Seminar on May 27 in Oxford: History of Techniques in Ancient Iran - Case of Textiles and Cosmetics (original) (raw)
Related papers
2015
The object of this study consists of two textile fragments, which are in a private collection and have a main decoration of pearl roundels containing respectively one single or two composite creatures with a dog’s head, wings and a peacock’s tail. Both fabrics are radio-carbon dated, respectively to the 9th-10th century and to the beginning of the 8th - end of the 9th century. M. Comparetti elaborates on the iconography of the composite winged creature, which is often referred to as simurgh ...
Nazila Daryaie, PhD in Art Research, Iran Encyclopedia Foundation, Tehran, Iran
International Seminar on Tribal Art of India , 1998
What is the meaning of art in relation with the popular culture explanation? It will be a language for representing cultural, historical and native heritage of nations. In fact the concepts of words in here have a vast definition and great values in itself. Heritage, culture, arts, popular culture is regarded as the main columns for each society and civilization. For producing different artistic works various infrastructural materials are available. Wool, silk, cotton is among those which have been shaped weaving in textile and rugs. In this article the researcher wants to show how an artistic works-here Iranian rugs as a whole-create relations with native knowledge of the people. Three kinds of hand woven rugs consist of urban, rural and tribal are existed in gazetteer of rug weaving in Iran. The third specially establish a unique attraction between rug researchers, rug traders and the people in all. At times we will find stories, tales, myths, believes, meanings, religious subjects in rugs, no matter belong to each trinal groups or the place of producing. Also design and color has the ability to convey meaning and tales directly. It is worth mentioned to say about literal traditions, literal poems, customs, native dances and native foods, traditional ceremonies, the way of life of the people which depict themselves in rug weaving or rug festivals. Weaving carpets most of the time is classifying under traditional arts. In these arts chest by chest method of teaching has a basic role for immortality of the art. To study and finding such these titles or regaining and retrieval the tales supposed to be gathering native knowledge, Parts of tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Maybe by writing about it the diversity of culture of human society will be shown and cultural features will be saved for the future. Washing rug ceremony in Ardehal of Kashan shows a kind of intangible cultural heritage by religious mores. Here the rug has only symbolic meaning for wrapping death body of scared person who was killed there. Two kinds of traditional dances and native music in Khorasan Provinces especially show the creation process in agriculture and carpet weaving. The particular name of it is "Afar". In second, Afar of rug weaving, different steps of carpet weaving will be shown. By another example of carpet design the native knowledge of the people of Markazi province were kept. This pattern saves the memory of making dike between two villages. Finding these historical and native tails and showing them to the people put emphasize on the importance of artistic cultural works. In this article the method of study founded on library information and field surveying. For gathering this information the weaving places were visited directly and will be shown by photos and film. The data classified according descriptive style. The samples depicted on no limitation of weaving or the time of weaving.
The Tenth Century Iranian Wares
The ceramic production has always been a matter of knowledge, technique and aesthetics in which one of the most long lasting material culture of humanity. The ceramics reflect color, taste, preferences and relations. They can not be examined without understanding their context. In this paper, I try to reach a wider perspective that includes the roots of the tenth century Iranian wares, mainly the Iraqi wares and the Chinese stylistic influences. It was a hard process to classify the material which I collected because of the problematic nature of classification in which has its own benefits and disadvantages. First of all, we do not know about the original terms and meanings in which the producers used in their context. How can we classify the repeated use of a peacock-like bird figure in various media of pottery? Should we categorize each and every style with strict borders? Thus, after this point, I used the categories in order to made easier to explain what I meant. However, one should avoid to establish a perspective, purely attached to these categories. With this understanding, I covered three groups of ceramics: luster-like, Samanid epigraphic and Nishapur figural.
