Download or read book Archaeological Atlas of Samarra written by Alastair Northedge and published by Samarra Studies. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Archaeological Atlas of Samarra sets out to map and catalogue the site and buildings of the Abbasid capital at Samarra in the period 836 to 892 AD, preserved as they were until the middle years of the 20th century. Site maps and catalogues are provided of all the approximately 5819 building and site units identified. This is the first time that it has been possible to catalogue nearly all the buildings of one of the world's largest ancient cities, from the caliph palaces to the smallest hovels.
Download or read book The Historical Topography of Samarra written by Alastair Northedge and published by Samarra Studies. This book was released on 2005 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first fundamentally new work to come out in half a century on one of the world's most famous Islamic archaeological sites: Samarra, in Iraq. This capital of the Abbasid caliphs in the 9th century is not only one of the largest urban sites worldwide, but also gives us the essence of what the physical appearance of the caliphate was like, for early Baghdad is long lost. Northedge sets out to explain the history and development of this enormous site, 45 km long, using both archaeological and textual sources to weave a new interpretation of how the city worked: its four caliphal palaces, four Friday mosques, cantonments for the military and for the palace servants, houses for the men of state and generals.
Download or read book The Shi a of Samarra written by Imranali Panjwani and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-01-30 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 22 February 2006, the main dome of the al-Askariyya shrine in Samarra was blown up. In the aftermath, sectarian strife between Shi'i and Sunni communities in Iraq and the wider region resonated around the world. The assault on Samarra, which was built in the period of the Abbasid caliphate in the ninth century CE, therefore came to represent for many a symbol of the destructive civil conflict which engulfed Iraq following the 2003 US-led invasion. The Shi'a of Samarra explores and analyses the cultural, architectural and political heritage of the Shi'a in both Samarra and the Middle East, thus highlighting how this city functions as a microcosm for the contentious issues and debates which remain at the forefront of efforts to rebuild the modern Iraqi state. From its origins under the eighth Abbasid caliph to its rise as a recognized site for visitation (ziyarat), akin to that of Najaf and Karbala, Samarra in the early period of Islam was a prominent gathering place for Shi'i Muslims. Of particular importance was the presence of the shrines of the tenth and eleventh Imams, and Samarra's status as the last known residence of the twelfth Imam. But upon the return of the Abbasids to their former capital of Baghdad at the end of the ninth century, Samarra's importance declined. Although there were Shi'i Muslims present in Samarra, it was in the late nineteenth century that the city once again became a centre for religious and juridical learning, for the most part due to the presence of the Ayatollah Mirza Hasan Shirazi. Here, the book highlights the cross-border linkages of Shi'i clerics and the impact of their teaching on both the Shi'a and Sunni within the city, and across the Middle East. Crucially, this volume also examines the history of sectarianism in Samarra: exploring issues of citizenship and identity in Iraq, and - bearing in mind the specific socio-political context of this conflict - analysing the rise of violence between the Shi'a and the Sunni. In the aftermath of the US-led invasion, and the bombings of the main dome in 2006 and the two minarets in 2007, this book also details the efforts at reconstruction that have taken place, providing important insights for students and researchers working on the history and politics of Iraq and the Middle East, as well as those interested in the art and architecture of the Islamic world.
Download or read book Ancient Arms Race Antiquity s Largest Fortresses and Sasanian Military Networks of Northern Iran written by Eberhard Sauer and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2023-02-16 with total page 1426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Which ancient army boasted the largest fortifications, and how did the competitive build-up of military capabilities shape world history? Few realise that imperial Rome had a serious competitor in Late Antiquity. Late Roman legionary bases, normally no larger than 5ha, were dwarfed by Sasanian fortresses, often covering 40ha, sometimes even 125-175ha. The latter did not necessarily house permanent garrisons but sheltered large armies temporarily – perhaps numbering 10-50,000 men each. Even Roman camps and fortresses of the Early and High Empire did not reach the dimensions of their later Persian counterparts. The longest fort-lined wall of the late antique world was also Persian. Persia built up, between the fourth and sixth centuries AD, the most massive military infrastructure of any ancient or medieval Near Eastern empire – if not the ancient and medieval world. Much of the known defensive network was directed against Persia’s powerful neighbours in the north rather than the west. This may reflect differences in archaeological visibility more than troop numbers. Urban garrisons in the Romano-Persian frontier zone are much harder to identify than vast geometric compounds in marginal northern lands. Recent excavations in Iran have enabled us to precision-date two of the largest fortresses of Southwest Asia, both larger than any in the Roman world. Excavations in a Gorgan Wall fort have shed much new light on frontier life, and we have unearthed a massive bridge nearby. A sonar survey has traced the terminal of the Tammisheh Wall, now submerged under the waters of the Caspian Sea. Further work has focused on a vast city and settlements in the hinterland. Persia’s Imperial Power, our previous project, had already shed much light on the Great Wall of Gorgan, but it was our recent fieldwork that has thrown the sheer magnitude of Sasanian military infrastructure into sharp relief.
