Timurid "kitabkhana"

by Sussan Babaie

Visiting professor, Institute for Art History, Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich

organized by Hannah Baader, Avinoam Shalem and Gerhard Wolf

Timurid Samarqand is the stuff of legend: in Persian poetry, it is pictured as the desired destination for the learned and the lover; to Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, it was the ancestral home of his South Asian empire; to the merchants networking as far afield as Venice and Peking, it was the marketplace where they met at the intersection of the legendary silk roads. In anticipation of the scheduled visit in March 2012 to Samarqand, this workshop considers some of the salient features of the arts and architecture of the Timurids (1370-1509). Timur/Tamerlane (r 1370-1405) founded an empire encompassing a vast region of West, Central and South Asia, and a plethora of ethnicities, religions and languages. To the Timurid elite, who was Turko-Mongol in ethnicity and languages, Persian was the 'lingua franca', the thread that created a Persianate cultural landscape across the entire empire and established a legacy shared by the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals. Our readings and discussions for this workshop will consider Timurid monuments in modern Uzbekistan through the lens of this vast cultural zone anchored on a network of princely "kitabkhana" and the imperial patronage of architecture. Specific buildings, urban ensembles, books and paintings and dishes and tent fittings; these undergird our forays into questions of commerce, competition, and empire. The workshop aims to intimate something of the texture of life of the artists, poets, architects and princely patrons who interacted on imperial book and building projects through the conceptual, and real, space of the "kitabkhana".