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Extracts from his works appear in all the chief collections of travels, but there is no complete English translation.
In 1681, Chardin determined to settle in England because of the persecution of Protestants in France.
He was well received at court, and was soon after appointed court jeweller.
He was knighted by Charles II at Whitehall, 17 November 1681.
The same day he married a Protestant lady, Esther, daughter of M. de Lardinière Peigné, councillor in the Parliament of Rouen, then a refugee in London.
He carried on a considerable trade in jewels, and in the correspondence of his time was called 'the flower of merchants.'
In 1682, when he lived in Holland House, Kensington, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.
In 1684, the king sent him as envoy to Holland, where he stayed some years, was styled agent to the East India Company.
On his return to London he devoted most of his time to oriental studies.
In the prefaces to his works, 1686 and 1711, besides travels he speaks of what he calls 'my favourite desipi,' or 'Notes upon Passages of to the Holy Scriptures, illustrated by Eastern ally Customs and Manners,' as having occupied his time for many years.
He did not live after to publish it, and after his death the manuscript was supposed to be lost.
Some of his descendants advertised a reward of twenty guineas for it.
When Thomas Harmer published a second edition of his, 'Observations on divers pissages of Scripture,' 2 vols., London, 1776, 8vo, it was found that by the help of Sir Philip Musgrave, a descendant of Chardin, he had recovered the lost manuscript in six small volumes, and had incorporated almost all of them in his work, under the author's name, or signed 'MS. C.,' i.e. manuscript of Chardin.
In his latter years Chardin lived at Turnin.
Sir John died in Chiswick, London in 1713. He was buried in Turnham Green (Chiswick). A funeral monument to Chardin exists in Westminster Abbey, bearing the inscription "Sir John Chardin – nomen sibi fecit eundo" ("he made a name for himself by travelling").
The remains of Chardin's library were sold by James Levy at Tom's coffee-house, St. Martin's Lane, 1712–13.
He had four sons and three daughters. His eldest son, John, was created a baronet 1720 and died unmarried. He had three others, Daniel, Charles and George. He left his large Kempton Manor House and estate, Sunbury on Thames to his nephew Sir Philip Chardin Musgrave.
Modern scholars consider the 1711 edition of "Voyages" (edited by the Orientalist Louis-Mathieu Langlès) to be the standard version. The complete book has never been translated into English; in fact, English-language versions contain less than half of the original material.
Jean Chardin's life story forms the basis of Dirk Van der Cruysse's 1998 book "Chardin le Persan", and of the partly fictionalised 2011 biography, "Le Joaillier d'Ispahan" by Danielle Digne.
George Kennan (February 16, 1845 – May 10, 1924) was an American explorer noted for his travels in the Kamchatka and Caucasus regions of the Russian Empire. He was a cousin twice removed of the American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan; both shared a birthday.
George Kennan was born in Norwalk, Ohio, and was keenly interested in travel from an early age. However, family finances made him begin work at the Cleveland and Toledo Railroad Company telegraph office at 12.
In 1864, he secured employment with the Russian–American Telegraph Company to survey a route for a proposed overland telegraph line through Siberia and across the Bering Strait. Having spent two years in the wilds of Kamchatka, he returned to Ohio via Saint Petersburg and soon became well known by his lectures, articles, and a book about his travels.
Kennan subsequently (1878) obtained a position with the Associated Press based in Washington, D.C., and as a war correspondent travelled throughout his career to many conflict areas of the world. He also contributed articles to magazines, such as "Century Magazine", "Atlantic Monthly", "McClure's Magazine" (a muckraker magazine), "National Geographic" and "The Outlook".
Kennan befriended other émigrés as well, such as Peter Kropotkin and Sergei Kravchinskii. He became the best-known member of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, whose membership included Mark Twain and Julia Ward Howe, and also helped found "Free Russia", the first English-language journal to oppose Tsarist Russia. In 1901, the Russian government responded by banning him from Russia.
Kennan was not completely consumed by Russian matters. As a reporter and war correspondent, he also covered American politics, the Spanish–American War, the assassination of President William McKinley, and the Russo-Japanese War, as well as World War I and the Russian Revolution. He also published a book, "E. H. Harriman's Far Eastern Plans", (1917, The Country Life Press) about Harriman's efforts to secure a lease to the South Manchuria Railway from Japan, as well as "The Chicago and Alton Case: A Misunderstood Transaction", (1916, The Country Life Press), defending Harriman's purchase of the Chicago & Alton Railroad from politically motivated criticism by the ICC and Teddy Roosevelt.
