The Masjid-e Jame in Isfahan was not the only congregational mosque in Buyid Isfahan: the Jurjir mosque was constructed sometime shortly before 985CE for the vizier Ibn Abbad, a Mutazilite scholar who transformed the court of the ruler Abu Mansur Moayyed-al-Dawla into a transnational literary centre.

Only a fragment of the façade of the latter building now remains, re-discovered in 1955 within the walls of the Hakim Mosque (itself constructed 1656-63).  This very rare physical survival from the century of Buyid calm and prosperity in Isfahan is a never-ending puzzle of shapes and shadows: using the typical Buyid decorative technique of thin bricks forming geometric patterns in relief; plus alternate engravings of repeated geometric patterns in stucco (click here – for wrongly placed – and here – for mislabelled – photos).

The Shah Abbas 2 water dispenser opposite the Jurjir mosque, with modern tap

Sheila Blair suggests that the Jurjir façade is the very earliest example of a monumental portal on a mosque in the eastern Islamic world.  She also describes an accompanying 100 – or maybe it was 70 – cubit minaret, which has now been destroyed.

What I wanted to show you, though, are the two Safavid royal water fountains immediately opposite the façade.

Detail of the (AH) date at the base of the Shah Abbas 2 water dispenser

Now, the space just looks like a deserted shop/workshop.  But on either side of the bottom of the ‘door’, the front of the ‘shop’ is made up of two carved stones.  The one on the left is largely plain, with just a simple band of calligraphy – including the name of Sultan Hossein (r.1694-1722).  The one on the right (shown here) is covered in much more ornate written panels with, at the very bottom . . a date from the reign of Shah Abbas the Second (r.1642–1666).

Both panels have raised ‘plugholes’ to catch and drain the water, and the right (Shah Abbas the Second) side has had a brass tap added in a notch cut through the top of the calligraphy.  The man who kindly showed me this place also told me that the tap was operational until very recently.

Lisa Golombek has suggested that Jurjir Mosque opened onto the west-east bazaar-street leading from the Kushk gate and intersecting at the Old (Seljuk) Maydan with the north-south bazaar from the Tuqchi to the Hasanabad gates.

The royal water fountains were then in a great position to supply the thirsty people of Isfahan.  They underline that, both before and after Shah Abbas the First’s development of the bazaar between his Maydan and the Masjid-e Jame, there were other important and active commercial areas in Isfahan.

This week, an amazing old Negah video showing all the stages of Ghalam-kari (also called qalamkari or wood-block printing), including the preparation of the cloth [@ 2.50 minutes], the first rinse [3.00], the printing [3.40 and 6.30]; and the carving of the blocks [5.55].

The video says [1.00] that the craft started in the time of Shah Abbas.  Though I’ve never seen any evidence for this; it was certainly very popular and a significant export in the nineteenth century.  That redoubtable traveller, Isabella Bird Bishop, saw the process of dyeing and rinsing going on upon the shingle flats of the Zayanderud at Isfahan in 1890:

Mrs Bishops tent on her ride to the Bakhtiari (Mrs B is the shorter lady on the right of the pic)

“There is quite a population of dyers, and now that the river is fairly low, many of them have camped for the season in little shelters of brushwood erected on the gravel banks. For fully half a mile these banks are covered with the rinsers of dyed and printed calicoes, and with mighty heaps of their cottons.”

I can’t find the date of the video, but it seems likely to come from or before the 1970s, when the Persian handicrafts organization curtailed the rinsing of the cloth for ecological rea­sons, since the setting of the colours pollutes the river water: @7.30 for the second riverside boiling up, 9.40 for rinsing, 10.30 for the laying out of the cloths on the shingle.

The video is in black and white, but Mrs Bird saw “indigo and turquoise blue, brown & purple madder, Turkey red & saffron . . [with] a vile aniline colour showing itself here and there”.

