A hero hauls a bound captive up by rope from a pit

Rustam, in a leopard-pattern cap and a brown gold-trimmed robe, bends over a small black opening in the pale ground below the purple hills, pulling a rope down to a round chamber where a bare-chested bound man kneels and grips it with both hands. Helmeted companions in orange and blue gather at the left beside three saddled horses; more helmeted men stand at the right, and a woman in a pink cloak watches with her face veiled in white.

The Shahnama, or Book of Kings, is the Persian national epic: a verse history of Iran from its first kings to the Arab conquest, completed around 1010 by the poet Firdausi of Tus (c. 940–1020). Its illustrations were painted in later centuries for the rulers and patrons who commissioned copies. Illustrated manuscripts survive from the Ilkhanid period onward, from the First Small Shahnama of the early fourteenth century to Shah Tahmasp's great copy made in Tabriz, and later volumes from Qazvin, Herat and Bijapur in the Deccan. Leaves from these dispersed manuscripts are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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