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These essays are the revised and updated version of four lectures given in the Yarshater Lecture Series, at SOAS in London in 2013. They concern some aspects of the arts from pre-modern Iran and India, namely, the “making of” of Persian illustrated manuscripts, the iconography of Kashan wares, the use and re-use of luster tiles in Ilkhanid Iran, and the glazed tiles made in three Indian sultanates (Delhi, Bengal and Malwa). These four topics share concepts of influence and impact, although inflected on different modes. The productions they embody represent many poles of influence, even if working on different scales, from the extensive diffusion of products, techniques, and systems to almost isolated productions.
The stone monuments of Mongolia’s Altai Mountains trace the web of ancient cultures across that remote land. This study breaks new ground by seeking their cultural significance from within their physical locations and viewsheds.
It is the first study to join the mute stone monuments to the vivid petroglyphic rock art of that region. In that and in the examination of a monument’s individualizing details, I seek to recover the impulse of original intention, the way in which monument and location fix cultural memory, and the way in which memory finally gives way to the cultural development of myth.
This book solves the long-standing mystery of a Christian monastery near Samarkand, seen and described by two Arab travellers in the tenth century. Despite several attempts made since the 1890s, its precise location had never been established. The first part covers the quest, the find, and the archaeological excavations’ results. Then the author proceeds to search for a mediaeval Christian enclave near modern Tashkent, which appears to have been washed away by a river that changed its course over centuries.
Apart from the Christians, the book also touches upon the Manichaeans, Buddhists, Zoroastrians and other Sogdians, their languages, faiths, and material remnants.
Practices and Rituals, Visual and Material Transfer
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The ERC-funded research project BuddhistRoad aims to create a new framework to enable understanding of the complexities in the dynamics of cultural encounter and religious transfer in pre-modern Eastern Central Asia. Buddhism was one major factor in this exchange: for the first time the multi-layered relationships between the trans-regional Buddhist traditions (Chinese, Indian, Tibetan) and those based on local Buddhist cultures (Khotanese, Uyghur, Tangut) will be explored in a systematic way. The second volume Buddhism in Central Asia II—Practice and Rituals, Visual and Materials Transfer based on the mid-project conference held on September 16th–18th, 2019, at CERES, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany) focuses on two of the six thematic topics addressed by the project, namely on "practices and rituals", exploring material culture in religious context such as mandalas and talismans, as well as “visual and material transfer”, including shared iconographies and the spread of ‘Khotanese’ themes.
Mirzā ʿAli-Qoli Khoʾi is the unsurpassed master of the art of illustration in Persian lithographed books of the Qajar period, both in terms of quality and quantity of production. In the decade of documented activity, 1263–72/1846–55, the artist produced more than 2,300 single images in about 70 books, plus hundreds of minutely executed small images on the margins of several books and numerous illuminated chapter headings. Prepared by Ulrich Marzolph together with Roxana Zenhari, the present publication is a comprehensive assessment of the artist’s work and the first ever detailed discussion of an Iranian artist of the Qajar period. In addition, the book also serves as an introduction to Persian and Islamic art.
In An Archaeological, Sociological and Historical Study, volume 2 of The Oasis of Bukhara, Rocco Rante, Florian Schwarz and Luigi Tronca engage in a strong, pluridisciplinary collaboration and use an innovative approach to offer a new contribution to the history of the oasis of Bukhara from the end of the last millennium BCE to the end of the medieval era.
Referencing archaeological, historical and sociological data, the book revisits the history of this Central Asian region, giving the specialist and general reader a detailed description of the political and socio-economical features that characterized the oasis during this long chronological span.

The volume is co-published by Brill, Leiden, and the Louvre Museum, Paris.
Mirzā ʿAli-Qoli Khoʾi is the unsurpassed master of the art of illustration in Persian lithographed books of the Qajar period, both in terms of quality and quantity of production. In the decade of documented activity, 1263–72/1846–55, the artist produced more than 2,300 single images in about 70 books, plus hundreds of minutely executed small images on the margins of several books and numerous illuminated chapter headings. Prepared by Ulrich Marzolph together with Roxana Zenhari, the present publication is a comprehensive assessment of the artist’s work and the first ever detailed discussion of an Iranian artist of the Qajar period. In addition, the book also serves as an introduction to Persian and Islamic art.
Mirzā ʿAli-Qoli Khoʾi is the unsurpassed master of the art of illustration in Persian lithographed books of the Qajar period, both in terms of quality and quantity of production. In the decade of documented activity, 1263–72/1846–55, the artist produced more than 2,300 single images in about 70 books, plus hundreds of minutely executed small images on the margins of several books and numerous illuminated chapter headings. Prepared by Ulrich Marzolph together with Roxana Zenhari, the present publication is a comprehensive assessment of the artist’s work and the first ever detailed discussion of an Iranian artist of the Qajar period. In addition, the book also serves as an introduction to Persian and Islamic art.
This book is the first full text and translation of a prosimetric tale from the rich repertoire of Central and West Asian bards to be published with ready access to recordings of both the prose narration and the sung verse. In Iranian Khorasan, bards known as bakhshi present tales that in other regions are performed wholly in a Turkic language with prose narration in Persian, Khorasani Turkish or Kurmanji Kurdish and most verses in Turkish. We compare portions of the full performance transcribed here with excerpts from two performances of Iranian bakhshis in the 1970s. Three introductory chapters and a commentary discuss musical and verbal dimensions of the bakhshi’s art in relation to relevant social, historical, and literary contexts.
A Socio-Political History of Architecture
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In Central Asia, Muslim shrines have served as community centers for centuries, particularly the large urban shrines that seem, in many cases, to have served as the inspiration as well for a city’s architectural development. In Four Central Asian Shrines: A Socio-Political History of Architecture R. D. McChesney documents the histories of four such long-standing shrines—Gur-i Mir at Samarqand, Khwajah Abu Nasr Parsa Mazar at Balkh, the Noble Rawzah at Mazar-i Sharif, and the Khirqat al-Nabi at Qandahar. In all four cases the creation and evolution of the architecture of these shrines is traced through narratives about their social and political histories and in the past century and a half, through the photographic record.