Lots of the work on Safavid Isfahan sees it as it is now – and not as the work-in-progress that many of the Isfahanis, and the European travellers, saw when they visited thoughout the seventeenth century.
This is surely wrong!
This section aims to bring out some of this – focusing especially on some less well known authors, and some points that others might have ignored.
I’m especially interested in the maydan:
- Considering its first (polo-ground) incarnation;
- The differences between Persian and European descriptions;
- The differences over time – for both Persian authors and Europeans;
- The question of scale: the perceived dimensions of the maydan
- How Western and Persian authors employed a “rhetoric built largely from commonplaces” to describe sensational novelties like the maydan – making allusions to places that were already well-known to the readers. For the English, this was especially the Royal Exchange in London.