Kennan was vehemently against the October Revolution because he felt the Bolsheviks lacked the "knowledge, experience, or education to deal successfully with the tremendous problems that have come up for solutions since the overthrow of the Tsar." President Woodrow Wilson read and weighed Kennan's report in 1918 criticizing the Bolsheviks, but Kennan eventually criticized Wilson's administration for being too timid in intervening against Bolshevism.
Kennan's last criticism of Bolshevism was written in the "Medina Tribune", a small-town newspaper, in July 1923:
Kennan died at his home in Medina, New York on May 10, 1924, and was buried in Boxwood Cemetery.
Robert Mignan (1803 – 3 June 1852) was a British military officer, explorer, and author. He was fellow of the Linnean Society of London and member of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
Mignan entered the Bombay Army in 1819 and became a lieutenant of the 1st European Regiment on 3 May 1820. In January 1821, he was part of an expeditionary force of 2,695 men under the command of General Lionel Smith sent on a punitive campaign against the Bani Bu Ali tribe in Oman.
In the 1820s, Mignan commanded the escort attached to the resident of the British East India Company. Between 1826 and 1828, Mignan made several archaeological excursions into the little known regions of Iraq, visiting such sites as Ctesiphon and Babylon. He published "Travels in Chaldæa: Including a Journey from Bussorah to Bagdad, Hillah, and Babylon, Performed on Foot in 1827" in 1829.
In 1829 Mignan departed, with his family, from London to return to his military duties in India. Travelling through St. Petersburg, the Russian capital, he joined Prince Khosrow Mirza, Persian envoy extraordinary, returning to Persia after conveying regrets at the murder of the Russian diplomat Alexander Griboedov in Teheran. While in St. Petersburg, Mignan met the Prussian scholar Alexander von Humboldt who convinced him to explore the western coastline of the Caspian Sea. His winter journey on a difficult route via Novocherkassk and through the Caucasus to Tiflis, the capital of Russian Georgia, and further south into northwestern Persia in 1829 and 1830 is described in Mignan's travelogue "A Winter Journey through Russia, the Caucasian Alps, and Georgia", published in London in 1839.
Mignan was promoted to captain on 11 September 1830 and major of the right wing on 15 August 1847. His last commission was brevet lieutenant colonel on 7 June 1849. He died in Poonah in 1852.
Vicken Cheterian (Western ) is a Lebanese-born journalist and author, who teaches international relations at Webster University Geneva. He has also lectured at University of Geneva and SOAS University of London (2012-14). Cheterian is also a columnist for the Istanbul-based weekly "Agos". He holds a PhD from Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IUHEI).
Agathangelos (in Agatʿangełos, in Greek "bearer of good news" or angel, 5th century AD ) is the pseudonym of the author of a life of the first apostle of Armenia, Gregory the Illuminator, who died about 332.
According to Agathangelos, he was tasked by Tiridates III to write about his father Khosrov II of Armenia and his reign period. Until the 19th century, based on this fact, scholars believe that Agathangelos lived in the 4th century. However further detailed research of his writing has demonstrated that Agathangelos lived and worked in the 5th century and was not able to be Tiridates III's secretary.
Kirakos Gandzaketsi (}) (c. 1200/1202–1271) was an Armenian historian of the 13th century and author of the "History of Armenia", a summary of events from the 4th to the 12th century and a detailed description of the events of his own days. The work concentrates primarily on the history of Medieval Armenia and events occurring in the Caucasus and Near East. The work serves as a primary source for the study of the Mongol invasions and even contains the first recorded word list of the Mongolian language. The work has been translated into several languages including Latin, French and Russian.
A ransom was paid to free Vanakan in the summer of that year but Kirakos also managed to escape the same night and returned to the town of Getik.
Following Vanakan's death in 1251, Kirakos assumed his former teacher's duties and became the head of the school in New Getik. In 1255, he was granted an audience with the leader of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, Hetum I, in the town of Vardenis (in Aragatsotn), informing him of missionary work in the region.
He remained in New Getik for several more years; he died in 1271 and was buried there.
