We often forget that the imperial traditions of planet Earth were once centered in what we now call the Middle East and Central Asia. The Old World was vibrant, violent, turbulent, glorious and centered on Kabul, Kandahar and Delhi: great cities with longer histories than any in America.

Part of this era was defined by the Mughal emperors, Muslims who ruled what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of India from the 1550s to the 1650s, descendants from ancestry who included Ghengis Khan and rulers of the mighty Iranian Timurid dynasties. Never heard of the Mughals? Think of the Taj Mahal, a symbol of modern India if there ever was one, whose construction was initiated by the emperor Shah Jahan.

Like all old-school emperors, the Mughals were preoccupied with conquest, dynastic vendettas and patronizing artists who could portray them at the height of their power and fashion sense. The biggest names among them — Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan — all maintained ateliers of artists and have left us with an invaluable treasury of paintings, drawings and illuminated manuscripts.

The Chester Beatty Library collection of Muraqqa' or "albums" now showing at the Honolulu Academy of Arts represents a fantastic opportunity for us commoners of the modern American empire to admire some of the most amazing portraits and depictions left behind by any ruling class in history.

Muraqqa' is a Persian word referring to collections of folios containing numerous paintings, drawings and prints, made at different times and in different cultures. It also means "patched" or "patchwork," in reference to the humble cloaks worn by Muslim mystics (Sufis) as a sign of poverty. The term also reflects the albums' literal "patching together" of pages, from carefully assembled paper borders around the images, to their compositional strategies, and the integration of non-Islamic subject matter such as European allegorical prints and Renaissance-style Christian imagery painted by Muslims. This hybrid style extends to the rulers' portraits, which evoke the flat profiles depicted in Egyptian art, the tone and detail of Chinese painting, and the Hindu tendency to surround central figures with smaller images of royals, scholars and sages.

The albums can be read as radical experiments in graphic design, most frequently structured in terms of a pairing of portrait and calligraphy. Muraqqa' belong to the overall category of Persian miniature paintings and are treasured among the world's art histories for their almost overwhelming detail and technical expression. Each page is a cosmos of exquisitely-rendered fabrics, intricately folded turbans, gauzy robes, furs, feathers and fine jewelry.

The accompanying calligraphic styles demonstrate stunning refinement and creativity. Frequently executed at an angle, these poems are surrounded by strokes that expand and unify the shapes of the characters, forming a kind of cloud. Graffiti artists will immediately recognize the technique as one used to distinguish letter forms from background. But instead of using the cloud to obscure competing tags, it serves to simultaneously evoke heaven and float the text over richly textured backgrounds of sumptuous floral patterns, abstract vegetation outlined in gold, and rhythms of geometric concentricity.

Making use of the magnifying glasses available in the gallery reveals even greater dimensions of detail in both person and letter. Take advantage of this way of seeing that was once exclusively reserved for art historians, restoration technicians and the painters and emperors themselves! One can spend hours exploring the nuances of the calligrapher's stroke, and this de-facto catalog of ancient male facial hair styles — five o'clock shadows beneath handlebars, finely-tapered chin coverings, bushy salt-and-pepper life vests, and tumbling white cumulus clouds implying great wisdom.

These paintings are certainly not photorealistic, but they are so rich in information (some brushes were single rat hairs!) at such deep and layered scales that a kind of magical hyper-accuracy emerges. Thus we are reminded that the true art of depiction is not based on simulating the visible, but on amplifying the recognizable. The character of these subjects (even if fictionalized) is so clearly rendered that a modern viewer, separated from the Mughals by time and the dizzying splendor of 1600s fashion, can actually pretend to "get to know" these rulers.

Despite the fact that the Mughal empire has dissolved into the turbulence of post-colonial economics and sometimes violent contemporary Islamic fundamentalism, the Mughals would be proud that their likenesses and their illustrated memoirs are on display in the most strategically valuable place on Earth.

One might actually feel a twinge of nostalgia for an image of leadership that is now only reserved for figurehead monarchs, African dictators and high-ranking Catholic priests. Though representing royals in their finery is practically an art universal, the rich colors, fanatic draftsmanship and the balance struck between graphical and painterly techniques is uniquely energizing — especially when contrasted with, for example, the relatively austere portraits of our founding fathers who have comparable political and military legacies. The invitation to consider the changes and consistencies of how rulers and their stories are represented is perhaps the most powerful underlying themes of the show.