Medieval Kashan: Crossroads of Commerce and Culture

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 395-429
Author(s):  
Mehrdad Amanat ◽  
Roy P. Mottahedeh
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Education ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Arab Immigrants ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic

AbstractThis essay first attempts to explain why the Iranian city of Kashan is where it is and then how it came to grow.Extensive use of irrigation allowed an adequate and perhaps abundant agriculture in the surrounding region. The arrival of substantial numbers of Arab immigrants in Kashan in the early Islamic period played an important role in the city’s development and its continuation as a center of Shiʿism. A strong educational tradition produced many talented Kashani officials, who served in the Saljuq and later administrations and sent some of their wealth back to Kashan.It was also in the Saljuq period that Kashan gained a reputation for its production of luxury ceramics. Artisanal traditions were passed from generation to generation and contributed to exports of brass, and especially of textiles, which continued for centuries. Wealthy Kashanis (probably including a fair number of sayyids) invested heavily in charitable endowments, which served the poor and furthered learning in general. In the Timurid period, investments in mathematical education produced several outstanding mathematicians and astronomers. Tax yields from the medieval period may indicate the increasing prosperity of Kashan.

The long-term geopolitics of the pre-modern Middle East

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 33-41
Author(s):  
MICHAEL COOK
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Random Fluctuations ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Over Time

AbstractThe geopolitical shape of the Middle East has varied greatly over time. This article is concerned with the period from Late Antiquity to the end of the eighteenth century, during which four basic configurations succeeded each other. Late Antiquity was marked by the coexistence of two large empires, one based in the western Middle East and the other in the eastern Middle East; the early Islamic period saw the dominance of a single empire the location of whose centre was unstable; the medieval period was characterised by the absence of large and lasting empires and a shifting plurality of smaller states; finally in the Ottoman period we see the renewed dominance of a single empire, now based in the western Middle East. Are these changes to be seen as random fluctuations, or can they be explained in terms of a small number of underlying factors? The point of this article is to argue that a focus on the potential imperial heartlands of the Middle East can help us to explain much—though not all—of the changing geopolitical configuration of the region.

scholarly journals Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 153-156
Author(s):  
Eyad Abuali
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Latin West ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Previous Scholarship

Interactions between Latin Europeans and the Islamic world during the medievalperiod have received great attention in numerous scholarly studies. Thefocus of such works often consists of an attempt to delineate the constructionof identities and the extent to which they were utilized to mark out an “other.”By contrast, one of König’s most important conclusions demonstrates that formedieval Arab-Islamic scholars writing about the Latin West, these Latin Christiansocieties “were often simply regarded as alternative manifestations ofhuman life and its social and political organisation” (pp. 327-28).This is primarily a historiographical investigation with a macro-historicalapproach. König analyzes material spanning the early Islamic period (the seventhcentury) to the later medieval period (the fifteenth century) and covers arange of genres. It could be said that such an approach fails to critically analyzethe motivations of individual Muslim authors, something that the author doesacknowledge in his preface. However, such analyses lie beyond the scope ofthe project at hand. Furthermore, a macro-historical approach is necessary forchallenging previous scholarship on the subject. Bernard Lewis asserted thatthe Latin West was perceived as a united barbaric monolith, one viewed at bestwith disinterest in the minds of Muslim writers – a view that continues to influencescholarship to this day ...

Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The People ◽  
Modern Egypt ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Point Of Departure

This volume deals with the possibility of glimpsing pre-modern and early modern Egyptian scribes, the people who actually produced ancient documents, through the ways in which they organized and wrote those documents. Breaking with the traditional conception of variation in scribal texts as ‘free’ or indicative of ‘corruption’, this volume reconceptualizes scribal variation in pre-modern Egypt from the point of view of contemporary historical sociolinguistics, seeing scribes as agents embedded in particular geographical, temporal, and sociocultural environments. This volume comprises a set of studies of scribal variation, beginning from the well-established domain of scribal variation in pre-modern English as a methodological point of departure, and proceeding to studies of scribal variation spanning thousands of years, from Pharaonic to Late Antique and Islamic Egypt. This volume introduces to Egyptology concepts such as scribal communities, networks, and repertoires, and applies them to a variety of phenomena, including features of lexicon, grammar, orthography, palaeography, layout, and format.

