service in an Eastern State. Good salary and prospects to suitable man, who must be physicially fit: highest references; proficiency in languages an advantage. Write with full details to Box S.501, The Times, London E.C.4.
(The Times, 10 August 1925)

Belgrave applied for the post and after a series of interviews with British Government officials (including the British Political Resident in the Persian Gulf, Francis Prideaux) he was offered the position of Adviser to Shaikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, the ruler of Bahrain. A letter Belgrave wrote to Prideaux in September 1925 reveals that he had conveniently forgotten his own age when he applied (he was 31 at the time and the upper age limit was 28).

First page of a letter sent from Belgrave to Prideaux, 11 September 1925 (IOR/R/15/1/362 f. 1E)

Before setting out for Bahrain, Belgrave completed a three-month Arabic course at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in order to refresh his Arabic and married his fiancée, Marjorie Lepel Barrett-Lennard. The newly-married couple arrived in Manama in March 1926 having combined their journey to Bahrain with their honeymoon.

Belgrave began his new role at a tense time in the country, Shaikh Hamad had been installed as ruler by the British only three years earlier when his father Shaikh Isa bin Ali Al Khalifa had been forced to step down. This had led to lingering tensions between Shaikh Hamad and factions within Bahrain – including members of his own family – that supported his elderly father, Isa.

Belgrave was Adviser to Shaikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, the ruler of Bahrain (pictured above) from 1926 until Hamad’s death in 1942. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Though Bahrain was nominally independent, Britain had dictated its foreign policy since the nineteenth century, before consolidating its power over the islands in 1900, with the creation of the post of British Political Agent in Bahrain. Although Belgrave was an employee of the Shaikh and not the British Government, as his hiring process clearly demonstrates, his position was closely tied to the colonial aims of the British in the region. Belgrave swiftly became a powerful figure in Bahrain and came to be known simply as ‘The Adviser’ (المستشار). He essentially ran Bahrain’s government, was the head of its police force and – in the absence of an organised legal code – personally operated its courts. Belgrave oversaw a programme of modernisation that saw the creation of an education system, a police force, a health service and an extensive series of public works (including roads, power stations, piers and airports). This transitional period also saw a centralisation of power and the consolidation of both the British and Al Khalifa family’s position in Bahrain. Belgrave was also instrumental in supporting oil exploration in the country, which was the first in the region to discover oil, in 1932.

A 1935 Indian postage stamp picturing King George V that is marked for use in Bahrain. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Belgrave is an extremely visible presence in the records of the Political Agency, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the India Office Records held at the British Library, with a very large amount of correspondence and other papers bearing his name, paying testimony to the range of matters he covered and to his great attention to administrative detail. In fact, Belgrave’s fastidious attention to detail was something for which he was criticised. In May 1941, Charles Geoffrey Prior, the British Political Resident in the Persian Gulf wrote to his superiors in India that Belgrave had a “tendency to waste time on trivialities”. In the same letter, Prior also claimed that Belgrave’s increasing aloofness had caused a drop in his popularity and that he “and the other Bahrain officials have had their way for so long without any supervision, inspection or control that they have become a society of self-satisfied Czars”.

Extract of letter from Charles Geoffrey Prior to O.K Caroe at the India Office in London, 25 May 1941. (IOR/R/15/1/344 f. 128)

Prior’s concern was prescient as by the 1950s Belgrave had become an unpopular figure in Bahrain; many Bahrainis had grown angry at the amount of power that was centralised in his hands. Belgrave had come to embody British Imperialism in the Middle East at a time of fervent Arab nationalist activity and when, after the Suez Crisis, Britain’s standing in the region had reached a nadir. Belgrave was viewed by many in Bahrain as an impediment to the country making the transition to a democracy and as shown in this BBC archival clip from 1956, calls for him to leave the country were at the forefront of the demands of protestors at the time. As one protestor stated to the BBC reporter, “Belgrave is not just an adviser – he is the judge, and when he goes to the court he is also the police commandant. He is everything in Bahrain, he is not an adviser.”Eventually, in April 1957, Belgrave was forced to leave and was never to set foot in Bahrain again.

