Introduction: Channels of Transmission: Family and Professional Lineages in the Early Modern Middle East, (original) (raw)

Introduction Family history has become one of the most stimulating fields in Middle Eastern studies during the last two decades. Since 2015, the French-German research project Dynamics of Transmission: Families, Authority and Knowledge in the Early Modern Middle East, 15th-17th centuries (DYNTRAN) has attempted to contribute to and further this recent tradition. By initiating an interdisciplinary dialogue between historical and textual studies with art history, and by setting out to bridge the gaps between Mamluk, Ottoman, Persian, and Central Asian area studies, the project seeks to identify dynamics of family and family-like transmission networks and patterns on the macro-scale of the Muslim Middle-East during the late mediaeval and the beginning of the early modern period. The DYNTRAN project is a collaboration of the Centrum für Nah-und Mittelost-Studien of the Philipps-Universität Marburg and the Research Laboratory UMR 7528 Mondes iranien et indien of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), with the partnership of the Institut français d'archéologie orientale (IFAO) in Cairo. It is jointly funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, WE/2587-01) and Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR, FRAL-14-0009-01). This special issue of Eurasian Studies gathers a selection of DYNTRAN midterm results, proceeding from a series of workshops held at the University