Leading the vanguard of his armies across India, Genghis Khan suddenly encountered an uncanny animal, blue‑green in colour, with the body of a bull, the tail of a horse, and a single horn. The Great Khan declared this apparition inauspicious, turned his reins, and led his army back to Mongolia.
Category Archive: Non-Fiction
It normally makes a great difference to art “history” if a given object is authentic or fabricated. And yet, the fabrication of any given object, to say nothing of a class of objects, carries within its own history: one not always of fraud, but also of gatekeeping on the one hand and exploitation on the other. The story of Islamic era objects that began to flood the museums and the market around the turn of the 20th century is one such story.
With the US-Israeli war against Iran into its second month, the publication of Homa Katouzian’s history of the 1979 Iranian revolution couldn’t be timelier. The outcome of the current war may decide the fate of that revolution and the Islamic regime that resulted from it. Katouzian’s conclusion mentions the June 2025 joint US-Israeli attacks targeting Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and notes, with astonishment, that the Iranian people failed to rise up against the regime.
Those hoping that a book called Venice and the Mongols would be a deep-dive into everything Marco Polo will be disappointed, for that most celebrated of Venetians warrants only a single chapter. Authors Nicola Di Cosmo and Lorenzo Pubblici focus rather more on Venice’s forays—commercial and territorial—into the Black Sea, where they ran up against the Mongols in Crimea. After the Fourth Crusade and the Mongol’s westward conquests, “The Pontic area,” write the authors, “became a common space, a nexus between Asia and Europe” at what was respectively the western- and eastern-most expansion of each.
The ARB website has been serving its readers for twenty-five years, and it’s time for an upgrade to take advantage of the latest advances in web technology. From next week the site will have a new, refreshed, appearance.
In London’s Victoria and Albert Museum a 16th-century Iranian carpet reigns over the Islamic collection and mesmerizes visitors. In Threads of Empire, Dorothy Armstrong writes, “The carpet transports us away from South Kensington to wherever our personal Arabian Nights dreams are located.” While the beauty of the pile side of her 12 rugs entrances her, she looks deeply at the knotted side, to explore the complex stories of their origins. Through both picture and pattern she teases out the history of these carpets, which, she argues, can reveal much about the history of our world.
A number of books in English have given us histories of Korean emigration to the United States and Canada, but the story of those who left Korea for Japan in the decades of Japanese imperial rule is relatively unknown. Sayaka Chatani, a professor of history at the National University of Singapore, writes in this book of Korean immigrants and their descendants in Japan who chose after 1948 to support North Korea, despite most of them having roots in South Korea.
The art historian Ernst Gombrich once observed that in Chinese landscape painting, the aim is not to reproduce the appearance of things, but to convey the rhythm and spirit of nature. Among genres of traditional Chinese art, landscape painting is widely regarded as a central tradition and admired for its qualities beyond the aesthetics, with the capacity for conveying lofty ideas and cultural meanings. To many artists, Chinese landscape painting is not merely a literal depiction of a specific place but represents an idealized vision of their environments shaped by their imagination and individualized understanding of nature. Chinese landscape paintings thus bear meanings beyond the physical realm, elevating the viewer towards spiritual and intellectual awakenings.
The lives of those impacted by the British Empire were complex, deeply intertwined, and, as Julia Stephens describes, transcend boundaries. The lives of the generations that follow the initial immigrants are varied and pluralistic, so they can no longer fit the identities their forefathers held.
Those who know other volumes in the “History in Objects” series from Thames & Hudson and the British Museum will find much that is familiar in this latest one on Japan: a wide and often eclectic collection of objects well-displayed on pages balanced with bite-sized yet informative blocks of text.
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