admin The mother of Abul Qasim composed this poem after his death, and made him famous among all the Bakhtiari. The story was given by the reciter as follows: “Abul Qasim went to Shiraz. The daughter of his father’s brother was betrothed to him. He went to get a camel, so that he might celebrate his marriage …
The first part of this Bakhtiari poem is sung to a baby when it has woken up crying; the mother rocks the cradle whilst she sings. The second part is sung when the baby has gone to sleep – there is one version for boys, another for girls. The lullaby actually consists of more than …
Above: DLR Lorimer was originally in the colonial service in India, before he was posted to Persia. Here he is, in 1909, shortly after his renegotiation of the key 1905 oil agreement. (This image is reproduced with the kind permission of Christina Lorimer, DLR Lorimer’s grand niece). Bakhtiari poetry has been described as “revealing the …
In 1601, Shah Abbas the First started by walking northwards from his new and still only partly built capital, Isfahan, up towards the busy trading city of Kashan. A Polish carpet merchant, Sefer Muratowicz, had dinner with Shah Abbas the night before the thousand-kilometre walk started and reported: “Starting the next morning, having put on …
This schematic drawing (Figure 2 in Mawer 2010a) shows how many of the key buildings in Safavid Isfahan had not yet been built in 1601, when the Shah set off on his walk to Mashhad. [SA1.4.]
This annotated map shows some of the key buildings in Safavid Isfahan. Shah Abbas started from the Naqsh-i Jahan Palace, just off Maydan-i Shah, and halted first at Masjid-i Tuqchi, just outside the city walls. [SA1.3]
According to David Lockhart Lorimer, Bakhtiari poetry “reveals the real interests and outlook, and something of the experiences, of the Bakhtiari people”. He is clear that it is “the genuine product of the Bakhtiari mind” and that it owes nothing to any other poetic conventions. Laments are the most common type of poem, with grief …
Engelbert Kaempfer was a German physician who traveled to Persia with a Swedish embassy in 1683. He is best known, in Persia, for his descriptions of the court of Shah Abbas II and of Persepolis, where he was the first person to identify the inscriptions as a form of writing. He lodged in Isfahan for …