Syriac Christian Culture
Syriac Christian Culture

Author: Aaron Michael Butts

Publisher: CUA Press

Published: 2021-01-08

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0813233682

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Syriac Christianity developed in the first centuries CE in the Middle East, where it continued to flourish throughout Late Antiquity and the Medieval period, while also spreading widely, as far as India and China. Today, Syriac Christians are found in the Middle East, in India, as well in diasporas scattered across the globe. Over this extended time period and across this vast geographic expanse, Syriac Christians have built impressive churches and monasteries, crafted fine pieces of art, and written and transmitted a sizable body of literature. Though often overlooked, neglected, and even persecuted, Syriac Christianity has been – and continues to be – an important part of the humanistic heritage of the last two millennia. The present volume brings together fourteen studies that offer fresh perspectives on Syriac Christianity, especially its literary texts and authors. The timeframes of the individual studies span from the second-century Syriac translation of the Hebrew Bible up to the thirteenth century with the end of the Syriac Renaissance. Several studies analyze key authors from Late Antiquity, such as Aphrahat, Ephrem, Narsai, and Jacob of Serugh. Others investigate translations into Syriac, both from Hebrew and from Greek, while still others examine hagiography, especially its formation and transmission. Reflecting a growing trend in the field, the volume also devotes significant attention to the Medieval period, during which Syriac Christians lived under Islamic rule. The studies in the volume are united in their quest to explore the richness, diversity, and vibrance of Syriac Christianity.

Inside/Outside Islamic Art and Architecture
Inside/Outside Islamic Art and Architecture

Author: Saygin Salgirli

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-07-29

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1501341871

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When we walk into a gallery, we have a fairly good idea where the building begins and ends; and inside, while observing a painting, we are equally confident in distinguishing between the painting-proper and its frame and borders. Yet, things are often more complicated. A building defines an exterior space just as much as an interior, and what we perceive to be ornamental and marginal to a given painting may in fact be central to what it represents. In this volume, a simple question is presented: instead of dichotomous separations between inside and outside, or exterior and interior, what other relationships can we think of? The first book of its kind to grapple with this question, Inside/Outside Islamic Art and Architecture focuses on a wide spectrum of mediums and topics, including painted manuscripts, objects, architectural decoration, architecture and urban planning, and photography. Bringing together scholars with diverse methodologies-who work on a geographical span stretching from India to Spain and Nigeria, and across a temporal spectrum from the thirteenth to the twenty-first century-this original book also poses engaging questions about the boundaries of the field.

Arts of Allusion
Arts of Allusion

Author: Margaret S. Graves

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-07-31

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 0190695935

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The art of the object reached unparalleled heights in the medieval Islamic world, yet the intellectual dimensions of ceramics, metalwares, and other plastic arts in this milieu have not always been acknowledged. Arts of Allusion reveals the object as a crucial site where pre-modern craftsmen of the eastern Mediterranean and Persianate realms engaged in fertile dialogue with poetry, literature, painting, and, perhaps most strikingly, architecture. Lanterns fashioned after miniature shrines, incense burners in the form of domed monuments, earthenware jars articulated with arches and windows, inkwells that allude to tents: through close studies of objects from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, this book reveals that allusions to architecture abound across media in the portable arts of the medieval Islamic world. Arts of Allusion draws upon a broad range of material evidence as well as medieval texts to locate its subjects in a cultural landscape where the material, visual, and verbal realms were intertwined. Moving far beyond the initial identification of architectural types with their miniature counterparts in the plastic arts, Margaret Graves develops a series of new frameworks for exploring the intelligent art of the allusive object. These address materiality, representation, and perception, and examine contemporary literary and poetic paradigms of metaphor, description, and indirect reference as tools for approaching the plastic arts. Arguing for the role of the intellect in the applied arts and for the communicative potential of ornament, Arts of Allusion asserts the reinstatement of craftsmanship into Islamic intellectual history.

Metalwork and Material Culture in the Islamic World
Metalwork and Material Culture in the Islamic World

Author: Venetia Porter

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2012-06-29

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 0857721887

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The material and visual culture of the Islamic World casts vast arcs through space and time, and encompasses a huge range of artefacts and monuments from the minute to the grandiose, from ceramic pots to the great mosques. Here, Venetia Porter and Mariam Rosser-Owen assemble leading experts in the field to examine both the objects themselves and the ways in which they reflect their historical, cultural and economic contexts. With a focus on metalwork, this volume includes an important new study of Mosul metalwork and presents recent discoveries in the fields of Fatimid, Mamluk and Qajar metalwork. By examining architecture, ceramics, ivories and textiles, seventeenth-century Iranian painting and contemporary art, the book explores a wide range of artistic production and historical periods from the Umayyad caliphate to the modern Middle East. This rich and detailed volume makes a significant contribution to the fields of Art History, Architecture and Islamic Studies, bringing new objects to light, and shedding new light on old objects.