Once back in the UK, Belgrave wrote an autobiography named Personal Column which offers a fascinating insight into his life and the development of Bahrain during this period. In the book’s conclusion, Belgrave states his belief that if a more liberal system of government is to be introduced in Bahrain, it should be done so gradually and that any attempt to “rush the process” would be “disastrous” - a clear expression of the attitude that eventually made his position in the country untenable and forced him to leave. Ultimately, Belgrave’s legacy in Bahrain remains a contentious issue, but it is one that anyone wishing to understand the modern history of Bahrain must seriously engage with.

More stories related to the modern history of the Gulf can be found on the British Library's Untold Lives blog.

Further reading:

BL IOR/R/15/1/362: 'File 19/204 I (C 55) Bahrain, Appointment of Financial Adviser, Belgrave and Assistant, Luard'.
BL IOR/R/15/1/344: 'File 19/169 III (C 80) Bahrain Reforms'.
Charles Belgrave, Personal Column (London, 1960).
Charles Belgrave, The Pirate Coast (London, 1966).
Mayy Muḥammad al-Khalīfah , Tshārlz Biljrīf : al-sīrah wa-al-mudhakkirāt (Beirut, 2000).
Photographs of Bahrain: Life Magazine, Life in the Middle East: Power and Petroleum in the Gulf in 1945.

Louis Allday, Gulf History/Arabic Specialist, British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership
Twitter - @Louis_Allday

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[1] Note: some do not recognise Hamad’s reign as formally beginning until the death of his father, Isa in 1932.

When I first joined the British Library in 1986 as Curator for Maritime Southeast Asia, my official remit was manuscripts and printed books and periodicals in the vernacular languages of Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei and the Philippines. I also regarded myself as having a ‘watching brief’ on other materials in the British Library relating to the Malay world, ranging from East India Company archives to prints and drawings of the region. But in the present digital age, the wealth of collections in the British Library relating to Indonesia in particular has expanded exponentially through the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP).

The EAP, which was founded in 2004, is funded by Arcadia (previously known as the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Foundation) and administered by the British Library.  It aims to preserve in the form of (digital) reproductions archive material deemed to be in danger of survival.  The original material is retained by its owners, but digital copies are deposited both in the country of origin and at the British Library.  The EAP offers grants for both pilot projects, which usually yield a survey and images of a small sample of manuscripts, and major digitisation projects.  To date the EAP has funded 13 projects in Indonesia. (Strangely enough, there have been few applications for projects in Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei or Singapore).  There are also two projects in Timor Leste, and one on manuscripts from Vietnam in Cham, an Austronesian language.  


One of three Cham manuscripts digitised through the 2012 pilot project EAP531, Preserving the endangered manuscripts of the Cham people in Vietnam: an Islamic manuscript containing selections from the Qur'an and prayers, in Cham and Arabic, from Vietnam,19th c (with thanks to Ervan Nurtawab for this identification).  EAP531/1/2. 

Under the terms of the EAP, the digital copies sent to the British Library will be made freely available online for research purposes.  In practice it has taken some time to process the images and to solve technical issues, but six of the Indonesian projects are now fully catalogued and accessible online, while the other seven projects are in varying stages of completion.  And what surprises they bring!  It would not be an exaggeration to say that the manuscript collections now made accessible digitally through the EAP have begun to change our understanding of the landscape of the writing traditions of the Malay world.  

The first and most striking impression is the overwhelming predominance of Islamic texts, in the form of copies of the Qur’an, prayer books and sermons, and works on ritual obligations, theology, and Sufism.  This should be contrasted with the strong literary, historical and legal slant of collections of Malay and Indonesian manuscripts held in Europe, and those in Southeast Asia formed under colonial auspices.  

The second, and related, point is the very high proportion of manuscripts written in Arabic, rather than in vernacular Southeast Asian languages.  Such manuscripts have tended to fall under the radar of most academic programmes of Indonesian and Malay studies.  For example, the authoritative catalogue of Indonesian manuscripts in Great Britain by M.C. Ricklefs and P. Voorhoeve (London, 1977) lists manuscripts in Austronesian languages ranging from Balinese, Batak and Bugis to Javanese, Makasarese, Malay, Old Javanese and Sundanese, but not in Arabic.  And yet a full appreciation of the totality of writings produced within a culture is an important context from which to appreciate better the composition of texts in indigenous languages such as Malay and Javanese.

