How King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba were brought together by a hoopoe

The story of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba has been told and retold by numerous cultures over the centuries. It has, for example, inspired both an oratorio by Handel (Solomon, 1748) and a swords-and-sandals Hollywood epic starring Yul Brynner and Gina Lollobrigida (Solomon and Sheba, 1959).

In Ethiopia, tradition has it that the pair had a son, Menelik, who founded the royal house which ruled that country until the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974.

The story actually dates back to two near-identical passages in the Old Testament: 1 Kings 10 and 2 Chronicles 9. Both tell of a queen from a faraway land called Sheba, who had ‘heard about the fame of Solomon [and] come to test him with difficult questions’. Solomon, the king of Israel and much renowned for his wisdom, answered all the queen’s questions correctly — something which, along with the splendour of his palace, ‘took her breath away’.

The queen gave him 120 talents of gold, a large quantity of spices, and a selection of precious stones. Solomon bestowed even greater gifts on her in return, before she left Jerusalem and headed home.

The biblical story is short and reasonably spare, which has allowed it to be interpreted with a considerable degree of creative licence ever since. One intriguing interpretation, a 15th-century painting from the Timurid Empire, is being offered in Art of the Islamic and Indian Worlds at Christie’s in London on 27 April.

The painting depicts the meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, who are enthroned at the top of a court scene also featuring many of their subordinates; some bountiful flora; a gold sky; and a wonderful array of ornithological creatures (more on which later).

The sense of wonder is enhanced by the wings on a number of female figures on the right, who seem to be fairies. On such evidence, one can well believe that the queen was left breathless by the king’s palace.

According to the version of the story in the Qur’an, she came to Jerusalem a pagan but left it converted to the monotheism of Solomon (who in Islam is deemed to have been a prophet as well as a king). However, though the Timurids were an Islamic dynasty, this painting shows no hint of a religious conversion.

More telling is the appearance of the king, who — with his round face, feathery moustache, and gold earring with a single hanging pearl — looks strikingly like the Timurid prince Baysunghur (c. 1397-1433). Strikingly like, that is, the few contemporary portraits of Baysunghur that survive, such as Baysunghur ibn Shahrukh Seated in a Garden (below), a painting from an illustrated manuscript he commissioned of a set of fables known as Kalila wa Dimna (today found in the Topkapi Palace Library in Istanbul).

Extant depictions of the prince are rare — fewer than 10 in number — and yet he was among the most important figures of his age, certainly as a patron of the arts. The folio coming to auction is thought to be one of the earliest depictions of him.

The Timurid empire is named after its founder, the warlord Timur (also known as Tamerlane), who between 1370 and 1405 led his nomadic Turko-Mongol tribe to conquer lands including modern-day Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, southern parts of Russia, and northern parts of Pakistan and India.

He died while attempting a final hurrah: invading China. None of his successors could match Timur’s military prowess (and the empire would eventually fall in 1507). However, the oasis city of Herat — propitiously located on the Silk Road, in present-day Afghanistan — soon became a centre of cultural florescence. Herat was the Timurid capital, and it attracted many of the day’s best artists, architects and poets (such as the famous Sufi mystic, Jami) from across the empire.

As Babur, Timur’s great-great-great grandson and the founder of the Mughal empire, put it in his memoirs: ‘Herat was filled with learned and matchless men. Whatever work a man took up, he aspired to bring it to perfection.’ (It was, in fact, a woman who left the most visible impact on the city — Gawhar Shād, Baysunghur’s mother, who oversaw the construction of a marvellous religious complex — but that’s another story.)

Baysunghur was the grandson of Timur and the son of the Timurid ruler Shah Rukh, whom he predeceased. A cultivated individual, the prince was a gifted poet and calligrapher. However, he’s remembered more for the works he commissioned than those he created, especially in the art of the book.

Baysunghur kept a royal library where he employed some 50 calligraphers, illustrators, illuminators, ruling-makers and bookbinders. Their most memorable achievement was the Baysunghur Shahnama — a version of Persia’s national epic, the Shahnama — widely regarded as one of the finest illustrated manuscripts ever made (and today found in the library of Golestan Palace in Tehran).

According to Ernst J. Grube in his book The Classical Style in Islamic Painting (1968), subsequent generations of Herati artists all considered those of Baysunghur’s time to have been ‘the absolute measure of excellence’ — and worth ‘making every effort’ to emulate.

The folio coming to auction boasts all the hallmarks of Baysunghur’s atelier, from the vivid colour and elaborate design to the overall sense of refinement. The prince always insisted on the use of the most expensive pigments and paper, which has helped the paintings to survive in fine condition to the present day.

Baysunghur commissioned manuscripts in several genres, from histories and poetry to didactic texts. The last of these included a subgenre known as ‘A Mirror for Princes’, which consisted of stories serving as moral guides for princes about how to conduct themselves.

Given Baysunghur’s own rank, it is easy to see why such stories appealed to him. One popular example was The Conference of the Birds, and the folio coming to auction is likely to have come from a manuscript of this text.

Written in 12th-century Persian by Farid al-Din ’Attar, The Conference of the Birds  tells the allegorical tale of all the world’s birds, who are in search of a sovereign. At the suggestion of the hoopoe, their spiritual guide, this search entails the crossing of seven treacherous valleys — which only a true leader could achieve. Some birds, such as the finch and the nightingale, choose not even to set out in the first place.

We’re told that the hoopoe is revered among its fellow birds because, as per Qur’anic tradition, it had successfully acted as Solomon’s messenger in inviting the Queen of Sheba to his palace. This explains the inclusion of a painting of the king and queen in a manuscript of The Conference of the Birds.

The folio coming to auction would originally have served as half of the manuscript’s frontispiece (though it has since been separated from the other pages).

As for why Baysunghur had himself depicted as Solomon in this painting, it was presumably a mix of wishing to be equated with a great ruler and wishing to insert himself prominently into a book on model princely behaviour.