The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives
The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives

Author: Carole Hillenbrand

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-24

Total Pages: 726

ISBN-13: 1135956138

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Coinciding with the 900th anniversary of the Crusades, this book is the first general introduction to some of the wider aspects of the history of the Crusades. Prepared by Carole Hillenbrand, a leading authority with a world-wide reputation, The The Crusade is unique in covering the Crusades from the Muslim perspective; it is also a timely reflection on how the phenomenon of the Crusades influenced the Muslim world, then and now--militarily, culturally, and psychologically. The Crusades discusses a group of themes designed to highlight how Muslims reacted to the alien presence of the Crusaders in the heart of traditional Muslim territory. Ideological concerns are examined, and the importance of the concept of jihad is assessed in the context of the gradual recovery of the Holy Land and the expulsion of the Crusaders. There are also chapters devoted to an analysis of the warfare--arms, battles, sieges, fortifications--on the basis of written sources and extant works of art. Also extensively discussed is the complex issue of the interaction between Muslims and Crusaders in a social, economic, and cultural setting. The epilogue traces the profound impact of the Crusades on Muslim consciousness up to the present day. The Crusades is also lavishly illustrated with 500 black-and-white pictures and two full color-plate sections.

Compilation and Creation in Adab and Luġa
Compilation and Creation in Adab and Luġa

Author: Albert Arazi

Publisher: Eisenbrauns

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 9781575060453

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Selected contents of this volume (1999), collected in memory of Naphtali Kinberg: Rachel Milstein, "The Evolution of a Visual Motif: The Temple and the Ka'ba"; Gabriel M. Rosenbaum, "A Certain Laugh: Serious Humor and Creativity in the Adab of Ibn al-Gawzi"; Aryeh Levin, "Sibawayhi's Attitude to the Language of the Quran"; Kees Versteegh, "Loanwords from Arabic and the Merger of d/d"; Toufic Fahd, "Adab: Poesie, Prose, Proverbes"; Richard C. Steiner, "Philology as the Handmaiden of Philosophy in R. Saadia Gaon's Interpretation of Genesis 1:1"; Dominique et Marie-Therese Urvoy, "Un aspect particulier de relation entre adab et falsafa"; Joseph Sadan, "Arabic Tom 'n Jerry Compositions: A Popular Composition on a War between Cats and Mice and a Maqama on Negotiations and Concluding Peace between a Cat and a Mouse"; Ulrich Marzolph, "Adab in Transition: Creative Compilation in Nineteenth-Century Print Tradition"; David Wasserstein, "A West-East Puzzle: On the History of the Proverb 'Speech in Silver, Silence in Golden." Israel Oriental Studies has ceased publication with volume 20.

Wonderful Things: Byzantium through its Art
Wonderful Things: Byzantium through its Art

Author: Liz James

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 1351871099

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The essays collected in this book were delivered at the XLII Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, held in London in 2009 to accompany the exhibition Byzantium 330-1453, at the Royal Academy. The exhibition was one of the most ambitious and complex exhibitions ever mounted at the Royal Academy, as well as one of the most popular, and the overall aim of the book is to reflect on the exhibition of Byzantine art, both as an academic and popular exercise, and through the choice and discussion of individual objects. Exhibitions present a very different picture of Byzantium and its culture from works of history. The choices of object for display, their arrangement, and the underlying aims of exhibition curators and designers mean that every exhibition presents a different picture of Byzantium. Particular emphases can be placed, whether on everyday life or high court culture; Constantinople or the provinces; or claims of continuity or change over the Byzantine millennium. The essays explore aspects of the image of Byzantium that results from these choices. Given the enormous popularity of exhibitions of Byzantine objects (continued after the completion of this volume by exhibitions in Paris, Bonn and Istanbul), art has become one of the most popular and accessible means of popularizing Byzantium to a wide public audience. Hitherto there has been no general consideration of either the historiography of Byzantine exhibitions or the ways in which they have been set up to present different aspects of Byzantine culture to an academic and general public. The essays are divided into 3 sections: Exhibiting Byzantium sets the 2009 exhibition into the context of other exhibitions of Byzantine art and considers the issues involved in curating and viewing such major collections of medieval art; Object Lessons offers a set of studies of individual objects that were in the exhibition; Byzantium through its Art moves to consider Byzantine art more widely, thinking about the different ways in which objects can be used to study Byzantine culture and society. These are preceded by an introduction by the editors which sets the volume in context.