Kirakos completed several works in his lifetime; however, his most prominent is that of "History of Armenia" (Պատմություն Հայոց). He began to write the book on May 19, 1241 and completed it in 1265. Divided into two parts, the first part of the "History of the Armenians" begins with the life of Gregory the Illuminator, the patron saint of the Armenian Apostolic Church, and is devoted largely to the history of the Armenian church from the third century to the twelfth century. The second part of "History" focuses on the ramifications and physical damage inflicted against the people of the region by the Turkic and Mongol invasions, including the torture and death of Hasan-Jalal, the prince of Khachen.
Approximately 47 facsimiles of the 65 chapters of "History of Armenia" survived and can be found in numerous repositories located around the world including the Matenadaran in Yerevan, Armenia and museums in Vienna, London, Paris, and St. Petersburg.
Tovma Artsruni (; also known in English-language historiography as Thomas Artsruni; precise birth date and date of death unknown) was a ninth-century to tenth-century Armenian historian and author of the "History of the House of Artsrunik" (). Contrary to the given title, the four-volume work not only relates the history of Artsruni royal family, of which he was a member of, and its origins near Lake Van but also comprehensively covers the history of Armenia.
Tovma began writing "History" sometime in the 870s. Much like other histories composed by Armenian historians, the first volume starts at the beginning of the Armenian nation and ends in the middle of the fifth century. However, Tovma's most valuable contributions are found in the second and third volumes which accurately detail Armenian life under the rule of the Arab Caliphates and in particular the 851 Arab military expedition led by the Turkic general Bugha al-Kabir, its subsequent consequences, and the establishment of the independent Bagratid state north of Lake Van. Tovma was a relative of the king of Vaspurakan Gagik I, and wrote a detailed account in "History" about the famous palace and church Gagik constructed on Akhtamar Island.
The precise date that Tovma completed his work is unknown although some historians have determined that it was composed sometime after 905. Tovma's work ends with an incomplete 29th chapter yet several unknown authors (referred to as "Anonymous"; ) took it upon themselves to continue "History" down to the 1370s and added an appendix and colophon. Tovma's "History" was first published in 1852 in Constantinople in Armenian and was subsequently translated into French by Marie-Félicité Brosset in 1862.
Alec (Alirza) Rasizade () is a retired Azeri-American professor of history and political science, who specialized in Sovietology, primarily known for the typological model (or "algorithm" in his own words), which describes the impact of a drop in oil revenues on the process of decline in rentier states by stages and cycles of their general socio-economic degradation upon the end of an oil boom. He has also authored more than 200 studies on the history of international relations, Perestroika reforms and breakup of the USSR, oil diplomacy and contemporary politics in the post-Soviet states and autonomies of Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus.
Professor Rasizade's academic contribution to Sovietology may be divided into 4 general categories: Caspian oil boom, Russia, Azerbaijan and Central Asia. His ideas and conclusions for each of these major studies are summarized in the following theses:
1) Having an insider knowledge of Caspian oil reserves, Rasizade precisely calculated and predicted in his writings the exact end of the second Baku oil boom of 2005-2014, notwithstanding the geopolitical euphoria of the 1990s in Western capitals based on exaggerated estimates by American academia, Azeri government and Caspian oil consortium.
2) On Russia, he wrote that Putin's Bonapartism was a natural result of the 1990s turmoil, when the society as a whole and the nouveau riches in particular, longed for a strongman who could establish order, stability and legitimacy for the illegally acquired wealth even at the expense of civil rights restriction. Furthermore, Rasizade argues that demise of the USSR was only the first stage in the process of Russian Federation's own breakup or, as he put it bluntly, Russia is doomed to disintegrate as did all multinational empires in history.
3) Azerbaijan, in his view, is a classic Middle Eastern petrostate, which will eventually sink into its legitimate place among the impoverished Muslim nations with the end of oil boom, as is predetermined by its culture, endemic corruption and lack of industrial endowment. He insists that the oil boom was just an aberration on Azerbaijan's natural path from communism into the Third world.
4) As for Central Asia, his main argument has been the futility of US efforts to impose there the democratic values of European civilization, since democracy in Muslim countries inevitably leads to election and entrenchment of Islamofascism. Instead of direct Western intervention in the region, he recommends support for the local despots who are able to maintain peace in the region and order in their countries by brutally effective methods of the same Islam.
