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. In The Khan and the Unicorn,…
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,…
A worldly Hungarian informed me in 1976, as I was leaving to take up a scholarship in Iran, “I was at the Shah’s 2,500 year celebration.” Astounded, I asked him what it was like. “Like something out of Buñuel”, he replied. Iran’s ruler had invited to him to the infamous coming out party because he…
Slavery underpins so much of the pre-modern Islamicate world, with its slave-sultans, eunuchs, elite dancing girls as well as household servants, and yet we don’t know much about this social institution and what we know is probably wrong. Perhaps because contemporary historians considered slavery so natural, we can glean little insight from their texts about…
Can grammar function like a machine? Can a set of mechanical procedures, or rules, generate perfectly correct sentences in a given language? This is a question that preoccupies linguists, but not language users. It is natural to assume that language is too sloppy, too idiosyncratic, too human, in the end, to be generated by a…
In Egypt’s eastern province, the annual Arabian Horse Festival celebrates the deep historical connection between the province, the Arabian horse, and the settlement of Bedouin tribes in Egypt during the 7th century. Except that, according to Yossef Rapoport’s new book, Becoming Arab, this perceived connection doesn’t represent a historical event, but rather a lengthy process…
You come across them in used book stores, with their fading, cloth covers, their saccharine prose, with black and white photos of palaces and tennis courts. These are the memoirs of princesses from the house of Muhammad Ali of Egypt, of Zog of Albania, or the Dogras of Kashmir. It’s easy to forget that behind…
In few countries is the contrast between buried riches and visible squalor as great as in Afghanistan. Ancient towns like Balkh and Ghazna present scenes of desolation which belie the wonderful objects and architectural elements that archaeologists have recovered from them. Other rich sites, like Ai Khanum, lie below the surface of a featureless plain….
Not as well-known as the classic poets of the Tang era, Xie Lingyun (385-433) stands at a turning point in Chinese literature. The long-ruling Han dynasty had a conservative view of culture. Scholars of that dynasty cultivated old fashioned poetic forms and adhered to a tradition-bound Confucian ethic. With the downfall of the Han and…
The Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, never one to shrink from a challenge, visited Gobustan in Azerbaijan for two decades to prove his theory that the ancestors of today’s Scandinavians left behind the mysterious rock carvings near Baku. Uncanny similarities between petroglyphs showing the long, oared boats of Caspian seafarers and those of the Vikings, and…
Even the idlest stroller will be awestruck by the beauty of Cairo’s City of the Dead. Yet this gem of 14th and 15th century architecture, a Unesco World Heritage site, leaves the visitor wondering about the sultans, beys and princesses for whom these elaborate monuments were built. Stones can tell stories, but objects bring the…
Some myths take longer to die than others. For students of equine history, the passion that these animals inspire in their owners and breeders often act as a veil, impenetrable for scientists and historians trying to get to the facts. In Horses, Ludovic Orlando, who has been gathering the facts jaw bone by jaw bone…
“Untranslatable”, concluded the erudite, 17th-century Jesuit missionaries, referring to the glorious corpus of Chinese poetry. While they acknowledged that poetry played an outsized role in Chinese civilization, they limited their translations to histories and scientific texts. They knew of but didn’t try to tackle the Book of Songs or the Tang dynasty anthologies. We can…
Globalization has polarized people into nativists and cosmopolites. Nowhere is that truer than in India. The nativist reaction in India to profound technological, commercial and social changes of today takes refuge in the myth of an unchanging, hermetically sealed, and eternal civilization. Audrey Truschke’s 600-page survey of five millennia of history shows how misguided this…
An Iranian grandee once asked this reviewer if he had enjoyed a dish of braised sheep brains. I replied, quoting Sa’di, “a lenifying lie is better than an irksome truth.” Face saved on all sides. This incident illustrates an important aspect of Iranian and Persianate culture: the use of poetic language to shape and elevate…