[1] Written by Rashid al-Din Hamadani (1247–1318 AD) at the start of the 14th century, the breadth of coverage of the work has caused it to be called "the first world history".

[3] The lavish illustrations and calligraphy required the efforts of hundreds of scribes and artists, with the intent that two new copies (one in Persian, and one in Arabic) would be created each year and distributed to schools and cities around the Ilkhanate, in the Middle East, Central Asia, Anatolia, and the Indian subcontinent.

The oldest known copy is an Arabic version, of which half has been lost, but one set of pages is currently in the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art (London, England), comprising 59 folios from the second volume of the work.

The Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh consists of four main sections of different lengths: Rashid-al-Din Hamadani was born in 1247 at Hamadan, Iran into a Jewish family.

Hamdani was responsible for setting up a stable social and economic system in Iran after the destruction of the Mongol invasions, and was an important artistic and architectural patron.

The Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh was one of the grandest projects of the Ilkhanate period,[6] "not just a lavishly illustrated book, but a vehicle to justify Mongol hegemony over Iran".

[7] The text was initially commissioned by Il-Khan Ghazan, who was anxious for the Mongols to retain a memory of their nomadic roots, now that they had become settled and adopted Persian customs.

Initially, the work was intended only to set out the history of the Mongols and their predecessors on the steppes, and took the name Taʾrīkh-ī Ghazānī, which makes up one part of the Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh.

At some point during the next two decades it was brought to England, probably when Harriott came home on furlough, when the manuscript entered the collection of Major General Thomas Gordon.

In 1948, it was loaned to the British Museum and Library, and in 1980 was auctioned at Sotheby's, where it was purchased by the Rashidiyyah Foundation in Geneva for £850,000, the highest price ever paid for a medieval manuscript.

The images within, designed to correspond to its texts, depict historical and religious events, courtly scenes, and authority figures spanning nationalities and ethnicities.

[13] Because of Rashid al-Din’s mandate for an Arabic and Persian version of the text to be produced every year[14] there was an adopted standard style for the illustrations, giving characters Mongol countenance and dress, that made the differentiation between key figures difficult.

[18] The full collection, known as the Majmu'ah, contains Bal'ami's version of Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari's chronicle, the Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, and Nizam al-Din Shami's biography of Timur.

These portions of the Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh cover most of the history of Muhammad and the Caliphate, plus the post-caliphate dynasties of the Ghaznavids, Seljuks, Khwarazmshahs, Is'mailis, and the Turks.

[18] MS H 1654 later came into the ownership, along with the Arabic and other Persian versions, of the Timurid ruler Shahrukh, whose royal library both refurbished and added illustrations to the Hazine 1654.

Mongol, Shahrukh, and Timurid styles are exemplified among these depictions of Ughuz Turks and Chinese, Jewish, Frankish, and Indian history.

Rashid al-Din was, of course, a very busy man, with his public life and would have employed assistants to handle the materials assembled and to write the first draft: Abu'l Qasim may have been one of them.

In this capital, a crossroads of trade routes and influences, and a place of great religious tolerance, Christian, Chinese, Buddhist and other models of painting all arrived to feed the inspiration of the artists.

The miniatures are ink drawings with watercolour washes added, a technique also used in China; although they are generally in good condition, there was considerable use of metallic silver for highlights, which has now oxidized to black.

Borrowings from Christian art can also be seen; for example the Birth of Muhammad adapts the standard Byzantine composition for the Nativity of Jesus, but instead of the Biblical Magi approaching at the left there is a file of three women.

Like other early Ilkhanid miniatures, these differ from the relatively few surviving earlier Islamic book illustrations in having coherent landscape backgrounds in the many scenes set outside, rather than isolated elements of plants or rocks.

One can thus distinguish a remarkably well observed group of Abyssinians, Western-style figures based on Syrian Christian manuscripts, Chinese, Mongols, Arabs, and so on.

Timur's youngest son, Shahrukh, who ruled the eastern portion of the empire from 1405 to 1447, owned incomplete copies of the Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh and commissioned his court historian Hafiz-i Abru to complete it.