Download PDF | (Islamic History and Civilization 64) Linda Komaroff (editor) - Beyond the Legacy of Genghis Khan -Brill Academic Pub (2006).
680 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is usually a pleasure to write the acknowledgments to a publication, not only because it generally signals the end of a lengthy project (in this case one that was nearly a decade in the planning and rendering), but also for the reason that it gives one a chance to count one’s blessings, so to speak, and to thank those responsible. First and foremost, I would like to thank each of the contributors to this volume who approached the task of turning their symposium papers into full-fledged articles with great diligence, enormous skill and erudition, and in most cases in a timely manner. For those who were less than timely, I am nonetheless grateful for their genial responses to my relentless harassment.
In addition, I would like to acknowledge those who participated in the symposium on which this publication is based but did not contribute to this volume: Stephen Album and Priscilla Soucek, who presented papers, and Stefano Carboni and Morris Rossabi, who served as session chairs. This publication and the symposium that preceded it would not have been possible without the generous support of the Hagop Kevorkian Fund, as well as Amina and the late Ahmad Adaya and the late Joan Palevsky. In the blessings’ department I would certainly have to count the Adaya family, Joan Palevsky, and especially Ralph Minasian and the Kevorkian Fund, who have on multiple occasions supported projects I have proposed. I would also like to express thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for its financial support for the exhibition The Legacy of Genghis Khan and its related programs, including the symposium that led to this publication. Finally, I am most grateful to the Ancient Art Council at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for its generous assistance. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where this volume was edited, I am grateful to the administration for recognizing that endeavors such as this are integral to the intellectual life of the institution, and to the many colleagues here who knowingly or unknowingly eased the burden of this project.
Among these I would especially like to thank Jaclynne Kerner, Camilla Chandler Frost Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Art (2004–6), for many matters large and small, and in particular for systematizing the substantial bibliography that buttresses this volume. I am also pleased to acknowledge Sara Cody (associate editor at LACMA) for her adroit skills as a copy editor, as well as for her good-humored and unflappable responses to innumerable phone calls and unannounced visits. Thanks, too, to Megan Knox, in Middle East Art, and to Steve Oliver in Photographic Services. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Trudy Kamperveen and her colleagues at Brill, as well as their anonymous reader, for believing that this publication would make a valuable contribution to the study of Islamic history and civilization. Linda Komaroff.
INTRODUCTION LINDA KOMAROFF
An international symposium was held June 13–15, 2003, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in connection with the exhibition The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256–1353, co-organized by LACMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition was the first to examine the important artistic developments that occurred in the Iranian world as an effect of the Mongol conquests of western and eastern Asia. As a preliminary investigation into a period of extraordinary creativity and momentous cultural achievements, The Legacy of Genghis Khan and its associated publication raised or left unanswered many questions, offering symposium participants ample opportunity to move beyond the confines of the exhibition and its catalogue—hence the title of this volume. Although not every paper presented at the symposium could be included here, two of the session chairs contributed papers germane to the topic.
Taken as a whole, this collection should provide a good overview of a still-evolving area of scholarship examined from multiple perspectives by means of diverse disciplinary practices. Through war and conquest, Genghis Khan and the Mongols created the largest land empire in history—stretching at its greatest extent from Hungary to Korea. The types of cultural collisions resulting from the creation of this world empire particularly fascinate in today’s global age; most recently, the Mongol invasions have been viewed as an often disquieting parallel to contemporary events in the Middle East (also see David Morgan’s contribution to this volume). The opening of The Legacy of Genghis Khan in Los Angeles in the spring of 2003 (figs. 1–2), for example, was covered by local media in close relation to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. One headline in the Los Angeles Times proclaimed: “Beauty from a troubled land. As war threatens Iraq’s treasures, LACMA prepares ‘Legacy of Genghis Khan’.”1 Eerily, American and British troops entered Baghdad the day the exhibition previewed to the press—April 9.2 Not all reactions to the exhibition and especially to its title were quite so preoccupied with contemporary events. Instead, for some members of greater Los Angeles’s very large Iranian diaspora community, it was the thirteenth century all over again as some feelings ran fairly high against Genghis Khan and the Mongols.3 Though by no means pervasive, this mindset generally did not allow for the possibility that the Mongol conquerors’ promotion of pan-Asian trade, methods of governance, avid taste for luxury goods, and practice of relocating skilled personnel might have resulted in an unprecedented cross-fertilization of cultural ideas throughout Eurasia. Nor was it considered that the so-called ‘Pax Mongolica’ might have had the effect of energizing Iranian art and infusing it with new meanings and forms that were subsequently spread throughout the Islamic world.
