The Maqāmāt Ship: Image as Source in Historical Archaeology of the Indian Ocean

An iconic illustration of a ship in a thirteenth-century Islamic manuscript now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris is one of the most significant individual images used in studies of Indian Ocean seafaring, and in nautical archaeology in particular. This painting, in the Arab manuscript known as the Schefer Maqāmāt, was the primary visual source for interpretations of the ninth-century shipwrecks from Belitung in Indonesia and Phanom Surin in Thailand and for the design and construction of two full-sized reconstructions (Severin 1985: 279; Vosmer 2010: 121, 134; Guy 2019: 125–28; Staples 2019: 316). This Maqāmāt ship illustration is prized because of the relative paucity of other archaeological, iconographic, or documentary sources, although this conversely makes validation difficult. The context of the image, and of several others in other illustrated versions of the manuscript, is troublesome for researchers of material culture, as the Maqāmāt text was a collection of witty short stories or fables written in the eleventh century, in which illustrations were designed to enhance the witticisms by clever compositions rather than to depict contemporary material culture faithfully, much as in the popular shadow theaters of the time. Using these ship pictures as historical evidence requires particular caution, as knowledge of the models or referents used by the artists—which may have included shadow puppets, the limitations imposed by the page size and shape, the skill of the artists, and the intended mode of reception—is integral to sound interpretations...