Download or read book A hundred years of excavations in Samarra written by Julia Gonnella and published by Dr Ludwig Reichert. This book was released on 2014 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2011, the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin celebrated the 100th anniversary of the German excavations of the Islamic-medieval site Samarra. The former Abbasid capital (836-892 A.D.) around 125 km north of Bagdad is one of the largest archaeological ruins in the world and one of the key sites in the field of Islamic art and archaeology. The excavations led by Ernst Herzfeld and Friedrich Sarre between 1911 and 1913 represent a primary moment in the establishment of the field. Today, a hundred years later, our knowledge on Abbasid art has widened immensely. This volume includes papers given at an international symposium organised by the EHG together with the Museum of Islamic ARt from June 30 to July 02, 2011 to discuss the latest state of research on the former Abbasid city and its impact on Islamic art. Articles touch the history of the excavations, the city of Samarra and its finds as well as other recently studied Abbasid sites.
Download or read book The Conservation of Decorated Surfaces on Earthen Architecture written by Leslie Rainer and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2006 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For millennia, people of all cultures have decorated the surfaces of their domestic, religious, and public buildings. Earthen architecture in particular has been, and continues to be, a common ground for surface decoration such as paintings, sculpted bas-relief, and ornamental plasterwork. This volume explores the complex issues associated with preserving these surfaces. Case studies from Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas are presented. The publication is the result of a colloquium held in 2004 at Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, co-organized by the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) and the National Park Service (NPS). The meeting brought together fifty-five conservators, cultural resource managers, materials scientists, engineers, architects, archaeologists, anthropologists, and artists from eleven countries. Divided into four themes--Archaeological Sites, Museum Practice, Historic Buildings, and Living Traditions--the papers examine the conservation of decorated surfaces on earthen architecture within these different contexts.
Download or read book Ernst Herzfeld and the Development of Near Eastern Studies 1900 1950 written by Ann Gunter and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2005-02-01 with total page 654 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As archaeologist, philologist, and historian, German scholar Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948) significantly shaped the study of the prehistoric to Islamic Near East. His life and work are reassessed and situated within decisive developments in research and politics in the 20th century, providing new insights into the historiography of the Near East.
Download or read book KaE ba Orientations written by O'Meara Simon O'Meara and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most sacred site of Islam, the KaE ba (the granite cuboid structure at the centre of the Great Mosque of Mecca) is here investigated by examining six of its predominantly spatial effects: as the qibla (the direction faced in prayer); as the axis and matrix mundi of the Islamic world; as an architectural principle in the bedrock of this world; as a circumambulated goal of pilgrimage and site of spiritual union for mystics and Sufis; and as a dwelling that is imagined to shelter temporarily an animating force; but which otherwise, as a house, holds a void.
Download or read book Mesopotamia Syria and Transjordan in the Archibald Creswell Photograph Collection of the Biblioteca Berenson written by Stefano Anastasio and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2023-03-23 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Keppel Archibald Cameron Creswell (1879-1974) developed an early interest in Islamic architecture, considering photography as an essential tool for recording architectural artefacts. This volume presents the photographs that concern Mesopotamia, Syria and Jordan, kept today at the Biblioteca Berenson in Florence.
