Overview

Gardens were both a setting and showcase for nearly every aspect of social and daily life at the royal court during the early Islamic period in Western Asia. Safa Mahmoudian uses a wide range of primary source materials including contemporary Arabic manuscripts, together with archaeological reports, aerial photographs, and archaeologists' letters and diaries. Through close readings of this evidence, Mahmoudian creates a picture of these gardens in their historical, architectural and environmental contexts and examines various factors that influenced their design and placement. In doing so, Mahmoudian adds to our understanding of these gardens and palaces and, ultimately, early Islamic-period court culture as a whole.

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9781399524254

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Safa Mahmoudian has unearthed considerable evidence of the gardens of Sawād during the first Islamic centuries to paint a comprehensive picture of these long-overlooked historical landscapes. Through precise analyses, she unravels the layers of architectural, sociocultural, geographical and horticultural significance embedded in these once flourishing royal gardens now largely lost to the desert sands.--Mehrdad Qayyoomi Bidhendi, The Iranian Academy of Art

Author Information

Wolfson College, Khalili Research Centre, Oxford Safa Mahmoudian is an art and architectural historian, who has held academic positions at the University of Oxford, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna. Her doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Vienna received the Grete Mostny Dissertation Prize in 2022. Her first monograph, titled The Story of Fadan Mādī Life, Architecture and Urban Spaces along a Canal in Safavid Isfahan (in Persian, Tehran: Rawzana) explores the riverine landscape of a main water canal - Fadan Mādī - in seventeenth-century Isfahan from various angles. Her investigations demonstrated the crucial role that the water system of Isfahan played in shaping the city's morphology, architecture and daily life.

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