Pre-Islamic religious motifs (550 BC to 651 AD) on Iranian minor art with focus on rug motifs
HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies
This review research focuses on the influence of religion on pre-Islamic carpet designs, which were prevalent during the beginning of the Achaemenid period (550 BC) through to the end of the Sassanid period (651 AD). The main intention of rug production at that time was to provide comfort, show wealth (status) and, as considered in this article, demonstrate its position in cultural standing (burial ceremonies). In this study, rug design motifs of the periods mentioned above are reviewed together with other handicraft forms to determine the type of rug motifs and symbols employed to decorate rugs with their spiritual meaning in the overall design (geometric designs). Research background The tendency to create art as a form of cultural production is one of the inherent traits of human beings, as can be seen in the extant artworks from ancient times to the present. In Iran, artworks reflect cultural, traditional and religious beliefs. The quality of the Persian rugs and their motifs This article reviewed the influence of pre-Islamic religions such as Mithraism and Zoroastrianism on decorative elements of ancient Persian rugs. The article then evaluated the effect of the Islamic religion on Persian rugs. This was examined through extant evidence from pre-Islamic empire artefacts and publications in Persian carpet history, iconography and religious studies. Using spiritual motifs on some ancient rugs results from the important position of rugs in ancient Iranians' lives. Believing the existence of religious motifs on Persian carpets is because the first carpet in history (Pazyryk) was attributed to the ancient Achaemenians, decorated with symbolic motifs from Mithraism and Zoroastrianism. Pazyryk shows how rug-weaving evolved during the Achaemenids, and it represented spiritual foundations through visual concepts. This article reviewed the symbolic Persian rug motifs from ancient religions through Pazyryk, with support from museum collections. With the emergence of religions, these effects are seen in all aspects of life, including the production of rug design. Contribution: The main contribution of this research was that it investigated the effects of religion on Persian art focusing on the Persian rug. The findings showed that religion had directly influenced the decorative motifs of the Persian rug among high-class families that might have cascaded into visual elements found on commoners' rugs.
Although at first sight book painting seems to be something of a Cinderella among Saljftq art forms, the evidence of the finest pottery of the period suggests quite the opposite. The close relationship between these very disparate media has long been recognised, though the details of that relationship have not been explored in depth. Yet a major theme of this symposium has been the frequent migration of themes from one medium to another in the Saljftq period. Textiles, metalwork and architecture have all been mentioned in this connection.I The central role of the arts of the book in this process seems to be generally acceptable, but the koine created by painters and designers can be most fully traced not directly in their own but indirectly in another medium-luxury ceramics. It is primarily this pottery that allows conclusions to be drawn not only as to the subject matter of the largely vanished school of Saljftq book painting, but also as to its stylistic quirks, its cliches-such as filler motifs-and possibly also its favoured compositions. Since books are so much more vulnerable than pottery to the malice or negligence of men, the ceramic record constitutes a vast reservoir of otherwise lost information about the characteristics of contemporary book painting. This may seem a large claim to make, and it must be substantiated before the argument proceeds any further. In Islamic art generally, ceramic decoration and book painting do not show much overlap in style and even their subject-matter is not very closely related. The principal exception that comes to mind, apart from the present case, is the close parallel between the script on Samanid epigraphic pottery and that on contemporary eastern Iranian Our'ans. 2 But this case remained an isolated one until the late Saljftq period and subsequent centuries produced no further examples of such striking correspondence. Nor is the basic incompatibility of style and subject matter the only reason why close connections between pottery and book paintings are intrinsically unlikely. At the most basic level, the labour 134 involved in painting a piece of pottery is in no way comparable to that involved in preparing an illustrated book. The element of mass production which bulks large in painted ceramics is generally absent in book painting. The huge difference in time and therefore price which naturally results reduces the likelihood that the two arts were supported by the same patrons. Luxury ceramics could scarcely compete in status with the illustrated book. Moreover, the