The Nasrid builders of the Alhambra - the best-preserved medieval Muslim palatial city - were so exacting that some of their work could not be fully explained until the invention of fractal geometry. Their design principles have been obscured, however, by the loss of all archival material. This book resolves [...]

This book offers an integrated study of the texts and images of illustrated Malay manuscripts on magic and divination from private and public collections in Malaysia, the UK and Indonesia. Containing some of the rare examples of Malay painting, these manuscripts provide direct evidence for the intercultural connections between the [...]

Crusader Landscapes in the Medieval Levant is a collection of scholarly essays addressing a number of aspects of the archaeology and history of settlement in the crusader states established in the Middle East during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, collectively known as the Latin East, and on their influence on the [...]

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire remained the grandest and most powerful of Middle Eastern empires. One hitherto overlooked aspect of the Empire's remarkable cultural legacy was the role of powerful women - often the head of the harem, or wives or mothers of sultans. These [...]

This book examines non-Muslim religious sites, structures and spaces in the Islamic world. It reveals a vibrant portrait of life in the religious sites by illustrating how architecture responds to contextual issues and traditions. Sacred Precinctsexplores urban context; issues of identity; design; construction; transformation and the history of sacred sites and [...]

This timely book tackles ongoing questions about how 'local' perspectives on contemporary art from the Middle East are defined and how these perspectives intersect with global art discourses. Leading figures from the Middle Eastern art world, western art historians, art theorists and museum curators discuss the historical and cultural circumstances [...]

Digital preservation of illustrated Persian manuscripts, forming part of a larger Digital Persian Manuscripts project which aims to put details of 11.000 manuscrpts online together with digitised images of 50. Author : Ursula Sims Williams This digitised manuscripts are available here : https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/persian.html

The official religion of Iran has been Shi'i Islam from the Safavids in the sixteenth century to the present day. Little is known about the material culture produced, especially in Iran, by the narratives and traditions surrounding Shi'ism. The Shi'i world experience has provided a rich artistic tradition encompassing painting, [...]

From Timur's tent in Samarqand to Shah 'Abbas's palace in Isfahan and Humayun's tomb in Delhi, the pavilion has been an integral part of Persianate gardens since its earliest appearance at the Achaemenid garden in Pasargadae in the sixth century BC. Here, Mohammad Gharipour places both the garden and the [...]

At the height of the Mughal Empire's wealth and power, Jahanara Begum, a 17 year old princess, became the head of the imperial harem. Imperial Women in Mughal India shows how this unmarried princess was able to transcend the customary and religious restrictions imposed on her gender, and make an [...]

Yezidism is a fascinating part of the rich cultural mosaic of the Middle East. The Yezidi faith emerged for the first time in the twelfth century in the Kurdish mountains of northern Iraq. The religion, which has become notorious for its associations with 'devil worship', is in fact an intricate [...]

Rashid al-Din (1274-1318), physician and powerful minister at the court of the Ilkhans, was a key figure in the cosmopolitan milieu in Iran under Mongol rule. He set up an area in the vicinity of the court where philosophers, doctors, astronomers, and historians from different parts of Eurasia lived together, [...]

The Arab-Islamic city has been always a glamorous urban dream in human cultural memory. This is manifested in Cairo, the world's largest medieval urban system where traditional lifestyles are still implemented. Nevertheless, despite the extensive efforts to preserve Historic Cairo, it is sadly vulnerable. Ahmed Sedky investigates the reasons behind [...]

Before the Mughal style came to dominate the Islamic architecture of the Indian sub-continent, Bengal and its rulers had developed their own forms. The mosque architecture of the Independent Sultanate period (from the 14th to the 16th centuries) represents the most important element of the Islamic architecture of Bengal. This [...]

Glossary of conservation terminology (Arabic-English and English-Arabic) developed by Dr Hossam Mahdy for the ATHAR programme and intended for conservation professionals working in the Arab region. This is a preliminary document distributed to invite discussion and comments. Author : Hossam Mahdy This publication in pdf can be downloaded here : [...]

Orientalist Vision and the Romantic Sense of the Past in Late Ottoman Culture. Author : Ahmet Ersoy This publication in pdf can be downloaded here : https://www.academia.edu/11300463/Osman_Hamdi_Bey_and_the_Historiophile_Mood

One of the world's most important collections of medieval Islamic embroideries is to be found in the Department of Eastern Art in Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum. The textiles were collected by the Egyptologist Percy Newberry between 1900 and 1930, while he was living in Cairo. Most of the embroideries were [...]

A symbolic locus embodying myriad meanings, the political center of the eastern Mediterranean, and one of the old world’s largest urban centers, Constantinople was the site of large-scale urban and architectural interventions. Changing visions—the changing political, cultural, and religious orientations of those who lived there and those who ruled from [...]

This study makes use of the primary sources like ancient texts, and medieval chronicles retrieved initially from Indian archives, and studies of archaeological survey of India reports, district and state Gazetteers. Author : Subhash Parihar The publication can be purchase from here : https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9788173053351/Land-Transport-Mughal-India-Agra-Lahore-8173053359/plp

"Kalila and Dimna" or "The Fables of Bidpai" is one of the gems of world culture, having been translated through the centuries everywhere from China to Spain. "Kalila and Dimna", like the fables of Aesop or Lafontaine, are subtle and suggestive moral tales - a kind of repository of wisdom [...]

Comprising thirty-one maps at a metric scale of 1:1,250 and a descriptive catalogue, The Monuments of Historic Cairo marks the first time that the city's significant architectural heritage has been mapped in ground plan within the present-day urban context. The work surveys an area of nearly six square kilometers, stretching [...]

This richly illustrated book provides an unsurpassed overview of Islamic art and architecture from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries, a time of the formation of a new artistic culture and its first, medieval, flowering in the vast area from the Atlantic to India. Inspired by Ettinghausen and Grabar's original [...]

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Ayyubid dynasty brought unprecedented architectural development to Aleppo, the most important city in medieval Syria. While early Islamic empires usually expressed their grandeur by founding new cities with vast extra-urban palaces, the Ayyubids asserted their power by "modernizing" existing towns. With its large, [...]

Saudi Arabia encompasses a greater variety of architectural styles than any other country in the Arabian peninsula. The buildings of the coastal, mountain and plains regions are entirely distinctive and local in their character. By contrast, several towns, especially Mecca and Medina, have naturally been directly exposed to foreign architectural [...]

The proceedings of the Barakat Trust Conference in Islamic Art and History held at St John's College, Oxford in 1994, on the politics and artistic patronage of the Ilkhanid court in Iran between circa AD 1290 and 1340. The Ilkhanids were of Mongol origin, and the papers range from their [...]

This volume focuses on the museum's exceptional group of Islamic miniature paintings found in illustrated copies of classic works & as surviving fragments pasted or bound into albums in the former royal libraries. It is illustrated with representative examples of sacred, literary, & technical works reflecting the patronage of individual [...]

This beautifully conceived and produced survey of Islamic architecture explores the glorious world of the caravansarai, mausoleum, palace, and mosque. Focusing on the multifaceted relation of architecture to society, Robert Hillenbrand covers public architecture in the Middle East and North Africa from the medieval period to 1700. Extensive photographs and [...]