Download or read book Arabic and Persian Seals and Amulets in the British Museum written by Venetia Porter and published by British Museum Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This catalogue is the first on the outstanding collection of Arabic and Persian seals and amulets in the British Museum, by a specialist in the field. The first part focuses on the 638 Arabic, Persian and Indian seals covering material from the 8th to the 20th century. The introduction covers seal practice in different periods and levels of society; the role of the seal and the "alama" or motto, the use of figural representation on the seals, seal engravers, the forgery of seals and the importance of the stones used are described. The features of the seals themselves, in particular the palaeography and dating of early Islamic seals, some grammatical features of the inscriptions, and the range of designs present on the seals are analysed. The types and form of Islamic names, the range of phrases that commonly appear and the characteristics of later seals are also discussed. The second part focuses on 170 amulets in the collection preceded by an introduction to the subject. Research into the engraving techniques is presented with analysis of the stones used. This publication will be a standard work of reference for years to come.

Download or read book Amulets and Talismans of the Middle East and North Africa in Context written by Marcela A. Garcia Probert and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-04-25 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume amulets and talismans are studied within a broader system of meaning that shapes how they were manufactured, activated and used in different networks. Text, material features and the environments in which these artifacts circulated, are studied alongside each other, resulting in an innovative approach to understand the many different functions these objects could fulfil in pre-modern times. Produced and used by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the case studies presented here include objects that differ in size, material, language and shape. What the articles share is an all-round, in-depth approach that helps the reader understand the complexity of the objects discussed and will improve one’s understanding of the role they played within pre-modern societies. Contributors Hazem Hussein Abbas Ali, Gideon Bohak, Ursula Hammed, Juan Campo, Jean-Charles Coulon, Venetia Porter, Marcela Garcia Probert, Anne Regourd, Yasmine al-Saleh, Karl Schaefer and Petra M. Sijpesteijn.

Download or read book Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-11-16 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice brings together the latest research on Islamic occult sciences from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, namely intellectual history, manuscript studies and material culture. Its aim is not only to showcase the range of pioneering work that is currently being done in these areas, but also to provide a model for closer interaction amongst the disciplines constituting this burgeoning field of study. Furthermore, the book provides the rare opportunity to bridge the gap on an institutional level by bringing the academic and curatorial spheres into dialogue. Contributors include: Charles Burnett, Jean-Charles Coulon, Maryam Ekhtiar, Noah Gardiner, Christiane Gruber, Bink Hallum, Francesca Leoni, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Michael Noble, Rachel Parikh, Liana Saif, Maria Subtelny, Farouk Yahya, and Travis Zadeh.

Download or read book Metalwork and Material Culture in the Islamic World written by Venetia Porter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-29 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The material and visual culture of the Islamic World casts vast arcs through space and time, and encompasses a huge range of artefacts and monuments from the minute to the grandiose, from ceramic pots to the great mosques. Here, Venetia Porter and Mariam Rosser-Owen assemble leading experts in the field to examine both the objects themselves and the ways in which they reflect their historical, cultural and economic contexts. With a focus on metalwork, this volume includes an important new study of Mosul metalwork and presents recent discoveries in the fields of Fatimid, Mamluk and Qajar metalwork. By examining architecture, ceramics, ivories and textiles, seventeenth-century Iranian painting and contemporary art, the book explores a wide range of artistic production and historical periods from the Umayyad caliphate to the modern Middle East. This rich and detailed volume makes a significant contribution to the fields of Art History, Architecture and Islamic Studies, bringing new objects to light, and shedding new light on old objects.

Download or read book Textual Amulets from Antiquity to Early Modern Times written by Christoffer Theis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-10-20 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparing amulets over time and space, this volume focuses on the function of written words on these fascinating artefacts. Ranging from Roman Egypt to the Middle Ages and the Modern period, this book provides an overview on these artefacts in the Mediterranean world and beyond, including Europe, Iran, and Turkey. A deep analysis of the textuality of amulets provides comparative information on themes and structures of the religious traditions examined. A strong emphasis is placed on the material features of the amulets and their connections to ritual purposes. The textual content, as well as other characteristics, is examined systematically, in order to establish patterns of influence and diffusion. The question of production, which includes the relationships that linked professional magicians, artists and craftsmen to their clientele, is also discussed, as well as the sacred and cultural economies involved.

