---
title: The Waq-Waq tree in art
type: Theme
description: The tree as a subject of Persian, Mughal, and Ottoman manuscript painting, and the "waqwaq" scrollwork ornament it named.
tags: [art, manuscript, painting, ornament]
timestamp: 2026-06-01T00:00:00Z
---

# The Waq-Waq tree in art

The Waq-Waq tree became a favourite subject of Persian, Mughal, and Ottoman manuscript painting, shown as a single tree whose branches sprout the heads of people and animals. Painters drew on both the [[waqwaq-tree|tree of talking fruit]] and the [[speaking-tree|speaking tree]] of the Alexander legend, and in any one picture the two are often hard to tell apart. The heads may be calm or grimacing, and the better known versions arrange them in dense symmetry across the crown of the tree.

The most reproduced examples come from copies of Ferdowsi's *Shahnameh* and of al-Qazwini's [[ajaib-al-makhluqat|Wonders of Creation]]. The painting in the Timurid *Shahnameh* of Ebrahim Soltan, made about 1430 and now in Oxford, shows Alexander before the tree at the world's edge, and is unusual for carrying no text on the page, which lends the scene a stillness.

The word *waqwaq* was also given to a style of ornament: an arabesque in which scrolling foliage turns into human and animal heads. This waqwaq scrollwork appears in metalwork, in illustration, and in the decorated borders of manuscripts, and it kept the tree's strange logic alive as a pattern long after the stories themselves had settled into folklore.