Isabella describes the rinsing as much rougher than shown in the film:

“Along the channels among the shingle are rows of old millstones, and during much of the day a rinser stands in front of each up to the knees in water . . the cotton must be good which stands his treatment. Taking in his hands a piece of soaked half-wrung cotton, from fifteen to twenty yards long, he folds it into five feet [sic] and bangs it on the millstone with all his might, roaring a tuneless song all the time, till he fails from fatigue. The noise is tremendous and there will be more yet, for the river is not at its lowest point. When the piece has had the water beaten out of it a boy spreads it out on the gravel, and keeps it wet by dashing water over it, and then the process of beating is repeated.  The coloured spray rising from each millstone in the bright sunshine is very pretty.  Each rinser has his watchdog to guard the cottons on the bank, and between the banging, splashing and singing, the barking of the dogs and the shouts of the boys, it is a noisy and cheery scene.”

Click here for a stunning 360 degree view of a modern ghalamkari shop.

When Shah Abbas walked along the Khurasan Highroad on his way to Mashhad in 1601, one of the places he stopped at is recorded by Munajjim Yazdi as Ribat-i Qusha (the fort at Qusha: 601km from Isfahan).

Entrance to the caravanserai in Qusha

A dervish named Kamal had walked with the Shah from Kashan and, around Qusha, Kamal is reported to have questioned Abbas about his act of holy pilgrimage to the grave of a dead man (Imam Reza), suggesting that the Shah should instead “Seek the live Imam”.  When Abbas asked who this Imam might be; the dervish replied “Me”.

The Shah realised that Kamal and his friends were from the Nuqtavi sect and immediately challenged the dervish’s divinity by saying “Let me see if you survive a bullet” – to which the dervish is said to have responded: “Your Imam Reza died with a [poisoned] grape, you expect me to survive a bullet?”

Interior of the caravanserai in Qusha - where Dervish Kamal did not survive a bullet

The shootings are then said to have been carried out in the caravanserai at Qusha.

This, then, was the tail-end of Abbas’ 1593 suppression of the Nuqtavi sect – an act which signalled the Shah’s transformation from a spiritual monarch descended, via the military conqueror and ‘divine leader’ Shah Ismail, from the Sufi pirs Shaykh Safi al-Din and Shaykh Junayd; into a Shah with absolute political power.

Babayan has written that, in this way, Abbas “divorced religion from politics”.  Reading the inscriptions within the Shah’s mosques in Isfahan – which portray Abbas as the propagator of Twelver Shia doctrine – I would suggest that in fact the Shah developed a mutually advantageous relationship with hand-picked shari’a minded ulama (religious legal scholars) – especially Shaykh Bahaie – as a religious extension of his usual system of sharing military and administrative power with hand-picked supporters.

The ulama moved on to convert the mass of the population to state-sponsored Imamism – to make Iran a truly Shia country at the grass roots – while Abbas got, amongst many other things, both a further squashing of those qizilbash who were not fully loyal to him, and also at least a partial resolution of the ongoing debate on the legality of Friday services during the Occultation of the Hidden Imam.  This latter allowed him to not only build the gorgeous Friday mosque in Isfahan, but also – and much more importantly – to broadcast his claims to sovereignty every Friday as part of the khutba (the Friday sermon).

Siavash queried the architectural origins of the Chini-kana, in one of his (thankyou, Siavash!) interesting comments.

I thought I’d add a note about this, drawing on AH Morton’s very helpful paper, “The Ardabīl Shrine in the Reign of Shāh Ṭahmāsp I”. Iran Vol. 12 (1974), pp. 31-64

AHM reports that ME Weaver, a UNESCO consultant working in Ardabil in 1969-70, found that the building was originally free-standing and with a monumental entrance, corresponding to the western iwan.

Roof 'chini-kana' niches in Hasht Behesht

The building was constructed before the Dar al-Huffaz (the construction of which blocked its entrance), most likely in the fourteenth century, and by Sadr al-Din.  Morton thinks that the building was probably originally the ‘Dome of the Princes’ – a tomb for at least one son of a Shaykh.