Download or read book Material Evidence and Narrative Sources written by Daniella J. Talmon-Heller and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collected volume that crosses traditional boundaries between methodologies. Each of its sixteen articles is based on imaginative combinations of data provided by excavations, artifacts, monuments, urban topography, rural layouts, historical narratives and/or archival records. The volume as a whole demonstrates the effectiveness of interdisciplinary research applied to historical, cultural and archaeological problems. Its five sections - Economics and Trade, Governmental Authority, Material Culture, Changing Landscapes, and Monuments – bring forth original studies of the medieval, Ottoman and modern Middle East, amongst others, of voiceless and silenced social groups. Contributors are: Nitzan Amitai-Preiss, Jere L. Bacharach, Simonetta Calderini, Delia Cortese, Katia Cytryn-Silverman, Miriam Frenkel, Haim Goldfus, Hani Hamza, Stefan Heidemann, Miriam Kühn, Ayala Lester, Nimrod Luz, Yoram Meital, Daphna Sharef-Davidovich, Oren Shmueli, Yasser Tabbaa, Daniella Talmon-Heller, and Bethany Walker.

Download or read book Lasting Impressions written by Annabel Teh Gallop and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture written by Finbarr Barry Flood and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-06-16 with total page 1448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two-volume Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture bridges the gap between monograph and survey text by providing a new level of access and interpretation to Islamic art. The more than 50 newly commissioned essays revisit canonical topics, and include original approaches and scholarship on neglected aspects of the field. This two-volume Companion showcases more than 50 specially commissioned essays and an introduction that survey Islamic art and architecture in all its traditional grandeur Essays are organized according to a new chronological-geographical paradigm that remaps the unprecedented expansion of the field and reflects the nuances of major artistic and political developments during the 1400-year span The Companion represents recent developments in the field, and encourages future horizons by commissioning innovative essays that provide fresh perspectives on canonical subjects, such as early Islamic art, sacred spaces, palaces, urbanism, ornament, arts of the book, and the portable arts while introducing others that have been previously neglected, including unexplored geographies and periods, transregional connectivities, talismans and magic, consumption and networks of portability, museums and collecting, and contemporary art worlds; the essays entail strong comparative and historiographic dimensions The volumes are accompanied by a map, and each subsection is preceded by a brief outline of the main cultural and historical developments during the period in question The volumes include periods and regions typically excluded from survey books including modern and contemporary art-architecture; China, Indonesia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Sicily, the New World (Americas)

Download or read book Tamta s World written by Antony Eastmond and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-20 with total page 750 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the compelling story of a Christian noblewoman named Tamta in the thirteenth century. Born to an Armenian family at the court of queen Tamar of Georgia, she was ransomed in marriage to nephews of Saladin after her father was captured during a siege. She was later raped and then married by the Khwarazmshah and held hostage by the Mongols, before being made an independent ruler under them in eastern Anatolia. Her tale stretches from the Mediterranean to Mongolia and reveals the extraordinary connections across continents and cultures that one woman could experience. Without a voice of her own, surviving monuments - monasteries and mosques, caravanserais and palaces - build up a picture of Tamta's world and the roles women played in it. The book explores how women's identities changed between different courts, with shifting languages, religions and cultures, and between their roles as daughters, wives, mothers and widows.