Nevertheless, this reaction was a good reminder of the very deep imprint that the Mongol invasions left on the lands they conquered and in the collective memories of their inhabitants and their descendants. The ultimate irony is that the Ilkhanids in Iran, as well as their Yüan cousins in China, became strong proponents of their adoptive cultural patrimony. In Iran, for instance, the Ilkhanids, under the guidance of their Iranian advisors, co-opted the trappings and symbolism of ancient Persian kingship by building a palace at Takht-i Sulayman (see the paper by Dietrich Huff) specifically because of the site’s ritual association with the coronation of the Sasanian king. The palace itself was even decorated with glazed tiles inscribed with verses abridged from the Iranian national epic, the Sh§hn§ma, possibly selected and subtly revised to suggest that they were addressed to the resident, the Ilkhanid ruler.4 In a now-dispersed illustrated manuscript of the so-called Great Mongol Sh§hn§ma (see the paper by Eleanor Sims)—probably produced for the last Ilkhanid ruler, Abå Sa‘Êd—Mongol legitimacy is underscored through the paintings, which depict the pre-Islamic kings and heroes of Iran recast in the guise of Mongols. For example, an illustration to the section on the founding of the Sasanian dynasty culminating in Ardashir taking captive Ardavan (the last Parthian ruler) clearly depicts Ardashir and his entourage as Mongol horsemen, who are distinguished by the fabric and design of their clothes (about which more will be said below).5 The painting recommends that the universal story lies not only in the narrative but also resonates through the details. In the larger view, the picture is far richer and more complicated than sheer destruction,6 as this collection of papers ably demonstrates.
These papers offer a wide-ranging account of the Mongols in western and eastern Asia in the aftermath of Genghis Khan’s disruptive invasions of the early thirteenth century, focusing on the significant cultural, social, religious and political changes that followed in their wake. An important subtext of this volume (and a major theme of the exhibition and the related symposium) is the cultural transmission that occurred in concert with the establishment of a Mongol world empire. One of the main figures in this area of cross-cultural transasiatic research is Thomas Allsen; though he was unable to participate in the symposium, his publications, particularly his Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire, were a major source of inspiration and information for The Legacy of Genghis Khan exhibition and catalogue.7 As Allsen’s work indicates, the Mongols placed great emphasis on the production and acquisition of luxury textiles—especially so-called cloth of gold, or nasÊj, a form of portable or wearable wealth.
Based on the evidence of the extant textiles, and in relation to other arts of the Ilkhanid period, I have elsewhere proposed that this medium was perhaps the primary carrier of East Asian (mainly Chinese) visual culture to the West.8 Given the significant role of textiles in cultural transmission and interchange, and considering that this important medium was not touched upon at the symposium, I will insert this subject here by very briefly considering a group of spectacular tent panels in the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, and a single panel in the David Collection, Copenhagen, that were included in the exhibition (pl. 1a).9 The tent hangings, which will be the focus of a more extensive study, help to delineate one process by which visual language was altered by external cultural forces.10 The group of textiles is comprised of five full panels and a narrow, vertical strip of a sixth (in Doha) and a vertically divided half panel (in Copenhagen). Each of the five full panels is defined by narrow, vertical bands forming slender columns supporting a pair of ‘cloud point’ arches.
When placed side by side (pls. 1a–b), the panels suggest an arcade formed of engaged columns and shallow, arch-like niches of a type that came into common use in Iranian architecture by the eleventh century and continued into the Ilkhanid period and beyond. The intended sequential arrangement of these wall-coverings is indicated by the fact that each panel has only two of the three sets of ‘columns’ necessary to support the arcade; each is completed by the next panel. Neither the original number of panels nor the size of the structure they once decorated can be conjectured, although it seems likely that were made for an impermanent edifice such as a tent.11 If so, the group of textiles would represent the earliest surviving tent interior.
