In 1590/1, three years after he had deposed his father, Shah Abbas visited Isfahan[1]. Aged only nineteen, he was still fighting to re-conquer his own country. He had recently made a humiliating – if pragmatic – peace with the Ottomans; as well as losing Mashhad (and the important Shia shrine there) to the Uzbeks. Shortly …
From 1590/1 onwards, the city of Isfahan was transformed in a magnificent royal building programme. The dense urban agglomeration that had grown up since the tenth century was substantially extended and remodelled. Shah Abbas the Great[1] oversaw an architectural revolution in which grand structures promoted local and international commerce and splendid new leisure amenities were …
Lord Curzon has described Thomas Herbert’s work as: “by far the most amusing work [on Persia] that has ever been published”[1]. Although Herbert visited Iran in 1626-29 – so, after della Valle and Figueroa – his account was made publicly available much more quickly. The first edition of A relation of some yeares travaile.. Into …
This week, I thought some of you might like to see the trailer for Pedram Khosronejad’s film about Bakhtiari lion tombstones (click here: its 16 minutes). This includes some fascinating testimony from some of the men who made the tombstones (up in situ, accommodated in tents for two or three months by the commissioning families …
This week, the BBC suggested that high heels were originally a virile fashion for men, which followed on the 1599 Persian embassy to Europe. Elizabeth Semmelhack of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto was reported as saying that “the high heel was worn for centuries throughout the near east as a form of riding footwear …
This year’s Yarshater lectures were about Images and Decor in the Persianate World. I especially liked Prof Yves Porter’s review of minai. As the professor noted, both minai and lustre pots are not fluid (or food or indeed anything-much)-proof. So the ceramics are not that functional. They just look pretty. Prof Porter created a delightful …
I’ve been visiting the Pergamon in Berlin. And this week I wanted to show you a few of their outstanding carpets. The Pergamon has got lots less on display than the Met. It’s less Iran-centred too. Though I did think it was going a bit far when a case of Safavid ceramics is labelled for …
The French and English commercial envoys both had an audience with the Shah [Safi II] on the 21st of September 1671. They were taken at 8 am from their lodgings by their relative conducteurs, and made to dismount 150 paces from the Royal Palace, before being led in. The Frenchman had his “second”, his surgeon …
What fun I’ve been having at the Met! Amidst all the glamorous masterpieces, I was very pleased to see a tiny moulded horseman – with a hunting cheetah on his horse’s bottom. Old hands on my old blog will surely remember a clip I included in Hunting with Cheetahs (1) from a 1939 film ‘Life …
Pincon wrote of the inhumanity and cruelty of Shah Abbas to his subjects, of how he “cut off their heads for the slightest offence, having them stoned, quartered, flayed alive and given alive to the dogs, or to the forty Anthropophagi and man-eaters that he always has by him”. But Chardin, who not only spent …