Download or read book Envisioning Islamic Art and Architecture written by David J. Roxburgh and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-01-27 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Envisioning Islamic Art and Architecture: Essays in Honor of Renata Holod is a collection of studies on the portable arts, arts of the book, painting, photography, and architecture spanning the medieval and modern periods and across the historical Islamic lands. The essays reflect the wide-ranging interests and diverse methodologies of Renata Holod and attend to the physical, material, and aesthetic properties of their objects, offer nuanced explanations of complex relations between objects and historical contexts, and remain critically aware of the shape of the field of Islamic art and architecture, its canonical objects, approaches, and historiographies. Essential reading for scholars working on Islam and the Islamic world in the disciplines of history of art and architecture, history, literature, and anthropology. With contributions by María Judith Feliciano, Christiane Gruber, Leslee Katrina Michelsen, Nancy Micklewright, Stephennie Mulder, Johanna Olafsdotter, Yael Rice, Cynthia Robinson, David J. Roxburgh, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Alison Mackenzie Shah, and Pushkar Sohoni.

Download or read book Die Rif ya aus Damaskus written by Boris Liebrenz and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-05-18 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Die Rifāʽīya spürt Boris Liebrenz der Buchkultur des Osmanischen Syrien (16. - 19. Jahrhundert) durch den Fokus der einzig überlebenden Privatbibliothek der Epoche nach. Er fragt nach der Produktion und Transmission von Wissen sowie dem sozialen Hintergrund der Leserschaft im Zeitalter der Handschrift. Studien der arabischen Bibliotheksgeschichte haben oft nur das Mittelalter in den Blick genommen und basierten fast ausschließlich auf literarischen Quellen. Dies ist die erste Monographie, die eine einzige Region während der Osmanischen Periode in den Fokus nimmt und deren auf uns gekommene Handschriften und Notizen ihrer Leser und Besitzer systematisch als dokumentarische Quelle benutzt. So erhellt sie die materiellen, rechtlichen und sozialen Voraussetzungen von Buchbesitz und Lesepraxis. In Die Rifāʽīya Boris Liebrenz explores the book culture of Ottoman Syria (16th to 19th century), using the only surviving Damascene private library of the time as a vantage point. He asks about the production and transmission of knowledge as well as the social background of the reading audience in a manuscript age. Scholarship on Arabic libraries has often focussed on the medieval period and relied nearly exclusively on literary accounts. This is the first book-length study that focuses on a single region in the Ottoman period and systematically uses the vast number of surviving manuscripts as a documentary source by means of the notes left by their readers and possessors. Thus, it sheds light on the material, juridical, and social basis of book-ownership and reading.

Download or read book Projecting a New Empire written by Eugenio Garosi and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-03-21 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Die Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Vorderen Orients erscheinen als Supplement der Zeitschrift Der Islam, gegründet 1910 von Carl Heinrich Becker, einem der Väter der modernen Islamwissenschaft. Ganz im Sinne Beckers ist das Ziel der Studien die Erforschung der vergangenen Gesellschaften des Vorderen Orients, ihrer Glaubenssysteme und der zugrundeliegenden sozialen und ökonomischen Verhältnisse, von der Iberischen Halbinsel bis nach Zentralasien, von den ukrainischen Steppen zum Hochland des Jemen. Über die grundlegende philologische Arbeit an der literarischen Überlieferung hinaus nutzen die Studien die archivalischen, sowie materiellen und archäologischen Überlieferungen als Quelle für die gesamte Bandbreite der historisch arbeitenden Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften.

Download or read book Muthanna Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy written by Esra Akin-Kivanç and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muthanna, also known as mirror writing, is a compelling style of Islamic calligraphy composed of a source text and its mirror image placed symmetrically on a horizontal or vertical axis. This style elaborates on various scripts such as Kufic, naskh, and muhaqqaq through compositional arrangements, including doubling, superimposing, and stacking. Muthanna is found in diverse media, ranging from architecture, textiles, and tiles to paper, metalwork, and woodwork. Yet despite its centuries-old history and popularity in countries from Iran to Spain, scholarship on the form has remained limited and flawed. Muthanna / Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy provides a comprehensive study of the text and its forms, beginning with an explanation of the visual principles and techniques used in its creation. Author Esra Akin-Kivanc explores muthanna's relationship to similar forms of writing in Judaic and Christian contexts, as well as the specifically Islamic contexts within which symmetrically mirrored compositions reached full fruition, were assigned new meanings, and transformed into more complex visual forms. Throughout, Akin-Kivanc imaginatively plays on the implicit relationship between subject and object in muthanna by examining the point of view of the artist, the viewer, and the work of art. In doing so, this study elaborates on the vital links between outward form and inner meaning in Islamic calligraphy.

