The British Library is busy digitising their Persian manuscripts (with help from IHF), and are starting to show off the results. Maybe I should confess that my favourite Mantiq al-Tayr manuscript is the one in the Metropolitan Museum. This was finished in 1487; with more illlustrations added by Shah Abbas in the early seventeenth century, …
Every day at dawn and dusk (and whenever a sick pilgrim gets healed), kettle-drums are beaten and long metal trumpets are blown in Mashhad. The 1910 photo here shows the naqqāra-ḵāna: the name used for the ensemble of musicians as well as the place where the performance takes place. Click here (and then on ‘live …
Percy Sykes is best known as spy, consul and military man in Eastern Persia. But, with a Persian author, Khan Bahadur Ahmad Din Khan, he also wrote a “second Haji Baba, which would serve as a true picture of Persia [in around 1900], before constitutional reform appeared on the horizon”. This book is an important …
Pincon wrote of the inhumanity and cruelty of Shah Abbas to his subjects, of how he “cut off their heads for the slightest offence, having them stoned, quartered, flayed alive and given alive to the dogs, or to the forty Anthropophagi and man-eaters that he always has by him”. But Chardin, who not only spent …
The Shah didn’t always act like a great warrior, major world leader, and major patron of architecture. Here he is, according to the Chronicle of the Carmelites – acting much more like a very annoying small boy: “One Friday therefore, on the 17th July [1609], while [Fathers Benignus and Redemptus] were in the Maidan near …
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 …
When I visited Bedasht, I was taken to see a very lovely little namaskhane (literally ‘prayer house’) – with images of Abul Fazl (just in case any of you still think images are taboo in Islam), and with much more space for women than for men. There’s also a mosque – this was the only …
Erzerum – now in eastern Turkey – was a thriving town until the Safavid-Ottoman wars of the sixteenth century. After that, the records dwindle to almost nothing. There are virtually no accounts from travellers, for example, for more than a century, until Evliya Celebi comes through in 1645. Dickram Kouymjian, however, has found some Ottoman …
I’ve been told, at the shrine in Arbabil, that no-one really knows where Shah Abbas is buried. Apparently, after he died, three coffins were prepared – maybe to ensure that his bones couldn’t be disturbed by enemies after his death, or perhaps to signal that he ruled over the whole of Iran. One coffin was …
Three of the men who travelled with the Sherley brothers wrote accounts of their trips. George Manwaring (who also wrote about the jewels he saw) describes arriving in Kashan in 1589: So that night we went twelve miles to a gallant city called Cason [Kashan], spending time by the way in hawking and hunting, and …