Amir Khusraw's Khamsa poem

The Walters Art Gallery, almost next door to our apartment, owns an extraordinary illustrated manuscript produced in the Mughal court during the reign of Akbar in the last decades of the sixteenth century CE. It's a copy of Amir Khusraw's Khamsa poem illustrated by Akbar's court artists. In one of its books, Khamsa describe the adventures of Alexander the Great, many of which are illustrated. We see Alexander visiting Plato; receiving homage from the defeated ruler of China; constructing a mirror which allows him to have surveillance of the high seas, etc.

My favorite illustration has Alexander descending into the ocean in a diving bell 'to seek truth and to demonstrate his faith in God' as the title has it.

It's a wonderful image for all kind of painterly reasons (the waves and sea colour are quite amazing: browny white rather than blue) but what I like most about it is that it presents most of the sailors doing the manual labourers as Europeans (wearing European hats), while the South Asians watch Alexander's devout feat of science with a lordly, relaxed air.

It's a reminder of a pre-modern globalisation, centred in Islam, in which the European's status was something like the opposite to that which it is today. Certainly it's a culturally and geographically more inclusive image than was being produced in Italy or Northern Europe at the time.