Shah Abbas’ chini-kana interior is, then, simply a decorative framework which has been inserted into an earlier building. It follows the design of similar niches for ceramics in Ali Qapu (click here) – and was itself followed by similar constructions up in the roof of Hasht Behesht (and click here to see more)

In Ardebil, there are some large spaces between the added interior and the structure of the original building and, where there is access to these, the remains of the original decoration can still be seen.  When the damaged roof was removed for restoration, spiral staircases were found within the corner towers.

So the Ardebil Chini-kana seems to be a purely Iranian construction – I havent found any evidence of  European influence.

Some of you may already have noticed that UNESCO inscribed the Sheikh Safi al-din Khānegāh and Shrine Ensemble in Ardabil on its World Heritage list on 31 July 2010.  In the citation, it was described as a “rare ensemble of medieval Islamic architecture”; incorporating a route to reach the shrine of Sheikh Safi “divided into seven segments, which mirror the seven stages of Sufi mysticism, separated by eight gates, which represent the eight attitudes of Sufism”.

External view of the Chini-khana at Ardabil: older photos show many more graves in this area

More prosaically, I can’t think of Ardabil without thinking of the 1,162 Chinese porcelains installed in the Chini-khana there in 1611 following on the waqf of Shah Abbas.  Seeing so many pieces from this collection was definitely the highlight for me of the recent Shah Abbas exhibition at the British Museum.

By chance, then, this week I stumbled upon a description from the 1850s by Sir Justin Sheil, ‘Knight General and Diplomat’ (but perhaps better known as the husband of Lady Mary Leonora Woulfe Sheil, author of Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia) of the collection in situ – or maybe I should say ‘in use’:

Internal view of the Chini-khana, showing the carved niches for the display of ceramics

“Close to the tomb [in Ardabil] was a large chamber containing an enormous quantity of blue china of all shapes and sizes, the offering of Shah Abbas to his great ancestor.  When any one gives a charitable feast to the poor – a common practice among the Persians – he is entitled to make use of this china, which, consequently, is in a perpetual state of diminution.”

This reminded me of the drawings also in the BM exhibition (click here to see an example) showing dervishes drinking wine and washing their hands using blue-and-white bowls.   Sheila Canby wrote in the exhibition catalogue that the paintings established “a link between dervishes and blue-and-white wares that did not exist before the Shah Abbas donation of porcelains entered the Ardabil shrine”.  From Sheil’s report, it seems that it wasn’t only dervishes who were able to handle the ceramics – and perhaps the people who were fed at the feasts included craftsmen who could then copy designs and inspect the techniques at close quarters.

There are also, of course, photos of the collection piled up on tables from when it was catalogued in 1935 by JA Pope, with the removal of 805 pieces to the National Museum in Tehran.  These have always reminded me (sadly I can’t include them here for copyright reasons, though much of the text of Pope’s work is available if you click here) of the sort of piles of washing up you get after a really big party – and now I’m left with an even stronger mental picture of these gorgeous ceramics being used – eaten and drunk from, washed up, and then put away – rather than just being ‘works of art’ to be looked at from behind glass.

This week, I went to a fascinating seminar about the Shahnameh at Janet Rady Fine Art, focusing on different representations of the hero Rostam through the ages (click here for Fereydoun Ave’s very original take on this).

Rustam slaying the White Div - on the west elevation of the Arg at Semnan

I was reminded of my own recent posting here about Shahnameh recitations by the Bakhtiari, when Nick Jubber spoke from his new book.  This draws parallels between Ferdowsi’s story and characters, and the current situation in Iran: it apparently includes a chapter on Bakhtiari recitations of the Shahnameh.

Barbara Brend drew on her recent book on the Shahnameh of Muhammad Juki and her work curating the upcoming Fitzwilliam Shahnameh exhibition to tell the story of Rostam’s life.

'Under the Blue Sky', Malekeh Nayiny, 2007. With thanks to Janet Rady Fine Art.

