Documents of the Shaykh Safī-al-Dīn Ardabīlī Shrine (952 to 1926 CE)

The document collection of the shrine of Shaykh Safī al-Dīn Ardabīlī (1253- 1334 CE) is one of the best-known and most unique collections in the Muslim world due to the antiquity, number, and variety of the documents in it. Currently housed at the National Museum of Iran, the collection contains 590 documents, most of which date back to the 13th and 14th centuries. They consist of royal decrees, administrative papers, legal records and contracts produced by Islamic courts and other public authorities in a great variety of languages, including Persian, Arabic, Mongolian, and Chinese, Uyghur Turkic. Offering unique and highly revealing documentary evidence about the broader Persianate world stretching from China to Anatolia, and from the steppes of South Russia to India, the documents shed a very important light on the dynamics of religious, ethnic, and cultural coexistence that characterized the multi-ethnic, multireligious and cosmopolitan society of medieval and early modern Iran.