An Illustrated and illuminated Leaf from the Hamzanama: A Prince seated in discussion with courtiers on a hillside, India, Mughal, Circa 1570

J.Seyller, The Adventures of Hamza, Washington, DC, 2002, p.259, R21. 

Akbar's Hamzanama is a celebrated work that has been described in every major book on Indian and Mughal art. More recently, all the known leaves from this manuscript were regrouped in an exhaustive publication (Seyller 2002) accompanying the touring exhibition 'The Adventures of Hamza', at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, and at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2002.

The Emperor Akbar (r.1556-1605) was a supreme patron of the arts, and the commissioning of the Hamzanama was the first great artistic undertaking of his reign. The Hamzanama is the principle cornerstone of early Mughal painting and one of the most innovative of all oriental manuscripts. Its enormous size and startling compositions were quite without precedent and were never attempted again. The manuscript is a romance of the mythical adventures of Amir Hamza, the uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, who is transformed by the tale into a chivalric hero who travels the world fighting infidels and dragons.

The Hamzanama was described as being in the library of Akbar at the end of his life, and it was inherited by Jahangir (r.1605-28) and Shah Jahan (r.1628-59). It probably remained intact in the royal palace at Delhi until the Mughal collections were looted during Nadir Shah's sack of the city in 1739 when many leaves of the book were taken back to Persia. Other leaves from the great book remained in the ruined palace of Delhi, which was sacked by Ahmad Shah Adbali in 1757 and captured by the British in 1803 and 1857. Of the approximately one hundred and seventy nine paintings still extant, most are in the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry in Vienna (Gluck, 1925, and Hamza-Nama, 1974) and in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Hamza-Nama, 1982). Others are divided among the Chester Beatty Library, the Fogg Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and elsewhere.