Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh (Compendium of Chronicles, Persia)

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

The Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh, commissioned by Vizier Rashid al-Din at the Ilkhanid court, stands not only as one of the world’s first universal histories, but also as an aesthetic act of epistemic power. Through Foucault’s lens—especially via The Order of Things—this manuscript is a profound attempt at a total ordering of knowledge, mirroring the Mongol empire’s ambition to survey, categorize, and command the entire known world. Yet, beneath this encyclopedic gesture lies a more intimate Foucauldian practice: the production of subjectivity through visibility.

Unlike traditional chronicles that focus solely on one people, this illuminated manuscript integrates Islamic, Mongol, Chinese, Jewish, and Christian histories within a unified visual and textual frame. For Foucault, such a document would not simply reflect a passive historiography, but instead constitutes regimes of truth—it defines what counts as “the real,” “the universal,” and “the civilizational.” It is an instrument of governmentality, ordering not just facts, but the way people remember, identify, and recognize themselves as part of the global whole.

The very act of illumination—rendering kings, prophets, astronomers, warriors—becomes a visual system of classification. Here, Foucault’s notion of the episteme is key: these painted miniatures don’t merely illustrate; they discipline the gaze. They offer a structured form of perception, showing rulers and sages within coherent, spatially ordered worlds, aligning virtue and cosmology within the architecture of the image.

But more subtly, the Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh is also a document of care for the collective self. It’s a manuscript that teaches how a ruler should think, how a subject should know, and how a civilization should remember. Rashid al-Din’s vision was both imperial and introspective—this manuscript functions as a mirror for princes and a history of exemplars, crafting subjects through ethical historicity.

Thus, the manuscript is a Foucauldian technology of self-governance through history. Knowledge, ethics, power, and aesthetics converge in this totalizing artifact, reminding us that the history we inherit is not neutral—it is a disciplinary regime that invites us to become certain kinds of subjects.