Simon Janashia (; July 13, 1900 – November 5, 1947) was a Georgian historian and public figure. He was a professor of history and one of the founding members of the Georgian Academy of Sciences.
Janashia was born in 1900, in Makvaneti in the southwestern Georgian province of Guria. His father, Nikoloz Janashia (1872-1918), was an educator and ethnographer, born in Abkhazia. In 1922, Simon Janashia graduated from the Tbilisi State University. From 1924 to 1947, he served as a lecturer (1924-1930), Associate Professor (1930-1935) and Professor (1935-1947) there. In 1941, he was one of the founders of the Georgian Academy of Sciences (GAS), and from 1941 to 1947, he was Vice-President of the Academy and Director of the Institute of History of the GAS. In 1943, Janashia was elected as a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (now the Russian Academy of Science). In the 1940s, he organized archaeological excavations in Mtskheta and Armazi in eastern Georgia.
Janashia's main fields of his research were the ethnogenesis of the Georgians and other Caucasian peoples, the history of feudalism in Georgia and the Caucasus, the history and archaeology of ancient Georgia, the history of Colchis and Caucasian Iberia, the history of Christianity in Georgia, and source studies of the history of Georgia and the Caucasus. He was an author of more than 100 scholarly works, including about 10 monographs. A full collection of Janashia's works was published in four volumes in Tbilisi between 1949 and 1968. Simon Janashia died in Tbilisi in 1947.
Ivane Javakhishvili (, 11 April 1876 – 18 November 1940) was a Georgian historian and a linguist whose voluminous works heavily influenced the modern scholarship of the history and culture of Georgia. He was also one of the founding fathers of the Tbilisi State University (1918) and its rector from 1919 to 1926.
Javakhishvili authored more than 170 works dealing with various aspects of Georgia's political, cultural, social and economic history. Since the publication of its first edition in 1908, his main work, "A History of the Georgian Nation" (fully published between 1908 and 1949), has remained one of the most comprehensive and eloquent treatments of pre-modern Georgian history. Regrettably, it has not been translated into any other language. Several of Javakhishvili's most influential articles and books including "A History of the Georgian Nation" have been reprinted in his twelve-volume collected works from 1977 and 1998.
A Persianate society is a society that is based on or strongly influenced by the Persian language, culture, literature, art and/or identity.
The term "Persianate" is a neologism credited to Marshall Hodgson. In his 1974 book, "The Venture of Islam: The expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods", he defined it thus: "The rise of Persian had more than purely literary consequences: it served to carry a new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom... Most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims... depended upon Persian wholly or in part for their prime literary inspiration. We may call all these cultural traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, 'Persianate' by extension."
The term designates ethnic Persians but also societies that may not have been ethnically Persian but whose linguistic, material or artistic cultural activities were influenced by or based on Persianate culture. Examples of pre-19th-century Persianate societies were the Seljuq, Timurid, Mughal, and Ottoman dynasties, as well as the Qarmatians who entertained Persianate notions of cyclical time even though they did not invoke the Iranian genealogies in which these precepts had converged. "Persianate" is a multiracial cultural category, but it appears at times to be a religious category of a racial origin.
Persianate culture flourished for nearly fourteen centuries. It was a mixture of Persian and Islamic cultures that eventually underwent Persification and became the dominant culture of the ruling and elite classes of Greater Iran, Asia Minor, and South Asia.
When the peoples of Greater Iran were conquered by Islamic forces in the 7th and 8th centuries, they became part of an empire much larger than any previous one under Persian rule. While the Islamic conquest led to the Arabization of language and culture in the former Byzantine territories, this did not happen in Persia. Rather, the new Islamic culture evolving there was largely based on pre-Islamic Persian traditions of the area, as well as on the Islamic customs that were introduced to the region by the Arab conquerors.
Persianate culture, especially among the elite classes, spread across the Muslim territories in western, central, and south Asia, although populations across this vast region had conflicting allegiances (sectarian, local, tribal, and ethnic) and spoke many different languages. It was spread by poets, artists, architects, artisans, jurists, and scholars, who maintained relations among their peers in the far-flung cities of the Persianate world, from Anatolia to India.
