Lives That Cannot Be Told

Abstract

Children appear frequently in Persianate sources, including Timurid chronicles, travel narratives, and miniatures, but they rarely develop as sustained narrative subjects. This article argues that childhood's marginality stems from structural limitations of historical narration rather than evidentiary absence. It proposes three thresholds: visibility as representational presence, intelligibility as recognition within meaning systems, and narratability as sustained subjecthood across causal sequences. Examination of Yazdi's Zafarnama, Samarqandi's Matla al-Sadayn, Clavijo and Ibn Battuta's accounts, and miniatures such as Khusraw in the Royal Camp and Layla and Majnun at School demonstrates that narratability centers on authority figures who generate temporal continuity. Children remain consistently present and occasionally legible in specific roles, yet they seldom achieve ongoing narrative subjecthood. The framework reveals historiography's selectivity, where structural criteria shape narratable lives beyond mere content selection, privileging continuity-generating subjects over dependent ones.