Of course, she included the seven trials, or perils, of Rostam.  The last of these was his single combat with the White Div (or Demon).  Both combatants despaired of their lives – Rostam thought: “If I survive this day, I ne’er shall die”; while the White Div bemoaned his fate: “Life hath no hopes for me”.  Rostam eventually slew the White Div, before removing his liver (this is the bit where “all the world was like a sea of blood”), and used it to restore the sight of King Kaus.  The slaying is pictured on my photo above from the Qajar-era Arg (monumental gate) in Semnan (click here to see it in context, on the building).

Demons continue to be pictured on buildings, even by the most modern Iranian artists, as shown in the image here by Malekeh Nayiny (click here for another great demon by Malekeh – though her devilish creation in a pink tutu has to be my personal favourite).

Inspired by Barbara’s performance, though, the real purpose of this posting is to suggest that you might read (or more probably re-read!) more of the Shahnameh.

I’ve started you off with a little section from the White Div combat below, and click here for the rest of Rostam’s seven perils; but you might also like to (re)read how Sohrab was born when Tahmina sacrificed prudence to her passion for Rostam  . . “if thou wilt have me, I am thine”.

Fighting the White Div (from http://www.heritageinstitute.com/zoroastrianism/index.htm

Now Rustam hasted not to slay the div
Asleep, but roused him with a leopard’s roar.
He charged at Rustam, like a gloomy mountain
With iron helm and brassards, seized a millstone
And drave at him like smoke. The hero quailed,
And thought : “Mine end is come!” Yet like a lion
Enraged he struck full at the div and lopped
From that enormous bulk a hand and foot,
So mighty was he with his trenchant sword!
As ’twere some lofty-crested elephant
And lion in its wrath the maimed div closed
With Rustam, and one-footed wrecked the cave.
They wrestled, tearing out each other’s flesh,
Till all the ground was puddled with their blood,
And Rustam thought: “If I survive this day
I ne’er shall die.”
The White Div also thought :-
“Life hath no hopes for me, for, should I scape
This Dragon’s claws, maimed as I am and torn,
None great or small within Mazandaran
Will look at me.”

Shortly after I returned home from tracing Shah Abbas’ thousand kilometre walk from Isfahan to Mashhad, I found this extraordinary (1907) photo of the citadel in Lasjird (40km west of Semnan), converted as it had been into an elevated, fortified village.

The earth fort at Lasjird, in 1907 (in: Jackson. From Constantinople to the Home of Omar Khayyam)

Lasjird was the only place specifically mentioned as having a fortress in an unpublished Ottoman logistics plan for an (abandoned) invasion of Iran at around the time of Shah Abbas I; and Ferrier, in 1845, described seeing the “remains of a fortification . . the walls of which are about twenty-four feet in height: it would hold a garrison of 2000 men”.

But the nineteenth century Turkoman raids meant the area was increasingly unsafe and by 1862 Eastwick reported that the Lasjird fort remains were again in active use – only this time as a fortified village, with “rooms which run round the interior of the fort in a sort of galleries” and a huge stone, on a pivot, acting as a door.  The mound had apparently grown to 80 feet high, with a balcony about 45 feet from the ground, from which “all filth is thrown hence, so that in the course of years a rampart has been formed, which the hardiest soldier would hesitate to cross”.

Interior view of the Qasr Mala, in Deh Namak. Look for the bricks!

In 1884, Mitford reported finding two storeys of rooms built onto the upper part of the fortifications, with doors opening outwards onto precarious scaffoldings.  He described the whole thing as “a more fit habitation for monkeys or pigeons, than for men”, and on his “remarking on the danger to the rising generation, [he] was told that many children were killed by falling from these rough platforms”.

By the time Jackson passed by in 1907, when he took the photo above, the ‘village’ was deserted, and the surrounding refuse had been converted into lush gardens – and when I was there, there was no sign at all of the old mud fort.

The modern picture here at left shows – for comparison – the inside of the crumbling fort at Deh Namak (‘village of salt’: 40km to the west of Lasjird).  There are no scaffolding balconies but, if you look carefully, there are widely spaced vertical and horizontal lines on the inside of the external wall, which (from the places where a few have fallen out) you can see are large, and so very early (maybe even Sasanian?) bricks.