Download or read book Arts of Allusion written by Margaret S. Graves and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The art of the object reached unparalleled heights in the medieval Islamic world, yet the intellectual dimensions of ceramics, metalwares, and other plastic arts in this milieu have not always been acknowledged. Arts of Allusion reveals the object as a crucial site where pre-modern craftsmen of the eastern Mediterranean and Persianate realms engaged in fertile dialogue with poetry, literature, painting, and, perhaps most strikingly, architecture. Lanterns fashioned after miniature shrines, incense burners in the form of domed monuments, earthenware jars articulated with arches and windows, inkwells that allude to tents: through close studies of objects from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, this book reveals that allusions to architecture abound across media in the portable arts of the medieval Islamic world. Arts of Allusion draws upon a broad range of material evidence as well as medieval texts to locate its subjects in a cultural landscape where the material, visual, and verbal realms were intertwined. Moving far beyond the initial identification of architectural types with their miniature counterparts in the plastic arts, Margaret Graves develops a series of new frameworks for exploring the intelligent art of the allusive object. These address materiality, representation, and perception, and examine contemporary literary and poetic paradigms of metaphor, description, and indirect reference as tools for approaching the plastic arts. Arguing for the role of the intellect in the applied arts and for the communicative potential of ornament, Arts of Allusion asserts the reinstatement of craftsmanship into Islamic intellectual history.

Download or read book Contemporary Art from the Middle East written by Hamid Keshmirshekan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-02-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is home-grown contemporary art viewed within the Middle East? And is it understood differently outside the region? What is liable to be lost when contemporary art from the Middle East is 'transferred' to international contexts - and how can it be reclaimed? This timely book tackles ongoing questions about how 'local' perspectives on contemporary art from the Middle East are defined and how these perspectives intersect with global art discourses. Inside, leading figures from the Middle Eastern art world, western art historians, art theorists and museum curators discuss the historical and cultural circumstances which have shaped contemporary art from the Middle East, reflecting on recent exhibitions and curatorial projects and revealing how artists have struggled with the label of 'Middle Eastern Artist'. Chapters reflect on the fundamental methodologies of art history and cultural studies - considering how relevant they are when studying contemporary art from the Middle East - and investigate the ways in which contemporary, so-called 'global', theories impact on the making of art in the region. Drawing on their unique expertise, the book's contributors offer completely new perspectives on the most recent cultural, intellectual and socio-political developments of contemporary art from the Middle East.

Download or read book Imperial Horizons of the Silk Roads written by Branka Franicevic and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2023-07-20 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume centres on how the exchange routes transformed the frontier regions of the Silk Road. In doing so, it utilises a range of methods to reach an archaeological interpretation of the factors that linked people with the environment; movements, settlements, and beliefs.

Download or read book The Long Life of Magical Objects written by Allegra Iafrate and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-01-17 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores a series of powerful artifacts associated with King Solomon via legendary or extracanonical textual sources. Tracing their cultural resonance throughout history, art historian Allegra Iafrate delivers exciting insights into these objects and interrogates the ways in which magic manifests itself at a material level. Each chapter focuses on a different Solomonic object: a ring used to control demons; a mysterious set of bottles that constrain evil forces; an endless knot or seal with similar properties; the shamir, known for its supernatural ability to cut through stone; and a flying carpet that can bring the sitter anywhere he desires. Taken together, these chapters constitute a study on the reception of the figure of Solomon, but they are also cultural biographies of these magical objects and their inherent aesthetic, morphological, and technical qualities. Thought-provoking and engaging, Iafrate’s study shows how ancient magic artifacts live on in our imagination, in items such as Sauron’s ring of power, Aladdin’s lamp, and the magic carpet. It will appeal to historians of art, religion, folklore, and literature.