This week in the UK Stargazing Live is showing on BBC2. I’ve already posted here and here on the glorious beauty of stars and comets in Iran. But I thought it would be good to again highlight the long tradition of astronomy in Iran. Here is a Seljuk bowl, with a central Sun- symbol roundel …
There’s a solo exhibition on in Jerusalem, reflecting on, and challenging the collection of the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic art there. Sadly I can find out very few details about it – but I wanted to share two films with you. The first one has the venerable Professor Ettinghausen and two other art historians, …
Last week’s posting on Yalda reminded me of a recent Saudi Aramco article explaining how all the commercial pistachio trees in California derive from just one ‘mother tree’, brought from Kerman. By 2010 – following the American Embassy ‘hostage crisis’ of 1979, and the subsequent embargo on Iranian pistachios – production in California apparently outstripped …
Saturday night is Yalda: the longest night of the year. The forces of Ahriman are at their peak. From tomorrow, the Sun God starts to triumph – and we all start getting longer days. I’ve written about Yalda before – but this year, I wanted to focus on its very earliest origins. In Babylonian times, …
Professor Dick Davis spoke at SOAS recently – on the women in the Shahnameh. He’s counted fifty (that’s 50!) named women in the Shahnameh – as well as all the unnamed mothers, daughters and slavegirls. He specially noticed the huge differences between the women in the first and second halves of the book. In the …
I’ve been reading Roger Bulliet’s fascinating book on agriculture and trade in early Islamic Iran. Bulliet suggests that the Muslim Arabs didn’t only bring Islam to Iran – but also the money and will to dig qanats and build villages to house workers to grow cotton as a cash crop. Khurasan, and the central plateau …
Recently, I introduced the BL digitised manuscript of Mantiq al Tayr (conference of the birds): mainly by praising both the manuscript in the Met, and a very cute cartoon film of the story. If you didnt watch the cartoon first time round, please dont miss it now! Coming back to the BL manuscript, though, the …
The current SOAS exhibition on Zoroastrianism has lots of great things – the video of the Yasna ceremony is especially interesting. But this week I want to pick out a very small reproduction of a very large mosaic: of three Parthian “wise men” or Magi. Here’s an image of the whole thing, in Ravenna – …
Silk found in various Viking ship burials has been long been known to be Persian – and thought to represent looting from English and Irish churches and monasteries. Recent research, however, has suggested that it probably represents an extended trade network carrying goods from Persia all the way to the Vikings. Vedeler suggests this largely …
Ashura is next week – on 14 November 2013. In Iran, Ashura is commonly commemorated with black for ash and red for blood, as shown in these photos from 2012. Of course, Ashura is all about Hossein. But I think one of the biggest heroes at the battle of Karbala was Abul Fazl – and …