This illustration by the Mughal court artists Miskin and Shankar depicts Adham Khan, foster brother of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r.1556–1605), being thrown from the palace walls at Agra, north-west India in 1562. This was his punishment for having burst into the private apartments of the palace with his companions, one of whom had stabbed the emperor’s prime minister to death. The different episodes of the incident are shown concurrently. Akbar emerges from his sleeping quarters, sword in hand, having been awoken by the commotion. The murdered prime minister is at lower left of the composition. Akbar orders the immediate death of Adham Khan, who is thrown from the terrace.

The painting is from the Akbarnama (Book of Akbar), commissioned by Akbar as the official chronicle of his reign. The Akbarnama was written in Persian by his court historian and biographer, Abu’l Fazl, between 1590 and 1596, and the V&A’s partial copy of the manuscript is thought to have been illustrated between about 1592 and 1595. This is generally seen as tthe earliest illustrated version of the text, illustrated by the leading court artists of the time. Many of these are listed by Abu’l Fazl in the third volume of the Akbarnamat, the A’in-i Akbari, and some of these names appear in the V&A illustrations, written in red ink beneath the pictures, demonstrating that this was a royal copy made for Akbar himself. After his death, the manuscript remained in the library of his son Jahangir, from whom it was inherited by Shah Jahan.

The V&A purchased the manuscript in 1896 from Frances Clarke, the widow of Major General John Clarke, who bought it in India while serving as Commissioner of Oudh between 1858 and 1862.