Wood and Woodworking in Late Ottoman Damascus:

Cet article a pour objet l’étude de la place de l’artisanat du bois à Damas à la fin du xixe siècle et au début du xxe siècle et porte plus particulièrement son attention sur les différents types de bois, produits localement ou importés, utilisés par les artisans syriens à cette époque. La source principale de cette étude est le Qāmūs al-ṣināʿāt al-Šāmiyya, un dictionnaire de l’artisanat damascène composé entre 1890 et 1906. L’un des apports de cet article est de montrer qu’à cette époque ce secteur de l’économie damascène parvenait à résister relativement bien aux objets d’artisanat importés d’Europe. Il contribue également à mettre en évidence le fait que les artisans adaptaient leurs activités en fonction des goûts changeants du marché.This article discusses the importance of woodworking crafts operating in Damascus in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It also tackle the main types of locally grown and imported woods exploited by Syrian craftsmen in this period. The main source for this analysis is the Qāmūs al-ṣināʿāt al-Šāmiyya which offers a comprehensive dictionary of Damascene craft industry between around 1890 and 1906. The article concludes that this sector of the economy of Damascus coped relatively well with the challenge of competing against imported European artifacts. Artisans might also adapt their activities to satisfy the changing supply of the market.تهدف هذه المقالة إلى دراسة مكانة حرفة الخشب في دمشق في نهاية القرن التاسع عشر وبداية القرن العشرين وتهتم بشكل خاص بمختلف أنماط الأخشاب المنتَجة محلياً أو المستورَدة التي استخدمها الحرفيون السوريون في ذلك العصر. إن المصدر الأساسي لهذه الدراسة هو قاموس الصناعات الشامية، وهو قاموس للحرف الدمشقية وقد تمّ تأليفه بين العامين ١٨٩٠ و ١٩٠٦ . أحد الأمور الذي تضيفه هذه المقالة هو التبيان أن هذا القطاع الاقتصادي الدمشقي استطاع في ذلك العصر مقاومة المواد الحرفية المستورَدة من أوروبا بشكل جيد نسبياً. وتساهم هذه المقالة أيضاً في إبراز الفكرة أن الحرفيين كانوا يوائمون نشاطاتهم تبعاً لأذواق السوق المتغيّرة

Patronage and the Idea of an Urban Bourgeoisie

From the reports of travelers and historians, people learn of the crafting of beautiful rock crystal and metalwork objects in the Cairo bazaar and, during the later Mamluk period, of beautiful gilded and enameled glass being produced in commercial areas of Aleppo and Damascus. Given the diverse subject matter of the manuscripts, people may speak of a patronage base allying the intelligentsia to the merchant class within a more broadly conceived bourgeoisie, one whose interests and aesthetic preferences, as compared with those of the court, might be productively investigated through such illustrated manuscripts. One of the frontispieces of a wonderful illustrated manuscript contains clearly Christian iconographical elements, and among the Christian community of Iraq and Syria, people encounter ample evidence for the patronage and production of metalwork, ceramics, and gilded and enameled glass as well as manuscripts

The Visual Construction of the Umayyad Caliphate in Al-Andalus through the Great Mosque of Cordoba

My first exposure to the epigraphic program of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, published in 2001, came from reading an article on the ideological meaning of the decoration and the Quranic citations inscribed in al-H. akam II’s addition to the building. In that article, I concluded that the Quranic verses found in the mosque were chosen not only for being a universal proclamation of divine power and praise for the Umayyad dynasty, as proposed by Nuha Khoury in 1996, but also because they clearly fitted in with the particular Andalusi, or rather Cordoban, religious, cultural, and political context in the first half of the 10th century. Most of the inscriptions had been read in the 19th century by Amador de los Ríos, but some of them remained uninterpreted. Given that they were an essential part of the ideological message, it seemed appropriate to revisit the critical reading of the epigraphic program and determine its full meaning. Later, I discussed other architectural aspects of the Great Mosque in which the links to the Andalusi and the eastern Umayyad traditions are a key aspect in understanding why these forms were chosen. Damascus, the eastern Umayyad capital, and to a lesser extent Medina and the Abbasid capitals, became the model for the caliphs of Cordoba. This article proposes to revisit the main architectural and decorative features of the caliphal enlargements of the Great Mosque of Cordoba in order to reflect on the meaning and forms of its epigraphic program

Crafting History: How the World Is Made. The Case of Islamic Archaeology

In this paper an archaeological and theoretical perspective that builds a relationship between the concepts of craft and of identity is presented. Both of them are concepts very widely used in archaeological and anthropological theory nowadays, and they have often been linked in field studies. However, these concepts are usually contemplated from very different points of view and with many diverse implications in each case. One of the aims of this paper is to show that craft and identity can be inserted in a common theoretical framework which in turn can be used to understand cultural change or, in other words, history within culture. The paper will start with a necessary theoretical introduction to different concepts related to craft and identity, and then a discussion on how to link these different concepts will follow. In the last part of the paper, this theoretical perspective will be applied to a field which is familiar to the author, that of Islamic archaeology. A case example of the author’s research in the Vega of Granada (southeast Spain) will be brought to the fore. This part of the paper will show how the theoretical discussion developed above can contribute to solve one of the core questions of this field, that of the definition of an Islamic culture and its application to understand the daily life of people living within it

Barbarians at the British Museum: Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

A critical historiographical overview of art historical approaches to early medieval material culture, with a focus on the British Museum collections and their connections to religion