Persianate culture involved modes of consciousness, ethos, and religious practices that have persisted in the Iranian world against hegemonic Arab Muslim (Sunni) cultural constructs. This formed a calcified Persianate structure of thought and experience of the sacred, entrenched for generations, which later informed history, historical memory, and identity among Alid loyalists and heterodox groups labeled by sharia-minded authorities as "ghulāt". In a way, along with investing the notion of heteroglossia, Persianate culture embodies the Iranian past and ways in which this past blended with the Islamic present or became transmuted. The historical change was largely on the basis of a binary model: a struggle between the religious landscapes of late Iranian antiquity and a monotheist paradigm provided by the new religion, Islam.
This duality is symbolically expressed in the Shiite tradition that Husayn ibn Ali, the third Shi'ite Imam, had married Shahrbanu, daughter of Yazdegerd III, the last Sassanid king of Iran. This genealogy makes the later imams, descended from Husayn and Shahrbanu, the inheritors of both the Islamic Prophet Muhammad and of the pre-Islamic Sassanid kings.
After the Arab Muslim conquest of Iran, Pahlavi, the language of Pre-Islamic Iran, continued to be widely used well into the second Islamic century (8th century) as a medium of administration in the eastern lands of the Caliphate. Despite the Islamization of public affairs, the Iranians retained much of their pre-Islamic outlook and way of life, adjusted to fit the demands of Islam. Towards the end of the 7th century, the population began resenting the cost of sustaining the Arab caliphs, the Umayyads, and in the 8th century, a general Iranian uprising—led by Abu Muslim Khorrasani—brought another Arab family, the Abbasids, to the Caliph's throne.
Under the Abbasids, the capital shifted from Syria to Iraq, which had once been part of the Sassanid Empire and was still considered to be part of the Iranian cultural domain. Persian culture, and the customs of the Persian Barmakid viziers, became the style of the ruling elite. Politically, the Abbasids soon started losing their control over Iranians. The governors of Khurasan, the Tahirids, though appointed by the caliph, were effectively independent. When the Persian Saffarids from Sistan freed the eastern lands, the Buyyids, the Ziyarids and the Samanids in Western Iran, Mazandaran and the north-east respectively, declared their independence.
The separation of the eastern territories from Baghdad was expressed in a distinctive Persianate culture that became dominant in west, central, and south Asia, and was the source of innovations elsewhere in the Islamic world. The Persianate culture was marked by the use of the New Persian language as a medium of administration and intellectual discourse, by the rise of Persianised-Turks to military control, by the new political importance of non-Arab ulama and by the development of an ethnically composite Islamic society.
Pahlavi was the "lingua franca" of the Sassanian Empire before the Arab invasion, but towards the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 8th century Arabic became a medium of literary expression. In the 9th century, a New Persian language emerged as the idiom of administration and literature. The Tahirid and Saffarid dynasties continued using Persian as an informal language, although for them Arabic was the "language for recording anything worthwhile, from poetry to science", but the Samanids made Persian a language of learning and formal discourse. The language that appeared in the 9th and 10th centuries was a new form of Persian, derivative of the Middle-Persian of pre-Islamic times, but enriched amply by Arabic vocabulary and written in the Arabic script.
The Persian language, according to Marshall Hodgson in his "The Venture of Islam", was to form the chief model for the rise of still other languages to the literary level. Like Turkish, most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims depended upon Persian (Urdu being a prime example). One may call these traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, ‘Persianate’ by extension. This seems to be the origin of the term "Persianate".
The Iranian dynasty of the Samanids began recording its court affairs in Persian as well as Arabic, and the earliest great poetry in New Persian was written for the Samanid court. The Samanids encouraged translation of religious works from Arabic into Persian. In addition, the learned authorities of Islam, the "ulama", began using the Persian "lingua franca" in public. The crowning literary achievement in the early New Persian language was the "Shahnameh" (Book of Kings), presented by its author Ferdowsi to the court of Mahmud of Ghazni (998–1030). This was a kind of Iranian nationalistic resurrection: Ferdowsi galvanized Persian nationalistic sentiment by invoking pre-Islamic Persian heroic imagery and enshrined in literary form the most treasured folk stories.