A third consideration is the great codicological value of these newly-documented manuscripts, often still cared for within the community within which they were created. As such, they are rich sources of information on traditional binding materials and storage methods – aspects of book history nearly always lost when an Oriental manuscript entered a western library, and was rebound or rehoused in accordance with European conventions.

The large volume of fragile materials being digitised in difficult conditions in the field means that inevitably there are problems with metadata supplied by project teams: titles are not always accurate, languages are sometimes misidentified, and a few items described as 'manuscripts' are in fact printed.  However these caveats are more than compensated for by the richness of the material now being made accessible for the first time.  Listed below are the six EAP projects from Indonesia which are now fully accessible online.

EAP276, Documentation and preservation of Ambon manuscripts
Although the central Moluccas has a large Christian population, this project of 2009 documented 182 mainly Islamic manuscripts from 12 collections on Ambon and the smaller neighbouring island of Haruku.
Calligraphic batik cloth binding of a finely illuminated Kitab mawlid manuscript containing songs in Arabic in praise of the Prophet, 19th c., from the collection of Husain Hatuwe, Ambon. EAP276/7/32.

EAP229, Acehnese manuscripts in danger of extinction: identifying and preserving the private collections located in Pidie and Aceh Besar regencies
EAP329, Digitising private collections of Acehnese manuscripts located in Pidie and Aceh Besar Regencies
The pilot project (EAP229) of 2008 surveyed the region and digitised 10 manuscripts; this was followed by a major project (EAP329) in 2009 which digitised 483 manuscripts in Arabic, Malay and Acehnese.

Ma'rifat al-fatihah, one of 118 manuscripts owned by Teungku Mukhlis of Calue, Pidie Regency.  Shown here is Syair Kalimat, a Sufi explication in Malay verse of the confession of faith, the title set within a dramatically graphic rendering of the shahada (Ini syair kalimat baca oleh kamu, hai ya ikhwan, supaya kamu faham akan dia) .  EAP329/1/90.

EAP205, Endangered manuscripts of Western Sumatra: collections of Sufi brotherhoods
A pilot project in 2008 digitised 7 manuscripts held in surau (prayer houses) in West Sumatra.  

Undang-undang Minangkabau, a Minangkabau legal digest in Malay, from the collection of the Surau Gadang Ampalu in Kabupaten Padang Pariaman, West Sumatra.  EAP205/2/2.

EAP280, Retrieving heritage: rare Old Javanese and Old Sundanese manuscripts from West Java (stage one)
This project of 2009 digitised 28 palm leaf manuscripts, comprising 27 from the sanctuary (kabuyutan) at Ciburuy in Garut Regency, West Java, and possibly dating from the 14th-16th centuries, and one manuscript from the private collection of Mr Kartani in Cirebon.

Nipah Kropak Ciburuy I (Buana Pitu?).  EAP280/1/2.

EAP365 Preservation of Makassarese lontara’ pilot project
This pilot project of 2010 was able to make representative images from seven 20th-century manuscripts written in Makassarese and Arabic held in Makassar, capital city of South Sulawesi, and in a number of villages in Kecamatan Galesong south of the city.  
Kotika Boddia, divination manual, from the collection of Daeng Tiro, Desa Boddia, Galesong, South Sulawesi, Indonesia [1920s]. EAP365/3/2.

Projects mostly completed but not yet accessible online:
•    EAP061, The MIPES Indonesia: digitising Islamic manuscripts of Indonesian Pondok Pesantren
•    EAP117, Digitising ‘sacred heirloom’ in private collections in Kerinci, Sumatra, Indonesia
•    EAP144, The digitisation of Minangkabau’s manuscript collections in Suraus
•    EAP153, Riau manuscripts: the gateway to the Malay intellectual world
•    EAP211, Digitising Cirebon manuscripts
•    EAP212, Locating, documenting and digitising: preserving the endangered manuscripts of the legacy of the Sultanate of Buton, South-Eastern Sulawesi Province, Indonesia

•    EAP352, Endangered manuscripts of Western Sumatra and the province of Jambi: collections of Sufi brotherhoods

For further information about the Endangered Archives Programme, contact the Grants Administrator, Cathy Collins: catherine.collins@bl.uk, and subscribe to their blog.

Annabel Teh Gallop, Lead Curator, Southeast Asia