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Project NikolaosNescis quid serus vesper vehat

Islamic cosmography

Jinn in the cosmographical manuscripts

13th-century tradition; this manuscript c. 1601–1800 · The Islamic world; this manuscript from the Persian sphere

A manuscript page: two standing figures with animal and human features in coloured pigment on a plain ground, framed by ruled lines, with Arabic script above.

Jinn, from a Book of Wonders manuscript, 17th–18th century.

Source & rights
What this is
Depiction from within the tradition
Object
Manuscript
Title
Jinns, from The Book of Wonders of the Age
Date
c. 1601–1800
Held by
University of St Andrews, MS32(o)
Licence
CC0
This copy
Hosted at the size published by the source; not altered.
Retrieved
2026-08-29

Made within the tradition that transmitted the account, though not by a witness to it.

A cosmographical manuscript: a genre that catalogued the world's contents, ordinary and otherwise, in the same register and on the same page. The category being illustrated is the source's own, and this archive does not translate it into any other.

Source recordLicence

The Arabic and Persian cosmographies - the ʿajāʾib al-makhlūqāt tradition, the wonders of creation - set out to describe the contents of the world. They cover the heavens, the calendar, minerals, plants, animals, remarkable places, and jinn, in sequence, in the same register, illustrated in the same hand.

That flatness is the interesting thing. A jinn is not introduced as an intrusion into the natural order; it is another entry in a catalogue of what there is, positioned by a scheme the compiler took to be exhaustive.

What the source is

An illustrated cosmographical manuscript in a long tradition of works cataloguing the contents of creation, in which jinn appear as one class among many.

This entry is a source and image card; no text is reproduced.

The report

No passage reproduced - Excerpt not published - edition and page not yet verified

No text is reproduced. This project cannot read the manuscript and has not consulted a published translation of this particular copy.

Why it is in this archive

It is the archive's best illustration of a rule that is easy to state and hard to keep. A source using its own categories is not making an approximate attempt at ours.

Rendering jinn as demon imports Christian angelology; as spirit, a modern English vagueness; as genie, an eighteenth-century French translation of a translation. None of these is what the manuscript says, and a collection that quietly standardised them would have destroyed the only evidence it holds - which is what each tradition actually said.

The compilers were also doing something recognisable: assembling a description of everything, from the best available sources, with illustrations, for readers who wanted to know what the world contained. That is not so far from what this site is doing, which is worth remembering before being condescending about the contents.

The words the source uses

Given in the language they were written in, with a plain rendering. None is treated as equivalent to a term from another tradition.

jinn
jinn
Deliberately left untranslated. The usual English renderings - spirit, demon, genie - each import a different tradition's category, and the whole point of this entry is that the source is using its own.
ʿajāʾib
wonders; marvels
The genre name. A wonder in this literature is something remarkable within the created order, not something outside it.

How close is the source?

Substantial chronological or textual distance from any event.

  1. 01 · Genre established by

    Zakariyyā al-Qazwīnī, 13th century, and predecessors

  2. 02 · Copied and illustrated by

    Later workshops, over several centuries

    Each copy an opportunity for the pictures to drift from whatever the text originally described.

  3. 03 · Held by

    University of St Andrews, MS32(o)

Details, provenance and rights
Experiencer state
Not applicable
Reported agency
Multiple personal agencies
Locomotion claim
None
Physical trace
None reported
Witness or speaker
None. These are compilations, not testimony.
Recorder / translator
Compilers in the tradition of al-Qazwīnī, and later copyists and illustrators
Edition
The Book of Wonders of the Age, St Andrews MS32(o), ff. 24
Rights
Link only - not reproduced here
Cultural sensitivity
Context needed

Provenance notes

  • The manuscript is dated only broadly, and this project has not examined it.
  • No translation of any part of this manuscript is offered.

The image is CC0 from the holding institution.

Source record

From the same shelf

Grouped by the tradition that produced them. Nothing here claims they share a cause.