Artwork story
About "The Ox Shanzabeh Left Behind, Grazing in the Territory of the Lion King", Folio from a Kalila wa Dimna
The artist and artwork
An unidentified painter made The Ox Shanzabeh Left Behind, Grazing in the Territory of the Lion King in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. This ink and opaque watercolor on paper was one of seventy-eight illustrations in an Arabic Kalila wa Dimna manuscript. Its moralizing animal tales grew from the ancient Indian Panchatantra and traveled widely. The Met attributes the leaf to Sultanate Gujarat, probably after an Egyptian original, without naming an artist.
The world around it
The manuscript's visual and written evidence reveals that travel. The Met finds Mamluk Egyptian figure types and bold drawing beside Ottoman tulips and Safavid turbans. Burnt-orange color and heavily inked lines support the Gujarat attribution. The book uses a forceful, left-leaning Arabic naskh-like script, but a Devanagari inscription at its end confirms its Indian life. It belongs to a world in which stories, scripts, and styles crossed the Indian Ocean and Islamic lands rather than staying within one court tradition.
A detail to notice
The title says Shanzabeh has been left behind to graze in the lion king's territory, but the image reads almost like a textile. Two black-and-white ox forms overlap so tightly that their backs become one dark band and their legs interlock; whether they compress different moments or share the field remains unresolved. A brown bird sweeps downward above them. Orange, white, and wine-red blossoms float against blue-gray ground without a horizon. Thick outlines and orange accents hold the worn surface together. Outside the painted rectangle, stains, marginal numerals, folded corners, and small ink marks preserve a page once handled and separated from its text. The wear does not mute its energy; it makes the oxen seem to emerge from centuries of travel.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is folio from an illustrated manuscript made in Ink and opaque watercolor on paper and held in the Islamic Art department.
Recorded dimensions include Overall:; H. 12 1/2 in. (31.8 cm); W. 8 7/8 in. (22.6 cm); Average text size:; H. 8 5/8 in. (21.9 cm); W. 4 7/8 in. (12.4 cm).
Subject terms include Animals, Birds, and Flowers. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is The Alice and Nasli Heeramaneck Collection, Gift of Alice Heeramaneck, 1981.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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