# Calligraphy

- By: Basavana (Indian, active c. 1560–1600)
- By: Sur Das (Indian)
- Date: c. 1596
- Medium: Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
- Classification: Calligraphy
- Dimensions: Image: 34 x 20 cm (13 3/8 x 7 7/8 in.); Overall: 38.5 x 25 cm (15 3/16 x 9 13/16 in.); with mat: 49 x 36.3 cm (19 5/16 x 14 5/16 in.)
- Culture: Mughal India, court of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605)
- Credit line: Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
- Museum: [Cleveland Museum of Art](https://clevelandart.org/art/1947.502.b)
- Rights: [Public domain (CC0)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
- Picture: https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1947.502.b/1947.502.b_web.jpg
- Who can see it: Tweens profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

Akbar, the third Mughal emperor of India, commissioned an illustrated copy of the Chingiz-nama, a historical text written in Persian during the early 1300s by a Jewish scholar who converted to Islam. The Chingiz-nama is an account of the conquests of Akbar’s ancestors, the Mongols, who swept across the Asian continent from Siberia to the Mediterranean Sea during the 1200s. This page describes the final momentous defeat of the caliph of Baghdad, the religious head of Sunni Islam and political leader of the Abbasid dynasty, with the names of all the caliphs who came before him listed in red at the top.