Mariam Emamy recently and kindly showed me three photos of graffiti at the gorgeous white-stone building of Qasr-i Bahram. Local experts say that Qasr-i Bahram – which has also been called Abbasabad and Siyahkuh (in all sorts of spellings over the years) – was constructed as a hunting lodge for Shah Abbas; and there is …
This week, you need to click the links to see the pictures, please. Don’t miss out on the 1 metre high golden globe with over 51 thousand gemstones (at the bottom of the page)! I wrote previously about the diamond Shah Abbas recognised when it was returned by refugee Uzbek princes in 1601; and the …
This week was Sotheby’s spring Islamic Sale. For me, the most interesting – if perhaps not the most beautiful – was the dated ‘black-ring’ dish. Amidst the mountain of Safavid-era ceramics that still exist worldwide, only a very (very!) few are dated. Of the 8 dated dishes known, 7 are in the so-called ‘black-ring’ style. …
I’ve been re-reading Henry Layard’s 1887 ‘Early Adventures in Persia’; after I noticed that this apparently included identifying details of the events and individuals in one of the Bakhtiari poems translated by DLR Lorimer. I was especially interested by Layard’s descriptions of Bakhtiari poetry recitations: “I frequently witnessed . . the effect which poetry had …
I’ve been finishing the first drafts of my two papers about Shah Abbas’ thousand kilometre walk in 1601. Abbas’ stopping places were relatively easy to find in the first part of the walk; but only three specific names were given by Munajjim Yazdi along the Khorassan Highroad. One of those was the Ribat-i Do Dar …