Happy Yalda! Yalda is the longest night of the year – or, more positively, the night after which the days become longer, and the sun starts to win again. Although it’s on December 20 or 21st, I’ve put this posting up early, since SOAS are having a special Yalda night on the 17th and you …
Professor Edmund Herzig did this year’s BIPS AGM lecture on 23 November. I’m not even going to attempt to summarise it, but he made some fascinating points about the teaching and conception of history during and after the Islamic Revolution. I’m going to (very partially) summarise some of them here. During the Pahlavi dynasty, pre-Islamic …
It’s all very exciting: the Met galleries (in New York) for ‘Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia’ (or ALTICASA for short, gulp!) are re-opening from 24 Oct. There are 15 galleries, and 1200 objects on show at any one time – so I’m not going through everything here! …
I’m fascinated by the area around Ahuan. Isidore of Charax’s Parthian Stations run through it. It’s near where Darius was killed by his men as he tried to escape from Alexander. And the Seleucid King Antiochus chased Arsaces across here too, with both forces trying to take control over the water supplies. Now, there’s a …
Even if his splendid mustachios were his defining feature, many European travellers reported on the clothes that Shah Abbas wore. Many of the visitors specifically noted the Shah’s simple costume. Gouvea (visiting between 1602 and 1613) “had to have the King pointed out” as his seat (on the ground), his turban and his dress were …
This week, the winners of the 2011 Jameel Prize were announced. The Prize is for contemporary art or design inspired by traditions of Islamic craft and design, and this year’s official winner is Rachid Koraïchi, for his embroidered cloth banners. The People’s Choice winner is Aisha Khalid, who showed the wonderful ‘Kashmiri Shawl’ (a cashmere …
From the times of Ptolemy’s Geographia, the Caspian Sea was (wrongly!) depicted by European cartographers as widest from east to west. Only as late as 1647 did Adam Olearius manage to correct this mistake. Click here to see Olearius’ map. Elio Brancaforte has described Olearius as an intellectual hybrid: drawing on classical and biblical sources, …
This week’s blog is with many thanks to Kamran Afshar – who also helped me make the contacts I needed to be able to walk the migration with a Bakhtiari family. Kamran wrote to me of how: Those who have travelled to the land of the valiant, namely Chahar Mahal & Bakhtiari province in Iran, …
Ice was a historical commonplace in Persia: Fryer wrote of how in 1677 the Persians “mightily covet cool things to the Palat. Wherefore they mix snow, or dissolve ice in their Water, Wine or Sherbets,”. Even the poorest, “have they but a Penny in the World, the one half will go for Bread, and dried …
I’ve already written a little about the tanab, the traditional rope-measuring device that Munajjim Yazdi and his team used to record the distances that Shah Abbas walked in 1601. As chief astrologer, Yazdi was a measurement expert – also using his astrolabe (click here to see a slightly later Safavid astrolabe) to compute how fast …