Ferdowsi's "Shahnameh" enjoyed a special status in Iranian courtly culture as a historical narrative as well as a mythical one. The powerful effect that this text came to have on the poets of this period is partly due to the value that was attached to it as a legitimizing force, especially for new rulers in the Eastern Islamic world:
The Persianate culture that emerged under the Samanids in Greater Khorasan, in northeast Persia and the borderlands of Turkistan exposed the Turks to Persianate culture; The incorporation of the Turks into the main body of the Middle Eastern Islamic civilization, which was followed by the Ghaznavids, thus began in Khorasan; "not only did the inhabitants of Khurasan not succumb to the language of the nomadic invaders, but they imposed their own tongue on them. The region could even assimilate the Turkic Ghaznavids and Seljuks (11th and 12th centuries), the Timurids (14th and 15th centuries), and the Qajars (19th and 20th centuries).
The Ghaznavids, the rivals and future successors of the Samanids, ruled over the southeastern extremities of Samanid territories from the city of Ghazni. Persian scholars and artists flocked to their court, and the Ghaznavids became patrons of Persianate culture. The Ghaznavids took with them Persianate culture as they subjugated Western and Southern Asia . Apart from Ferdowsi, Rumi, Abu Ali Sina, Al-Biruni, Unsuri Balkhi, Farrukhi Sistani, Sanayi Ghaznawi and Abu Sahl Testari were among the great Iranian scientists and poets of the period under Ghaznavid patronage.
Persianate culture was carried by successive dynasties into Western and Southern Asia, particularly by the Persianized Seljuqs (1040–1118) and their successor states, who presided over Iran, Syria, and Anatolia until the 13th century, and by the Ghaznavids, who in the same period dominated Greater Khorasan and parts of India. These two dynasties together drew the centers of the Islamic world eastward. The institutions stabilized Islamic society into a form that would persist, at least in Western Asia, until the 20th century.
The Ghaznavids moved their capital from Ghazni to Lahore in modern Pakistan, which they turned into another center of Islamic culture. Under their patronage, poets and scholars from Kashgar, Bukhara, Samarkand, Baghdad, Nishapur, Amol and Ghazni congregated in Lahore. Thus, the Persian language and Persianate culture was brought deep into India and carried further in the 13th century. The Seljuqs won a decisive victory over the Ghaznavids and swept into Khorasan; they brought Persianate culture westward into western Persia, Iraq, Anatolia, and Syria. Iran proper along with Central Asia became the heartland of Persian language and culture.
As the Seljuqs came to dominate western Asia, their courts were Persianized as far west as the Mediterranean Sea. Under their rule, many pre-Islamic Iranian traditional arts like Sassanid architecture were resurrected, and great Iranian scholars were patronized. At the same time, the Islamic religious institutions became more organized and Sunni orthodoxy became more codified.
Shahnameh's impact and affirmation of Persianate culture.
As the result of the impacts of Persian literature as well as to further political ambitions, it became a custom for rulers in the Persianate lands to not only commission a copy of the "Shahnameh", but also to have his own epic, allowing court poets to attempt to reach the level of Ferdowsi:
Iranian and Persianate poets received the "Shahnameh" and modeled themselves after it. Murtazavi formulates three categories of such works too: poets who took up material not covered in the epic, poets who eulogized their patrons and their ancestors in "masnavi" form for monetary reward, and poets who wrote poems for rulers who saw themselves as heroes in the "Shahnameh", echoing the earlier Samanid trend of patronizing the Shahnameh for legitimizing texts.
First, Persian poets attempted to continue the chronology to a later period, such as the "Zafarnamah" of the Ilkhanid historian Hamdollah Mostowfi (d. 1334 or 1335), which deals with Iranian history from the Arab conquest to the Mongols and is longer than Ferdowsi's work. The literary value of these works must be considered on an individual basis as Rypka cautions: "all these numerous epics cannot be assessed very highly, to say nothing of those works that were substantially (or literally) copies of Ferdowsi. There are however exceptions, such as the "Zafar-Nameh" of Hamdu'llah Mustaufi a historically valuable continuation of the Shah-nama" and the "Shahanshahnamah" (or "Changiznamah") of Ahmad Tabrizi in 1337–38, which is a history of the Mongols written for Abu Sa'id.
Second, poets versified the history of a contemporary ruler for reward, such as the "Ghazannameh" written in 1361–62 by Nur al-Din ibn Shams al-Din. Third, heroes not treated in the "Shahnameh" and those having minor roles in it became the subjects of their own epics, such as the 11th-century "Garshāspnāmeh" by Asadi Tusi. This tradition, chiefly a Timurid one, resulted in the creation of Islamic epics of conquests as discussed by Marjan Molé. Also see the classification employed by Z. Safa for epics: "milli" (national, those inspired by Ferdowsi's epic), "tarikhi" (historical, those written in imitation of Nizami's Iskandarnamah) and "dini" for religious works. The other source of inspiration for Persianate culture was another Persian poet, Nizami, a most admired, illustrated and imitated writer of romantic "masnavis".
