Reconstructing Rashīdī Manuscript Production: The Case for a Baghdad Scriptorium

Rashīd al-Dīn (d. 1318) left very specific instruction for how his scholarly works, including <br/>the historical compendium, the Collected Histories (Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh), were to be reproduced and distributed. However, these plans were disrupted by his fall from grace and execution. Several partial manuscripts of the Collected Histories have survived from Rashīd al-Dīn’s lifetime, but they do not match his instructions. This suggests that additional editorial processes shaped the early production of the text. This article compares the earliest manuscripts of the Collected Histories and the evidence surrounding Rashīd al-Dīn’s book production efforts to better understand the origins of the main manuscripts used in modern editions of his history of the Mongols. This is made possible by the recent reemergence of a previously unstudied manuscript that helps fill in the lacunae of its source manuscript. This new manuscript, part of the collection of the Aga Khan, has never been used in any edition of Rashīd al-Dīn’s history of the Mongols, but it offers great promise in reconstructing the early form of the work. Using that manuscript, this article presents the hypothesis that a group of scholars edited the Collected Histories at a scriptorium in Baghdad in the second decade of the fourteenth century. This may in turn help explain the appearance of certain seemingly contradictory textual additions made to the Collected Histories during the last years of Rashīd al-Dīn’s lifetime.