Ascending to Heaven: Fourteenth-century Illustrations of the Prophet’s miʽrāǧ
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scenes illustrating the Prophet’s ascension to heaven, are some of the most glorious in Persian painting. Single scenes illustrating the subject are found in various types of literature, ranging from such Persian classics as Nizami’s Hamsa to popular devotional works about the Prophet’s life such as the Qisas al-anbiya’ (Tales of the Prophet) and biographies of his life such as the Siyar an-nabi. In all these cases, the ascension is merely one of many illustrations, but in addition there were at least two illustrated manuscripts devoted entirely to the subject of the Prophet’s ascension. Called Book of Ascension, these works have multiple paintings illustrating several incidents of the journey. The more famous of the two manuscripts, transcribed in Uighur script, was made in the Timurid period. The other illustrated manuscript was made a century earlier under the Ilkhanids, Mongol rulers of Iran from 1256 to 1353. This essay surveys the illustrations from the Ilkhanid copy and shows how the topic of the Prophet’s ascension to Heaven developed in the fourteenth century from a single incident in the Prophet’s life to an independent hagiography with multiple, large illustrations that served as models for the next several centuries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".