Along with Ferdowsi's and Nizami's works, Amir Khusraw Dehlavi's "khamseh" came to enjoy tremendous prestige, and multiple copies of it were produced at Persianized courts. Seyller has a useful catalog of all known copies of this text.
In the 16th century, Persianate culture became sharply distinct from the Arab world to the west, the dividing zone falling along the Euphrates. Socially the Persianate world was marked by a system of ethnologically defined elite statuses: the rulers and their soldiery were non-Iranians in origin, but the administrative cadres and literati were Iranians. Cultural affairs were marked by a characteristic pattern of language use: New Persian was the language of state affairs, scholarship and literature and Arabic the language of religion.
Safavids and the resurrection of Iranianhood in West Asia.
The Safavid dynasty ascended to predominance in Iran in the 16th century—the first native Iranian dynasty since the Buyyids. The Safavids, who were of mixed Kurdish, Turkic, Georgian, Circassian and Pontic Greek ancestry, moved to the Ardabil region in the 11th century. They re-asserted the Persian identity over many parts of West Asia and Central Asia, establishing an independent Persian state, and patronizing Persian culture They made Iran the spiritual bastion of Shi’ism against the onslaughts of orthodox Sunni Islam, and a repository of Persian cultural traditions and self-awareness of Persian identity.
The founder of the dynasty, Shah Isma'il, adopted the title of Persian Emperor "Pādišah-ī Īrān", with its implicit notion of an Iranian state stretching from Afghanistan as far as the Euphrates and the North Caucasus, and from the Oxus to the southern territories of the Persian Gulf. Shah Isma'il's successors went further and adopted the title of "Shāhanshāh" (king of kings). The Safavid kings considered themselves, like their predecessors the Sassanid Emperors, the "khudāygān" (the shadow of God on earth). They revived Sassanid architecture, build grand mosques and elegant "charbagh" gardens, collected books (one Safavid ruler had a library of 3,000 volumes), and patronized "Men of the Pen" The Safavids introduced Shiism into Persia to distinguish Persian society from the Ottomans, their Sunni archrivals to the west.
At the beginning of the 14th century, the Ottomans rose to predominance in Asia Minor. The Ottomans patronized Persian literature for five and a half centuries and attracted great numbers of writers and artists, especially in the 16th century. One of the most renowned Persian poets in the Ottoman court was Fethullah Arifi Çelebi, also a painter and historian, and the author of the "Süleymanname" (or "Suleyman-nama"), a biography of Süleyman the Magnificent. At the end of the 17th century, they gave up Persian as the court and administrative language, using Turkish instead; a decision that shocked the highly Persianized Mughals in India. The Ottoman Sultan Suleyman wrote an entire divan in Persian language. According to Hodgson:
Toynbee's assessment of the role of the Persian language is worth quoting in more detail, from "A Study of History":
E. J. W. Gibb is the author of the standard "A Literary History of Ottoman Poetry" in six volumes, whose name has lived on in an important series of publications of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish texts, the Gibb Memorial Series. Gibb classifies Ottoman poetry between the "Old School", from the 14th century to about the middle of the 19th century, during which time Persian influence was dominant; and the "Modern School", which came into being as a result of the Western impact. According to Gibb in the introduction (Volume I):
The Saljuqs had, in the words of the same author:
The Mughals, who were of Turco-Mongol descent, strengthened the Indo-Persian culture, in South Asia. For centuries, Iranian scholar-officials had immigrated to the region where their expertise in Persianate culture and administration secured them honored service within the Mughal Empire. Networks of learned masters and madrasas taught generations of young South Asian men Persian language and literature in addition to Islamic values and sciences. Furthermore, educational institutions such as Farangi Mahall and Delhi College developed innovative and integrated curricula for modernizing Persian-speaking South Asians. They cultivated Persian art, enticing to their courts artists and architects from Bukhara, Tabriz, Herat, Shiraz, and other cities of Greater Iran. The Taj Mahal and its Charbagh were commissioned by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his Iranian bride.
