Identities & Islam: Material Culture, Self and Society in the Pre-Modern Muslim World was the inaugural UK Early Career Symposium on Islamic Archaeology. It was my first virtual conference: with the speakers in Southampton, and me watching at home (and others wherever they were). I wanted to share some of the points the keynote speaker, …
It’s the Islamic sales in London very soon. I usually focus on the ceramics, but this week I wanted to point out some almost-magic carpets, that you can go and see in person, if you’re near London. For example, in the Christies’ Oriental Rugs and Carpets Sale: – Lots 28 and 29 are two especially …
It’s easy to look at the beauty or historic importance of paintings – but it’s rare to find out about the men (it’s usually men) doing the painting. This week, two treats which give more than a glimpse into the craft of painters in the sixteenth century. First, Fiona McLees. Her blog article on her …
Percy Sykes is best known as spy, consul and military man in Eastern Persia. But, with a Persian author, Khan Bahadur Ahmad Din Khan, he also wrote a “second Haji Baba, which would serve as a true picture of Persia [in around 1900], before constitutional reform appeared on the horizon”. This book is an important …
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 …