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Secondary sourcePainting1573-74 CE

Razi Playing a Trick to Cure the Samanid King

Ahmad al-Shirazi (scribe); text by Ahmad b. Muhammad Ghaffari · 1573-74 CE

A 16th-century Persian miniature illustrating a legend of Razi curing a Samanid king through a clever medical trick.

This miniature illustrates a legend about Razi's cleverness as a physician, preserved in later Persian literary tradition.

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Miniature painting folio in a Persian manuscript with Persian text above and below. Several panels show a bald physician with a bearded man in blue robes seated on a mat, a seated bald man in blue trousers, a man in a red and green robe raising a sword at a wooden door, and a figure in blue at a red-curtained doorway. Patterned tiles and arches frame the scenes.
Razi Playing a Trick to Cure the Samanid King, folio from the Nigaristan, Shiraz, 1573-74. Aga Khan Museum, AKM272.f46v.

About this source

What it is

This painted folio comes from a manuscript of the Nigaristan, a collection of anecdotes written by the historian Ahmad Muhammad Ghaffari. The manuscript was copied and illustrated around 1573-74, probably in Shiraz, by the scribe Ahmad al-Shirazi. It depicts a legend about Muhammad Zakariyya Razi (Rhazes) treating the Samanid king Mansur ibn Nuh, who suffered from joint pain so severe that his own court doctors could not cure him.

Why it matters

The story, painted nearly 650 years after Razi's death, shows how later Persian culture remembered him not just as a scholar but as a clever and resourceful healer. It reveals how legends about famous physicians were passed down and illustrated to entertain and teach, blending history with storytelling.

Look closer

  • What details in the painting tell you this is a bath house scene?
  • Why might the artist have shown the story in two stacked scenes?
  • How much of this image do you think shows a real event, and how much is legend?

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