Maritime trade in early Islamic-period glass: New evidence from the Maʻagan Mikhael B shipwreck

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 102903
Author(s):  
Eyal Natan ◽  
Yael Gorin-Rosen ◽  
Agnese Benzonelli ◽  
Deborah Cvikel
Keyword(s):  
Maritime Trade ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Early Islamic

USE OF THE GALAXY AS A TOOL FOR SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL ORIENTATION DURING THE EARLY ISLAMIC PERIOD AND UP TO THE 15TH CENTURY

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Andreas Eckart
Keyword(s):  
Milky Way ◽  
The Other ◽  
Temporal Orientation ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Galaxy ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic

AbstractWe study to what extent the Milky Way was used as an orientation tool at the beginning of the Islamic period covering the 8th to the 15th century, with a focus on the first half of that era. We compare the texts of three authors from three different periods and give detailed comments on their astronomical and traditional content. The text of al-Marzūqī summarises the information on the Milky Way put forward by the astronomer and geographer ʾAbū Ḥanīfa al-Dīnawarī. The text makes it clear that in some areas the Milky Way could be used as a geographical guide to determine the approximate direction toward a region on Earth or the direction of prayer. In the 15th century, the famous navigator Aḥmad b. Māǧid describes the Milky Way in his nautical instructions. He frequently demonstrates that the Milky Way serves as a guidance aid to find constellations and stars that are useful for precise navigation on land and at sea. On the other hand, Ibn Qutayba quotes in his description of the Milky Way a saying from the famous Bedouin poet Ḏū al-Rumma, which is also mentioned by al-Marzūqī. In this saying the Milky Way is used to indicate the hot summer times in which travelling the desert was particularly difficult. Hence, the Milky Way was useful for orientation in space and time and was used for agricultural and navigational purposes.

Islamic Glass in the Making

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadine Schibille
Keyword(s):  
Glass Industry ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Plant Ash ◽  
Islamic Glass

The ancient glass industry changed dramatically towards the end of the first millennium. The Roman glassmaking tradition of mineral soda glass was increasingly supplanted by the use of plant ash as the main fluxing agent at the turn of the ninth century CE. Defining primary production groups of plant ash glass has been a challenge due to the high variability of raw materials and the smaller scale of production. Islamic Glass in the Making advocates a large-scale archaeometric approach to the history of Islamic glassmaking to trace the developments in the production, trade and consumption of vitreous materials between the eighth and twelfth centuries and to separate the norm from the exception. It proposes compositional discriminants to distinguish regional production groups, and provides insights into the organisation of the glass industry and commerce during the early Islamic period. The interdisciplinary approach leads to a holistic understanding of the development of Islamic glass; assemblages from the early Islamic period in Mesopotamia, Central Asia, Egypt, Greater Syria and Iberia are evaluated, and placed in the larger geopolitical context. In doing so, this book fills a gap in the present literature and advances a large-scale approach to the history of Islamic glass.

A New Architectural Survey of Qaṣr Burquʽ, Eastern Jordan

1991 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 191-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svend Helms
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Time Range ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The Third ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Dry Steppe ◽  
Architectural Survey ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic

Qaṣr Burqu⃓ is one of the most remote of the Jordanian so-called ‘desert castles’ (quṣūr) of the early Islamic period: it lies some 200km east of⃓Ammān (figs. 1–4). However, it is neither a castle, nor is it in the desert, rather it represents a variety of building types and lies in the dry steppe (areas receiving less than 100mm of rainfall per annum) of the bādiyat al-šām (literally, the steppe lands of Damascus). Furthermore, most of the architectural elements are not necessarily attributable to the early Islamic period, namely the Umayyad Caliphate of the seventh and eighth centuries, despite a ‘building’ inscription (E4: see below, pp. 206–7) of Walīd b. ‘Abd’l-Malik (Caliph AD 705–15), dated AD 700 (H. 81). Rather, the various architectural entities at the site, and their use, span the time from about the third-fourth (probably a little later) to the eighth centuries AD. This time range and the Qaṣr's remote location are significant in relation to the political and economic history of the Near East, particularly in regard of nomad-state relations across the verdant-steppic interface. The time range of the various constructions includes the period following the dissolution of the limes arabicus which had been extensively refurbished and augmented under Diocletian and later under Justinian in the third and sixth centuries AD. Many of the more remote erstwhile fortlets, forts and legionary fortresses were colonized by villagers and nomads, as well as monks and pious hermits. Between the fourth and sixth centuries (particularly in the sixth century under the Ghassānids), purpose-built monasteries and ‘residences’ for hermits were established throughout greater Syria, some of them far out in the steppe. The military station at Nemāras about 80km to the north-east of Qaṣr Burqu⃓, for example, may have become one of several centres, functioning as a παƍεμβολή νομάδον of the Lakhmids in the region, under the leadership of Imru'l-Qays who was called ‘king of the Arabs’ and who was buried there in AD 328. Places like Qaṣr Burqu⃓ and Deir al-Kinn, on the other hand, may have been founded or re-established as monasteries.

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