The fort at Deh Namak is called ‘Qasr Mala’, very close to the name Kasr al Milh (‘fort of salt’) given to the village a thousand plus years ago by Arab geographers including Ibn Rustah and Muqaddasi.  Perhaps the pile of mud remains shown here is a thousand years – or more – old?

John Cartwright, always called ‘The Preacher’ despite never having been recorded as doing any preaching, is one of the lesser known travellers in the Persia of Shah Abbas.  Usefully for me, finding out about Isfahan and Shah Abbas at or before the time the 1000km walk started in 1601, Cartwright left England in April 1600.  He then travelled via Aleppo, Armenia and Kurdistan to Persia, later becoming the first Englishman to visit the four key sites of antiquity in the Near East: Persepolis; Susa; Nineveh; and Babylon.

‘The Preacher’ had strangely mixed views about Shah Abbas – discussing on the one hand the “infinite . . calamities” that Abbas had brought down on his brothers, father, and the “ancient families” of the court; whilst also suggesting that “this Prince [Abbas] is very absolute both in perfection of his body and his mind (but that he is in religion a professed Mahumatine), excellently composed in the one, and honourably disposed in the other”.

A polo game in Persia in 1546: showing polo mallets and goal posts

Cartwright gives some fascinating insights into how Abbas spent his days in Isfahan:

“Usually every morning he visiteth his stables of great horses  . .”

“After he hath viewed his horses, he passeth into his Armoury, certain buildings near to his palace, where there are made very strong Curiasses, or Corselets, headpeeces and targets, most of them able to keep out the shot of an arquebuiser . .” [click here to see a replica 1602 arquebuisier in action] ”

“By this time having spent most of the forenoone, he returneth into his palace and there remains until three of the clock in the afternoon, at which time he makes his entry into the At-Maidan, which is the greatest marketplace or high street of Hifpaan [Isfahan]; round about this place are erected certain high scaffolds where the multitude do sit to behold the warlike exercises performed by the King and his courtiers, as at their running and leaping, their shooting with bows and arrows, at a mark both above and beneath, their playing at tennis [Cartwright means polo here: as shown to the right], all of which they performe on horseback . .”

Like the 1595 festival account in an earlier blog entry; this must be a description of the first phase of the Maydan development.  Although much has changed since then – the extra, inner row of shops and the second storey of ‘apartments’ was added in 1602 – there are still polo goalposts in the Maydan today.

When Abbas Mirza seized power from his father in 1587 to become Shah Abbas the First, he inherited a country in crisis.  As well as securing his external borders – initially in yearly campaigns against the Uzbegs – he had to struggle to create internal order.  As part of that, in 1590 he went on a year-long trip around Southern Iran.  This posting is going to focus on the time he spent in Isfahan.

Seljuk Isfahan: centred on the Old Maydan below and to W / L of Friday Mosque

In 1590, Isfahan was still based on the pre-Safavid, essentially Seljuk, plan shown on the right – centred on the Old Maydan next to the ancient Friday Mosque.  Natanzi gives some fascinating details about what happened when “the air of the City of Rule [Isfahan] was sweetened with the musk and ambergris of the dust of the hooves of the World Rulers’ steed, and [the Shah] alighted at the Bagh-i Naqsh-i Jahan”.

Naqsh-i Jahan was then a garden precinct south of, and outside, the main town.  The first Safavid Shah, Esmail I (r.1501-24), had stayed there several times in the first decade of the 16th century.  Under Shah Abbas it was to become the centre of the huge Safavid development of the city of Isfahan. You can see the later Palace of Naqsh-i Jahan (now destroyed) on the sketch map below.

Key locations in Safavid Isfahan. (Note different scale / area than the Seljuk map)

In 1590, Abbas apparently ordered a banquet and a “convivial gathering”.  Then, “unbeknownst to the guests, [he] betook himself to the citadel [fortress]” where he met his imprisoned family and, “acting under the dictates of anxiety and care which are the necessary adjuncts of world rule and the means of tying together the accoutrements of success, without hesitation or reflection, he did that which was concealed in his royal heart.”

