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Oriental Manuscript collection. I became especially intrigued with a manuscript leaf from the Persian national epic poem, the Shahnama. This particular leaf featured a miniature illustration of a scene from the Shahnama which was unidentified in the information provided in the collection. My curiosity to know what kind of scene was depicted on the Hollins manuscript leaf and its greater artistic context led me to begin researching this item in Special Collections for my final paper for the course. I began my research by examining the manuscript leaf in the Special Collections office and reading the accompanying materials to glean as much existing information about the piece as possible. Because of the limits of the existing information, I undertook a comparative methodological approach in an attempt to place this unknown Shahnama scene in context with other better known Shahnama scenes of the same time period. I was able to visually compare the miniature illustration on the Hollins leaf to a collection of Shahnama miniatures in Princeton University’s Firestone Library Special Collections through an online digitization project entitled The Shahnama Project. The similarities and differences among these Persian miniatures provided the bulk of my information an