After my previous blog, in which I gave my reading and some thoughts about an Iranian tombstone dated 1101 and kept in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I want to go on down this path and consider another tombstone, kept in the same museum (accession number M.73.7.1).
Category: reading inscription
XII century Iranian tombstones – reading what museums don’t read
Do I have to say again that I like tombstones? I think it’s quite clear… In these days, following the post about signatures on Iranian tombstones from XII century, I started to search similar material in museums and auction houses just to have an overall view on the subject. Well…I must admit that some of…
Signatures on gravestones: two XII century Iranian tombstones
Tombstones are full of surprises, and information: not only on the poor passed away, but also on the iconography, the use of Qur’anic citation, place and time, people, craftsmanship, patronage, religion, public and private sphere…in short: from a tombstone, if you are careful, you can get a whole context. Let’s take this one for instance
Reusing tombstones: a Fatimid-Ayyubid funerary stele from Metropolitan Museum
Even if Halloween is in two weeks, I love tombstones. This one I find particularly intriguing: it is strange to think that a tombstone can be reused, but that what’s happened in Ayyubid period. The tombstone is kept at the Metropolitan Museum, New York (acc. num. 2010.225) and contains some valuable information over the periods…
Friday Mosque of Isfahan: interpreting the function of the North Dome according to its inscriptions
The North Dome of the Friday Mosque of Isfahan is an architectural masterpiece. Built under the patronage the Saljuq courtier Taj al-Mulk, antagonist of the wazir Nizam al-Mulk, in 481/1088-1089, during the reign of Malik Shah. The dome includes a variety of inscriptions, but here I want to concentrate on the choice of some names of God…
When calligraphy becomes architecture: Q 2:137 and fashion
Calligraphy has been thoroughly used in Islamic art and architecture with decorative purposes. The Qur’an, the Word of God has been used for decorative purposes, but not only. Erika Dodd, in her “The Image of the Word” underlines how the Qur’anic text in mosque decoration was actually used with iconographic purposes, that are both related…
The Nilometer and the deliberate choice of Qur’anic texts
The Nilometer proves to be important in two ways: on the one hand it is technologically interesting, being an instrument built for the measurements of the Nile. On the epigraphic point of view, it is one of the rare monuments about which we have an historical account clearly stating how the Qur’anic inscriptions in it…
The Dome of the Rock – reading its iconographic project
The Dome of the Rock was built in 72 a.h. (691-2 A.D.) and, besides being the most ancient Islamic building survived till our days, it is, most probably, the first monument to have been built by the new rulers of the Near East. Its building followed a highly uneasy period: during the ten years that…
The importance of being Qur’anic
Why is it important to read and study Qur’anic inscriptions on monuments? And what are the problems and the futher developments of this field of research?
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