Week 2

Videos

Islamic Art: Ottoman Textiles
A curator at London's Victoria and Albert Museum displays textiles from the 16th and 17th centuries. She explains the history, design, artistry, and significance of Turkish silks and velvets in the museum's Islamic art collection.

Books

The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran by D. T. Potts (Editor)
ISBN: 9780199733309
Publication Date: 2013-06-21
Iran's heritage is as varied as it is complex, and the archaeological, philological, and linguisitc scholarship of the region has not been the focus of a a synoptic study for many decades. Thus, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran fills a longstanding gap in the literature of the ancient NearEast, providing up-to-date, authoritative essays by leading specialists based both inside and outside of Iran on a wide range of topics extending from the earliest Paleolithic settlements in the Pleistocene era to the Islamic conquest in the 7th century AD.The volume is divided into sections covering prehstory, the Chalcolithic, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Achaemenid period, the Seleucid and Arsacid periods, and the Sasanian period, concluding with the Arab conquest of Iran. In addition, more specialized chapters are included that treatnumismatics (Elymaean, Arsacid, Persid and Sasanian), religion (the Avesta and Zoroastrianism), languages (proto-Elamite, Elamite, Akkadian, Old Persian, Greek, Aramaic, Parthian and Middle Persian), political ideology, calendrics, textiles, administrative seals and sealing, Sasanian silver andreliefs, and political relations with Rome and Byzantium.No other single volume covers as much of Iran's archaeology and history with the same degree of authority. This work will be of vast interest to a wide range of students and scholars, from archaeologists and art historians to philologists, Classicists, ancient historians, religious historians, andnumismatists.

Sasanian Textiles
Chapter from Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran. Despite the vagaries of preservation, fragments of Sasanian textiles have survived at a number of sites on the periphery of the Sasanian Empire, particularly in western China, Central Asia, and the Caucasus...

Museum Exhibits

Ornament: Fragments of Byzantine Fashion

Ornament: Fragments of Byzantine Fashion brings together complete tunics, parts of garments, and contemporary replicas of ancient dress to evoke the fashions of this now lost world. These textiles often preserved traces of their wearers in the forms of folds and stains, providing researchers with important information about the people buried in these garments. But alongside these bodily vestiges, the decoration of these textiles reveals much about the sophistication and aesthetics of the period in which they were crafted. Often cut into pieces by dealers at the time they were sold on the art market, these fragments survive in an incomplete state that has complicated our understanding of Byzantine dress practices.