I’ve been reading Roger Bulliet’s fascinating book on agriculture and trade in early Islamic Iran. Bulliet suggests that the Muslim Arabs didn’t only bring Islam to Iran – but also the money and will to dig qanats and build villages to house workers to grow cotton as a cash crop. Khurasan, and the central plateau …
The current SOAS exhibition on Zoroastrianism has lots of great things – the video of the Yasna ceremony is especially interesting. But this week I want to pick out a very small reproduction of a very large mosaic: of three Parthian “wise men” or Magi. Here’s an image of the whole thing, in Ravenna – …
The always-great British Libary Asia and Africa blog shared images from a Gift to Kings / Gift to Viziers, recently purchased at auction. This tract on principles of ethics and government includes forty brief sections (bāb), each with four brief maxims, all “selected by sages from the books of the ancients”. The copy of the …
In 1896, three British men set off on “the longest bicycle ride ever attempted, just 19,237 miles over continuous new ground” – including a ride through Persia. John Foster Fraser’s account of the two year trip is full of colonial-style anecdotes (many of which are a little too close to racism for many modern readers). …
Last week I wrote about Jonas Hanway, the Caspian Trader, and his account of Shah Abbas advising the Ottoman Sultan that he would stop the Persians wearing green stockings if the Sultan stopped dogs in Turkey from pissing on the grass. When I was looking for images of Hanway, I found several (for example here …
Today the commonest tale told in Iran about Shah Abbas concerns the 999 caravanserais he is supposed to have constructed. Jonas Hanway, in his Historical account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea, tells lots more. My two favourites stories are about the shrewdness of Shah Abbas. The first is about Abbas’ supposed “method …
I’m fascinated by the area around Ahuan. Isidore of Charax’s Parthian Stations run through it. It’s near where Darius was killed by his men as he tried to escape from Alexander. And the Seleucid King Antiochus chased Arsaces across here too, with both forces trying to take control over the water supplies. Now, there’s a …
From the times of Ptolemy’s Geographia, the Caspian Sea was (wrongly!) depicted by European cartographers as widest from east to west. Only as late as 1647 did Adam Olearius manage to correct this mistake. Click here to see Olearius’ map. Elio Brancaforte has described Olearius as an intellectual hybrid: drawing on classical and biblical sources, …
Ice was a historical commonplace in Persia: Fryer wrote of how in 1677 the Persians “mightily covet cool things to the Palat. Wherefore they mix snow, or dissolve ice in their Water, Wine or Sherbets,”. Even the poorest, “have they but a Penny in the World, the one half will go for Bread, and dried …
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 …