Even after they established capital cities and built palatial residences, the Ilkhanid court remained itinerant. Seasonal camps, which could include both permanent and temporary structures, were the location for many important royal events, ranging quite literally from birth to death.12 The types of princely tentage that were used on ceremonial occasions are described in contemporary historical and traveler’s accounts; they were enormous, holding as many as two thousand men, and constructed of costly and elaborately worked textiles.13 One was portrayed as “that gilded cupola and heaven-like tent,” so striking that “the disc of the sun lost its brightness out of jealousy…and the resplendent moon wore a sulky expression.”14 Tents were also depicted in manuscript illustrations of the Ilkhanid period, although none matches contemporary descriptions in terms of either scale or opulence.15 Any structure embellished by these panels would have been truly opulent. They were woven from now-faded red silk and gilt thread, of which the latter is of two types—threads wrapped with a paper substrate and threads having an animal-based substrate, a combination that marks a rare technical occurrence.16 The panels are elaborately decorated (within the previously described architectural framework) by a wealth of motifs reflecting the textiles’ hybrid style (pl. 1b). Beneath the ‘cloud-point’ arch is a group of four large, vertically oriented roundels, each with a pair of confronted roosters with elaborate tail feathers flanking a stylized Tree of Life. The roundels alternate with pairs of smaller lobed medallions bearing a coiled dragon. While the latter is ultimately of East Asian inspiration, the confronted birds with Tree of Life motif has a long history in Islamic art, including pre-Mongol and Mongol-period Iranian textiles.17 The roundels are framed by interlocking circles, a well-known motif in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Iranian metalwork. Also mixing East and West, the background is filled with a scrolling, arabesque-like peony design and small floral medallions bearing a stylized bird, possibly a phoenix. Across the upper edge of the panels is a pearl border, a type of design found in Iranian textiles dating back to Sasanian times; this was originally surmounted by a pseudo-Kufic inscriptional band of which only a fraction survives on some panels. As already noted, the architectural frieze depicted by the conjoined panels was already well-known in Iranian architecture and architectural decoration prior to the Mongol invasions, including the use of decorative roundels or medallions, which continue into the Ilkhanid period.18 With the substitution of the Chinese ‘cloudpoint’ for the Iranian arch in the tent panels, the arcade has been updated to reflect the new, more cosmopolitan and eclectic visual language. Perhaps somewhat ironically, the textile arcade lining the interior of a tent would have imaginatively echoed the form and, to some extent, the decoration of a more permanent domed structure.
Even the original placement of the pseudo-Kufic inscription above the tent arcade relates to the placement of monumental inscriptions that encircle the upper walls just beneath the transitional zone of the dome,19 while medallions bearing confronted and entwined birds occur, for example, within shallow arched niches in a tomb tower at Kharraqan, c. 1067–68.20 The particular circumstances that produced the stylistic, iconographic, and technical fusion demonstrated by these panels and by a number of other contemporary textiles are documented by historical evidence.21 Under both Genghis Khan (d. 1227) and his son and successor Ögödei (r. 1229–41), communities of textile workers were established on the southern boundaries of the Mongol homeland by the relocation of captured Iranian artists. The artists were taken primarily from cities in Khurasan (such as Herat, which was renowned for its silk and gold cloth) and in Turkestan. In a different direction, Chinese textile workers were resettled in eastern Central Asia to manufacture fine stuffs for the Mongol overlords there.22
This transfer of artists and their techniques facilitated a kind of hybrid development in textile art and its technology, which for a time articulated the new visual language of the Mongol world empire. The tent panels, which were likely made somewhere in eastern Iran or western Central Asia where their architectural form would have been best appreciated, represent a new and short-lived artistic koiné expressed primarily through luxury objects, in which the opulence of the material itself, above and even beyond its decoration, conveyed a message of status. It is certainly this quest for status on the part of the Mongols that helped to drive the transmission of textile arts.23 Although only a few illustrated Persian manuscripts survive from the late thirteenth century, the depictions they contain of the new Mongol rulers and ruling elite convey the conquerors not only by their physiognomies but also quite specifically by the silk and gold fabrics of which their clothes, accoutrements, and even horses’ accessories are made.24 Whether artists included these details based on observation or through coercion is not possible to say, but considering some of the disparaging remarks made about the Mongols’ alleged sacerdotal preferences—for example the historian JuwaynÊ noted that before Genghis Khan the Mongols wore clothing made “of the skins of dogs and mice”—their acquisition of elaborate silk textiles was clearly a notable improvement.25 The Mongols neither wove the sumptuous cloth of gold that they craved nor is it likely that their personal taste played much of a role in the design of the textiles, but the structures they set in place brokering all manner of cultural exchanges between East and West helped to create, however briefly, a new mode of artistic expression, which in turn laid the foundation for still greater achievements.26 As already indicated, this discussion of the tent panels will evolve into a deeper study, but it serves to highlight here the types of issues concerning not only art but governance, diplomacy, commerce, religion, court life, and urban culture in the Mongol world empire as presented at the 2003 symposium and now distilled in this volume. This collection of papers demonstrates both the scope and the depth of Mongol-related studies and that will, I hope, inspire and provoke further research.
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