disadvantages which the ceramic painter faced in trying to emulate book painting were legion. His conditions of work were less privileged than those enjoyed by a painter securely ensconced in a royal kitiibkhiina. The texture of the surface on which he painted was substantially less smooth than paper. A coating of glaze would not be enough entirely to eradicate this· unevenness. Such a surface clearly discouraged precise draughtsmanship. Available evidence suggests that pottery was sold by the piece and not the set,3 which-the Freer beaker notwithstanding4-discouraged the painter from planning an extensive iconographic cycle with each image deriving an added charge from those which came before. He was committed to producing a single self-contained image per piece. Besides, and most significantly of all, he was forced to operate within the daunting physical constraints imposed by the very shape of the ceramic pieces he was painting. Convex ewers, shallow concave dishes, deep bowls-these were forms intrinsically ill-attuned to the skills of the book painter, and they posed teasing problems of composition and emphasis. Thus while the picture space offered by a leaf from a codex, or a portion of such a leaf, might actually be smaller in surface area, it would be much more straightforward to paint. These are, when weighed together, substantial reasons for doubting the existence of very close links between Saljftq luxury wares and book painting. But the notable rapport between the illustrations of, say, the Varqa va Gu/ shiih manuscript 5 and Saljftq luxury wares is surely sufficient to dispel these doubts (pls. 130 and 131). The resemblances embrace the lavish use of cursive script, the figural types employed, the use of the strip cartoon format, the use of either a plain background6 or of one that is dense and busy with curling scrolls, 7 and finally the courtly flavour which permeates pot and book alike. Significantly enough, these resemblances apply principally to lustre and minii'i wares; hence the much more abundant everyday pottery of the period is not very relevant to the present enquiry. Though this luxury ware was expensive, the sheer quantity to survive is substantially more (given the vastly greater quantity that must have disappeared) than court patronage alone could have produced. Perhaps, indeed, lustre and minii'i wares served as the poor man's illustrated book. Centuries before, Samanid epigraphic pottery (which survives in comparable abundance) had shown in its script, applied ornament and chromatic range that in Iran the arts of the book could usefully serve as a source for fine pottery (pls. 132 and 133). It may even be that in both cases the connection was deliberately emphasised, so that the pottery might acquire some of the prestige of the codex. The presence of lengthy inscriptions on the pottery could only accentuate this connection. One may conclude that, in Samanid epigraphic ware and Saljftq lustre alike, the humbler medium was not simply expanding its range but making available more widely and more cheaply a type of art distinguished by an exclusiveness and costliness which confined it to court patronage. Saljftq lustreware could, in short, be regarded as an exercise in haute vulgarisation. The discussion so far has admittedly rested on some rather cavalier assumptions about the close dependence of Saljftq luxury wares on the arts of the book, or perhaps rather on painters and designers who worked on paper. It is now time to demonstrate in detail the grounds for these assumptions, and the rest of the paper will be devoted to this. En passant, it may be noted that the features to be discussed, though they may be hackneyed in book 135
Haft Qalam Arayish: cosmetics in the Iranian world
Iranian Studies, 2000
Page 1. Iranian Studies, volume 33, numbers 3-4 Summer/Fall 2000 Fatema Soudavar Farmanfarmaian Haft Qalam Arayish: Cosmetics in the Iranian World INTRODUCTION THE HISTORY OF COSMETICS IN THE IRANIAN ...
Comparative study of Graphic aspects of textiles in Indian Gurakani and Iranian Safavid eras
Bulletin de la Société Royale des Sciences de Liège, 2016
The extensive support for the textile production industry and art from kings of 2 simultaneous Safavids and Gurkani Dynasties in Iran and India helped its promotion. In these periods, valuable textiles which played a significant role in expressing the individuals’ social dignity were provided with valuable fibers, rare colors and particular designs. The main goal of this research is to comparatively analyze the Iranian textiles designs in Safavids and Indian ones in Gurkani dynasties during 9-11th centuries (AH) so that it can find the similarities and differences in term of designs and color of the textiles in these 2 countries and the level and reason for their effectiveness. This research focused on designed courtier textiles whose images and samples remained and are available. Investigation into the political-cultural relationship between these 2 dynasties, techniques, the materials and instruments used in textiles, itineraries and historical and research books and designs analy...