Isfahan and its Palaces

Isfahan and its Palaces

Author: Sussan Babaie

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2008-07-14

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0748633766

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Winner of the Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award 2009This beautifully illustrated history of Safavid Isfahan (1501-1722) explores the architectural and urban forms and networks of socio-cultural action that reflected a distinctly early-modern and Perso-Shi'i practice of kingship.An immense building campaign, initiated in 1590-91 at the millennial threshold of the Islamic calendar (1000 A.H.), transformed Isfahan from a provincial, medieval, and largely Sunni city into an urban-centered representation of the first Imami Shi'i empire in the history of Islam. The historical process of Shi'ification of Safavid Iran and the deployment of the arts in situating the shifts in the politico-religious agenda of the imperial household informs Sussan Babaie's study of palatial architecture and urban environments of Isfahan and the earlier capitals of Tabriz and Qazvin.Babaie argues that since the Safavid claim presumed the inheritance both of the charisma of the Shi'i Imams and of the aura of royal splendor integral to ancient Persian notions of kingship, a ceremonial regime was gradually devised in which access and proximity to the shah assumed the contours of an institutionalized form of feasting. Talar-palaces, a new typology in Islamic palatial designs, and the urban-spatial articulation of access and proximity are the architectural anchors of this argument. Cast in the comparative light of urban spaces and palace complexes elsewhere and earlier-in the Timurid, Ottoman, and Mughal realms as well as in the early modern European capitals-Safavid Isfahan emerges as the epitome of a new architectural-urban paradigm in the early modern age.


Half the World

Half the World

Author: Stephen P. Blake

Publisher: Mazda Publishers

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13:

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Pt. 1. Background. 1. Land, People, Empire. 2. Imperial Capital: When, Where, Why? 3. Cityscape -- Pt. 2. Politics. 4. Imperial Palace and Imperial Garden Retreats. 5. Great Amiri Mansions and Garden Retreats -- Pt. 3. Economy. 6. Bazaar. 7. Caravanserai -- Pt. 4. Religion. 8. Mosque. 9. Madrasa and Imamzada -- Themes and Findings -- App. Mahallas and Suburbs of Isfahan.


Book Arts of Isfahan

Book Arts of Isfahan

Author: Alice Taylor

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 1995-12-01

Total Pages: 102

ISBN-13: 089236338X

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In the seventeenth century, the Persian city of Isfahan was a crossroads of international trade and diplomacy. Manuscript paintings produced within the city’s various cultural, religious, and ethnic groups reveal the vibrant artistic legacy of the Safavid Empire. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Getty Museum, Book Arts of Isfahan offers a fascinating account of the ways in which the artists of Isfahan used their art to record the life around them and at the same time define their own identities within a complex society.


Safavid Iran

Safavid Iran

Author: Andrew J. Newman

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2012-04-11

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0857716611

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The Safavid dynasty, which reigned from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth century, links medieval with modern Iran. The Safavids witnessed wide-ranging developments in politics, warfare, science, philosophy, religion, art and architecture. But how did this dynasty manage to produce the longest lasting and most glorious of Iran's Islamic-period eras?Andrew Newman offers a complete re-evaluation of the Safavid place in history as they presided over these extraordinary developments and the wondrous flowering of Iranian culture. In the process, he dissects the Safavid story, from before the 1501 capture of Tabriz by Shah Ismail (1488-1524), the point at which Shiism became the realm's established faith; on to the sixteenth and early seventeenth century dominated by Shah Abbas (1587-1629), whose patronage of art and architecture from his capital of Isfahan embodied the Safavid spirit; and culminating with the reign of Sultan Husayn (reg. 1694-1722).Based on meticulous scholarship, Newman offers a valuable new interpretation of the rise of the Safavids and their eventual demise in the eighteenth century. "Safavid Iran," with its fresh insights and new research, is the definitive single volume work on the subject.


The City as Anthology

The City as Anthology

Author: Kathryn Babayan

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2021-04-06

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1503627837

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Household anthologies of seventeenth-century Isfahan collected everyday texts and objects, from portraits, letters, and poems to marriage contracts and talismans. With these family collections, Kathryn Babayan tells a new history of the city at the transformative moment it became a cosmopolitan center of imperial rule. Bringing into view people's lives from a city with no extant state or civic archives, Babayan reimagines the archive of anthologies to recover how residents shaped their communities and crafted their urban, religious, and sexual selves. Babayan highlights eight residents—from king to widow, painter to religious scholar, poet to bureaucrat—who anthologized their city, writing their engagements with friends and family, divulging the many dimensions of the social, cultural, and religious spheres of life in Isfahan. Through them, we see the gestures, manners, and sensibilities of a shared culture that configured their relations and negotiated the lines between friendship and eroticism. These entangled acts of seeing and reading, desiring and writing converge to fashion the refined urban self through the sensual and the sexual—and give us a new and enticing view of the city of Isfahan.


Isfahan

Isfahan

Author: Farshid Emami

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2023-12-05

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0271096128

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A vibrant urban settlement from medieval times and the royal seat of the Safavid dynasty, the city of Isfahan emerged as a great metropolis during the seventeenth century. Using key sources, this book reconstructs the spaces and senses of this dynamic city. Focusing on nuances of urban experience, Farshid Emami expands our understanding of Isfahan in a global context. He takes the reader on an evocative journey through the city’s markets, promenades, and coffeehouses, bringing to life the social landscapes that animated the lives of urban dwellers and shaped their perceptions of themselves and the world. In doing so, Emami reveals seventeenth-century Isfahan as more than a cluster of beautiful monuments and gardens. It was a cosmopolitan city, where senses and materials, nature and artifice, and ritual and sociability acted in unison, engendering urban experiences that became paramount across the globe during the early modern period. Drawing extensively on Persian literary and visual sources, including the “Guide for Strolling in Isfahan,” this book casts new light on the history of a major Eurasian city and opens up new possibilities for cross-cultural studies of urban experience in the early modern period.


Formal Structure in Islamic Architecture of Iran and Turkistan

Formal Structure in Islamic Architecture of Iran and Turkistan

Author: Klaus Herdeg

Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13:

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Like its companion volume about Indian architecture (see NA1501), this volume presents the meticulous work of Herdeg and his students this time illustrating and explicating the great monuments of Islamic architecture in Iran and Tukestan. With some 150 measured drawings and analytical diagrams and 1


The Safavid World

The Safavid World

Author: Rudi Matthee

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-21

Total Pages: 961

ISBN-13: 1000392899

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The Safavid World brings together thirty chapters on many aspects of the complex Safavid state, 1501–1722. With the latest insights and arguments, some offer overviews of the period or topic at hand, and others present new interpretations of old questions based on newly found sources. In addition to political history and religious life, the chapters in this volume cover economic conditions, commercial links and activities, social relations, and artistic expressions. They do so in ways that stretch both the temporal and geographical perimeters of the subject, and contributors also examine Safavid Iran with an eye to both its Mongol and Timurid antecedents and its long afterlife following the fall of the dynasty. Unlike traditional scholarship which tended to view the country as unique, sui generis, and barely affected by the outside world, The Safavid World situates Iran in a wider, regional or global context. Examining the Safavids from their foundations in the fourteenth century to their relations with the rest of the world in the eighteenth century, this study is essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars of the Safavid world and the history and culture of Iran and the Middle East.