Or put just a little more explicitly, he blinded his father and brothers and sent them to the famous mountain fortress of Alamut.

Later, “when his mind was cleared of this matter, [Abbas] cast the rays of his attention on the construction and renovation of the buildings of that city whose rank is that of Paradise [Isfahan]”.   Since the Shah wanted a place to play polo and have horse races, “the maydan [large square] was levelled, river sand was spread on it and it thus became a coloured reflector of the forms of the heavenly bodies”.

Abbas also gave orders to rebuild the old bazaar area and “create a qaysariyya structure like the one that was [once] located in Tabriz”.  Click here for an amazing interactive 360 view of the Isfahan qaysariyya [bazaar entrance] as it is now (and dont forget to ‘turn round’ electronically to see the view of the maydan [square].  This is the specific view that Abbas wanted his many foreign visitors to be greeted with.

This was all “in accordance” with the twin kingly duties of “dispensing justice and building” – and was all done when Abbas was only 20 years old!

Recently I introduced you to Sattara Khanum, and her husband Jaffer Kuli Khan (Sitara and Ja’far Quli Khan in Lorimer’s translated Duraki/Behdarwand poem).

The puzzle in the posting this week is a salutary lesson in careful reading of transliterated names and also, perhaps, in not believing everything that even the most renowned authors write  – as well as a heartening example of how it is possible to find out more about individual women, even if they are often left out of mainstream histories.

Layard describes in his book how, forty years after he left Iran, he tried to find out what had happened to the families he stayed with.  A diplomatic contact wrote to him to tell him that ‘Jaffer Kuli Khan’ was the father of the “the first eelkhanee”, Hossein Gholi Khan (HGK), and that both father and son had been killed.

For a brief moment, I was hugely excited by the possibility that I had been reading a first hand account of the father (and perhaps mother!) of the Great Khan, the Consolidator, the the first Khan to hold all the various Bakhtiari factions in balance.

Sakineh has moved out of the mountains, to Laleh. She is another type of beauty than her sister-in law in the earlier posting on Sattara Khanum

But on thinking about names and dates, I quickly realised that I (and Layard too) was probably confusing two men with similar names.  HGK’s  father did indeed have a sound-alike name: ‘Jafar Gholi Khan’ – but this man died in 1836, before Layard arrived in Iran.  And HGK’s grandfather was Habibollah Khan – not the “drunkard” (H)asad Khan included in the Duraki/ Behdarwand poem.  Anyway, my Bakhtiari contacts told me that Layard had not stayed with any Ilkhani, Haji Ilkhani or Ilbegi families.

So perhaps Layard’s ‘Jaffer Kuli Khan’ / the poem’s ‘Ja’far Quli Khan’ was the ‘Jaf’r Quli Khan Bakhtiarvand’ that Sherry Sharzad Bakhtiar describes in her very helpful ‘Biography of Bakhtiary leaders’ as killing HGK’s father!  This fits nicely with Lorimer’s notes describing the hero of the poem as the chief of the Behdarwand (or Bakhtiarwand).

Then the opponent in the poem, ‘Qalb ’Ali Khan’ – “chief of the Duraki . . another powerful Haft Lang tribe” – could be HGK’s uncle, ‘Kalbali Khan’, who raised HGK after his father’s death.  This fits nicely too – with Layard’s description of his ‘Jaffer Kuli Khan’ having a rival: ‘Kelb Ali Khan’.  Looking again at Layard’s book, he does say that Jaffer Kuli Khan killed Kelb Ali Khan’s brother.

So Layard’s Jaffer Kuli Khan / the poem’s Ja’far Quli Khan is the killer of the father of HGK – and Sitara / Sattara Khanum, as Qalb ’Ali Khan’s’ daughter, must have been HGK’s first cousin, as well as the wife of the man who killed HGK’s father.

I think, anyway!?  All you Bakhtiari out there – please tell me where I’ve gone wrong, if I have!