"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 [...]