Download or read book Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art Architecture Three Volume Set written by Jonathan Bloom and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-14 with total page 1697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture is the most comprehensive reference work in this complex and diverse area of art history. Built on the acclaimed scholarship of the Grove Dictionary of Art, this work offers over 1,600 up-to-date entries on Islamic art and architecture ranging from the Middle East to Central and South Asia, Africa, and Europe and spans over a thousand years of history. Recent changes in Islamic art in areas such as Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq are elucidated here by distinguished scholars. Entries provide in-depth art historical and cultural information about dynasties, art forms, artists, architecture, rulers, monuments, archaeological sites and stylistic developments. In addition, over 500 illustrations of sculpture, mosaic, painting, ceramics, architecture, metalwork and calligraphy illuminate the rich artistic tradition of the Islamic world. With the fundamental understanding that Islamic art is not limited to a particular region, or to a defined period of time, The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture offers pathways into Islamic culture through its art.
Download or read book The Power of Art written by Caroline Campbell and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An epic work of art history that will transform our understanding of the world by unlocking the human stories behind millennia of art. Taking readers from ancient Babylon to contemporary Pyongyang, the eminent curator Caroline Campbell explains art's power to illuminate our lives—and inspires us to benefit from its transformative and regenerative power. Unlike the majority of contemporary art history, this book is about much more than the cult of artists’ personalities. Instead, each chapter is structured around a city at a particularly vibrant moment in its history, describing what propelled its creativity and innovation. The emotions and societies she evokes are highly recognizable, revealing how great art resonates powerfully by transcending the boundaries of time.
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 1442 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 The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology written by Bethany J. Walker and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islamic archaeology is young discipline, emerging only over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology is the first work of its kind to cover the archaeology of the Islamic world on a global scale, from North Africa to China and Europe to sub-Saharan Africa.
Download or read book Bones of Contention written by Andrew Petersen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-29 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pivot sets Muslim shrines within the wider context of Heritage Studies in the Muslim world and considers their role in the articulation of sacred landscapes, their function as sites of cultural memory and their links to different religious traditions. Reviewing the historiography of Muslim shrines paying attention to the different ways these places have been studied, through anthropology, archaeology, history, and religious studies, the text discusses the historical and archaeological evidence for the development of shrines in the region from pre-Islamic times up to the present day. It also assesses the significance of Muslim shrines in the modern Middle East, focusing on the diverse range of opinions and treatments from veneration to destruction, and argues that shrines have a unique social function as a means of direct contact with the past in a region where changing political configurations have often distorted conventional historical narratives.
Download or read book The Historian of Islam at Work written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-10-17 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Historian of Islam at Work is a volume in honor of Hugh N. Kennedy. It offers thirty contributions by three generations of prominent scholars in the field of pre-modern Middle Eastern studies, covering the many areas of Islamic historical inquiry in which Hugh Kennedy has been active throughout his career. Grouped around four major themes - Caliphate and power, economy and society, Abbasids, and frontiers and the others - the contributions deal with the history, archaeology, architecture and literature of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond, from the time of the Prophet until the fifteenth century.
Download or read book Routledge Revivals Medieval Islamic Civilization 2006 written by Josef Meri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-12 with total page 1238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islamic civilization flourished in the Middle Ages across a vast geographical area that spans today's Middle and Near East. First published in 2006, Medieval Islamic Civilization examines the socio-cultural history of the regions where Islam took hold between the 7th and 16th centuries. This important two-volume work contains over 700 alphabetically arranged entries, contributed and signed by international scholars and experts in fields such as Arabic languages, Arabic literature, architecture, history of science, Islamic arts, Islamic studies, Middle Eastern studies, Near Eastern studies, politics, religion, Semitic studies, theology, and more. Entries also explore the importance of interfaith relations and the permeation of persons, ideas, and objects across geographical and intellectual boundaries between Europe and the Islamic world. This reference work provides an exhaustive and vivid portrait of Islamic civilization and brings together in one authoritative text all aspects of Islamic civilization during the Middle Ages. Accessible to scholars, students and non-specialists, this resource will be of great use in research and understanding of the roots of today's Islamic society as well as the rich and vivid culture of medieval Islamic civilization.
Download or read book Medieval Urban Landscape in Northeastern Mesopotamia written by Karel Nováček and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the sites which formed an urban network from 6th to 19th centuries in the region of northeastern Mesopotamia, bounded by the rivers Great Zāb, Little Zāb and Tigris.
