Unusually, this painting takes up a full page of the manuscript. On the left is a richly dressed and ornamented figure on a throne, fanned by a servant holding a fly-whisk. A man bows in front of him. Three other men are sitting with hands upraised. They are all inside a domed palace.

On the bottom level, seven men make their way towards a building guarded by a doorkeeper.

The seven brothers who feature in this tale have been summoned to the palace because the king is curious about the source of their wealth. The scene has to be read from bottom to top. They are first shown arriving at the palace. Then one of them respectfully bows to the king while the others sit behind.

Other visual elements

This Ādityavāravratakathā manuscript is highly decorative. There are broad floral borders round both the picture and the text while the writing is set within a colourful garden.

Script

The elaborate script used for the text is the Jaina Devanāgarī script. It is used for writing numerous Indian languages, although here it is used for Gujarati and Hindi.

There are a few notable features of this script:

• it is an old type in the way the sounds e and o  are notated when used with a consonant, known as pṛṣṭhamātrā script
• the red vertical lines within the text divide the long sentences into smaller parts, but are not necessarily punctuation marks.