Khamsa

The Khamsa, whose name means 'Quintet' or 'Quinary' in Arabic and which is also known as Panj Ganj ('Five Treasures'), is Nizami Ganjavi's main and best-known work. It consists of five long narrative poems: Makhzan al-Asrar ('The Treasury of Mysteries'), dated to 1163 though some place it in 1176, which was influenced by Sanai's monumental Garden of Truth; Khosrow and Shirin (1177–1180); Layla and Majnun (1192), drawn from Arabic sources; the Eskandar-Nameh, or Book of Alexander (around 1194, or between 1196 and 1202); and Haft Peykar, or The Seven Beauties (1197). The last four are medieval romances.

Nizami substantially reworked the material from his sources. Khosrow, Shirin, Bahram Gur and Alexander the Great already appeared in episodes of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, and they return at the centre of three of the four romances.

In later centuries the Khamsa became a popular subject for lavish manuscripts illustrated with painted miniatures at Turkic, Persian and Mughal courts. Notable examples include a Jalayirid manuscript made in Baghdad (1386–1388), another made in Tabriz in 1481 for Yaqub Beg, and a copy created for the Mughal emperor Akbar in the 1590s.