The tendency towards Sufi mysticism through Persianate culture in Mughal court circles is also testified by the inventory of books that were kept in Akbar's library, and are especially mentioned by his historian, Abu'l Fazl, in the "Ā’in-ī Akbarī". Some of the books that were read out continually to the emperor include the "masnavis" of Nizami, the works of Amir Khusrow, Sharaf Manayri and Jami, the "Masnavi i-manavi" of Rumi, the "Jām-i Jam" of Awhadi Maraghai, the "Hakika o Sanā’i", the "Qabusnameh" of Keikavus, Sa’di's "Gulestān" and "Būstān", and the "diwans" of Khaqani and Anvari.
This intellectual symmetry continued until the end of the 19th century, when a Persian newspaper, "Miftah al-Zafar" (1897), campaigned for the formation of Anjuman-i Ma’arif, an academy devoted to the strengthening of Persian language as a scientific language.
Almost every Persian artwork was accompanied by texts. In the late 14th and 15th centuries, political control in Iran passed to the Timurids, who moved the capital from Tabriz in the west to Samarkand and Herat in the east. In the first half of the 15th century, Iranian artists working for the Timurid sultans developed the highly detailed, jewel-like style of painting that signifies Persian painting, which became known as the "Persian School of Herat".
When the Safavids came to power in 1501 and unified the eastern and western parts of Iran, the eastern and western Persian painting styles were mingled. The political unity under the first two Safavid rulers Ismail I and Tahmasp I, and the establishment of the Safavid capital at Tabriz in the west, led Persian artists to leave Herat. One of the most celebrated Iranian painters, Behzad, known as "the master of Persian painting", influenced many other Persian painters, including Reza Abbasi and Sultan Muhammad. He eventually painted perhaps the most extraordinary example of Persian painting "The Court of the Gayumars" from an opulent edition of the Shahnameh, commissioned by Shah Tahmasp c. 1522–1525. The painting depicts the legendary court of Gayumars, the first shah in the epic.
In Anatolia, a flourishing school of painting developed at the courts of Turkic rulers in the second half of the 15th century. The style of Ottoman miniature illustrations was derived from the Persian models, especially the painting of Shiraz. The long reign of the Ottoman sultan Suleyman enabled his successor Selim (r. 1566–1574) to enjoy the pleasures of the palace without much concern for military conquests. A painting of Sultan Selim II in the exhibition depicts him partaking in one of his favorite pastimes, drinking, which earned him the nickname "Selim the Sot".
By the mid-16th century, some Iranian artists from the Safavid Persian court had immigrated to Istanbul. Others had made their way to India in the retinue of the Mughal emperor Humayun, who returned to India in 1555 from exile in Iran. It was at the court of Humayun's son and successor Akbar (r. 1556–1605), however, that the Mughal style of painting came into its own.
The most important early project in this new style was the 14-volume "Hamzanama" produced by a team of Indian artists, both Muslim and Hindu, working under the supervision of Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad, two Persian émigré artists. Akbari paintings incorporated the precise, linear style of Persian painting with the dynamism and vibrant palette of indigenous Indian painting. With the introduction of European-style perspective and modelling, Mughal painting became increasingly naturalistic from the 1580s until the mid-17th century, but the core of both Ottoman and Mughal painting remained Persian.
The term "nowruz" first appeared in Persian records in the 2nd century CE, but it was also an important day during Achaemenid times (c. 550–330 BCE), on which kings from different nations under Persian rule would present gifts to the emperor ("Shahanshah") of Persia[5]. It has been suggested that the famous Persepolis complex, or at least the palace of Apadana and the "Hundred Columns Hall", were built for the specific purpose of celebrating Nowruz. However, no mention of Nowruz exists in Achaemenid inscriptions (see picture). Later it became the national holiday of the Parthian Empire, which ruled Iran (c. 247 BCE – 224 CE). There are specific references to the celebration of Nowruz during the reign of Vologases I (51–78 CE), but these include no details.
Extensive records on the celebration of Nowruz appear following the accession of Ardashir I of Persia, the founder of the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE). Under the Sassanid kings, Nowruz was celebrated as the most important day of the year. Most royal traditions of Nowruz, such as audiences with the public, cash gifts, and the pardoning of prisoners, were established during the Sassanid era, and they persisted unchanged until modern times.

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