Measuring with a rope

I’ve already written a little about the tanab, the traditional rope-measuring device that Munajjim Yazdi and his team used to record the distances that Shah Abbas walked in 1601.  As chief astrologer, Yazdi was a measurement expert – also using his astrolabe (click here to see a slightly later Safavid astrolabe) to compute how fast …

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Fakes in the Ashmolean

The Islamic Ceramics display in the Ashmolean Museum includes a fascinating feature on fakery. The first fake dish included here is boat-shaped – or seems that way. Actually it’s made up, according to the Ashmolean, from pieces of a round bowl. It’s maybe more difficult to see the fakery in the second dish. It purports …

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Ahuan – and the Parthian stations

Ahuan is one of the places in Khurasan where, on the 1601 walk to Mashhad, Abbas stayed in a ribat (fort). Click here to see Herzfeld’s plan – though it’s also as clear as can be on the satellite image. The hilltop ‘settlement’ (it’s now really just a petrol station) also has a superb extant …

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999 caravanserais?

Everyone knows 999 caravanserais were constructed by Shah Abbas the First . . don’t they? Certainly, very many Iranians will – on the slightest provocation – tell one of the very many variants of the story: most commonly that the Shah thought that the number 999 was so precise that it should be believed, whilst …

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Caravanserais along the Khurasan road

Stopping place km from Isfahan Details Dating CVS also called ‘ribat’ Deh Namak 441 17th century/Safavid CVS, inscription panel missing, restored in 1976-8. Second mud brick CVS, built after 1848, now in poor condition (Kleiss 1998 [K]: 85). See details Abdalabad 463 Mud/mudbrick CVS: stylistically of multiple periods including Qajar. ? Lasjird 483 17th century/Safavid …

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Shah Abbas’ eyebrows

Shah Abbas is often thought in terms of his luxuriant moustachios.  But maybe we should instead be thinking about his eyebrows. In 1595, a renowned poet and boon companion of the Shah, one Mowlana Sa’ni, composed some verses in praise of Abbas, including: Whether it be friend or foe who quaffs the cup / He …

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Diplomacy in action: an eye-witness account

Sefer Muratowicz was an Armenian merchant; sent to Persia by the King of Poland (Sigismund III) to buy tents, carpets, weapons and fine textiles. It was Muratowicz who described (in another posting, here) the greedy Russian ambassador and his party fighting over golden tableware and ripping up expensive textiles. He also tells some great tales …

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The hanging town of Yezdikhwast

Yezdikhwast is between Isfahan and Shiraz – or, for Vita Sackville-West in 1927, from Isfahan on the way across the Zagros Mountains when she visited the Bakhtiari. She described the town as: “that fantastic grey eyrie overhanging a chasm. Pierre Loti compared it to the abode of sea birds [click here and scroll down for …

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