The world of Ancient Persia

[RedWine]

The British Museum in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation present

Forgotten Empire: the world of Ancient Persia

with generous loans from The National Museum of Iran


Ancient Persia was the largest and wealthiest state in the Ancient Near East, eclipsing Assyria and Babylonia and overshadowing Greece in the west. Between 550 BC and 330BC the Persians ruled an Empire that stretched from North Africa to the Indus Valley and from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. This vast Empire, one of the largest of antiquity, was administered from the Persian homeland in South-West Iran and from capital cities such as Susa, Pasargadae and Persepolis, arguably the most magnificent site in the whole of the ancient world.

The exhibition shows the splendour of Ancient Persia as reflected in the architecture, the sumptuousness of the material culture, and the sophistication of the administration. This is the legacy of the Great Kings such as Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes.

Included in the exhibition will be substantial loans of material from the National Museum in Tehran, the Persepolis museum, and the Louvre in Paris. This will be the first time that many of the objects from Tehran have been outside Iran, and some of the more precious gold and silver items have never been shown before.


9 September 2005 –
8 January 2006

Room 5

Iran Cultural Heritage & Tourism Organization
Bank Melli Iran
National Petrochemical Company (NPC)

[RedWine]

Bridge across the Persian gulf
Richard Holledge
August 26, 2005
IN 522BC, Darius, "Great King, King of Kings" as he modestly described himself, could survey his Persian empire with understandable satisfaction. It spread from Libya and Greece to the west, Afghanistan to the east and as far north as the Aral Sea.

Now he needed to celebrate his power with palaces, stately pleasure domes, walls and towers. He settled on a fertile plain northwest of Shiraz, the city of roses and nightingales, where he had a mighty terrace constructed out of the rocky hillside and threw up a conurbation of vaunting columns and shimmering halls to create Persepolis.

He brought in hundreds of artists, perhaps under the supervision of a Greek sculptor, and they set to in teams of seven in a frenzy of creativity, carving and decorating that was to last 50 years.

Next month another team of workmen will descend on Iran's National Archeological Museum in Tehran to dismantle an astonishing number of works of antiquity and take them to the British Museum for the biggest exhibition of Persian art yet assembled outside Iran. And, after much negotiation, it has been agreed that the great limestone statue of Darius, headless but dramatic and standing proudly in the museum, will be taking centre stage among hitherto unseen items of jewellery, gold and silver, rare artefacts and dazzlingly precise reliefs from the Achaemenid era, which lasted from about 550BC to 330BC.

For John Curtis, curator of the exhibition, it is the culmination of a career that has drawn him to Persia since 1969. He discusses his passion with an academic gravity that barely disguises his excitement as we detour from the dusty ruins of Persepolis to sit on the terrace of a tearoom overlooking the great flower-filled, traffic-jammed, square of Maidan Naqsh-e Jahan in Isfahan, a few hundred kilometres to the northwest.

...

Maybe not that different from the great days of the Achaemenids. We know that Darius had a powerful and scheming wife and that Xerxes was dominated by Esther, the biblical character who persuaded him not to kill the Jews. But what you will not see on any of the great reliefs of Persepolis is one single woman.

The Times

[ProudPersian]

what pisses me off the most is that in return for giving the British museum all those artifacts the British museum is supposed to loan Iran. LOAN!! it to us! I will terminate this post here to refrain from insulting anyone.

[RedWine]

In the beauty and geometric complexity of tile mosaics on walls of medieval Islamic buildings, scientists have recognized patterns suggesting that the designers had made a conceptual breakthrough in mathematics beginning as early as the 13th century.

A new study shows that the Islamic pattern-making process, far more intricate than the laying of one’s bathroom floor, appears to have involved an advanced math of quasi crystals, which was not understood by modern scientists until three decades ago.

The findings, reported in the current issue of the journal Science, are a reminder of the sophistication of art, architecture and science long ago in the Islamic culture. They also challenge the assumption that the designers somehow created these elaborate patterns with only a ruler and a compass. Instead, experts say, they may have had other tools and concepts.

Two years ago, Peter J. Lu, a doctoral student in physics at Harvard University, was transfixed by the geometric pattern on a wall in Uzbekistan. It reminded him of what mathematicians call quasi-crystalline designs. These were demonstrated in the early 1970s by Roger Penrose, a mathematician and cosmologist at the University of Oxford.

Mr. Lu set about examining pictures of other tile mosaics from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Turkey, working with Paul J. Steinhardt, a Princeton cosmologist who is an authority on quasi crystals and had been Mr. Lu’s undergraduate adviser. The research was a bit like trying to figure out the design principle of a jigsaw puzzle, Mr. Lu said in an interview.

In their journal report, Mr. Lu and Dr. Steinhardt concluded that by the 15th century, Islamic designers and artisans had developed techniques “to construct nearly perfect quasi-crystalline Penrose patterns, five centuries before discovery in the West.”

Some of the most complex patterns, called “girih” in Persian, consist of sets of contiguous polygons fitted together with little distortion and no gaps. Running through each polygon (a decagon, pentagon, diamond, bowtie or hexagon) is a decorative line. Mr. Lu found that the interlocking tiles were arranged in predictable ways to create a pattern that never repeats — that is, quasi crystals.

“Again and again, girih tiles provide logical explanations for complicated designs,” Mr. Lu said in a news release from Harvard.

He and Dr. Steinhardt recognized that the artisans in the 13th century had begun creating mosaic patterns in this way. The geometric star-and-polygon girihs, as quasi crystals, can be rotated a certain number of degrees, say one-fifth of a circle, to positions from which other tiles are fitted. As such, this makes possible a pattern that is infinitely big and yet the pattern never repeats itself, unlike the tiles on the typical floor.

This was, the scientists wrote, “an important breakthrough in Islamic mathematics and design.”

Dr. Steinhardt said in an interview that it was not clear how well the Islamic designers understood all the elements they were applying to the construction of these patterns. “I can just say what’s on the walls,” he said.

Mr. Lu said that it would be “incredible if it were all coincidence.”

“At the very least,” he said, “it shows us a culture that we often don’t credit enough was far more advanced than we ever thought before.”

From a study of a few hundred examples, Mr. Lu and Dr. Steinhardt determined that the technique was fully developed two centuries later in mosques, palaces, shrines and other buildings. They noted that “a nearly perfect quasi-crystalline Penrose pattern” is found on the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan, Iran, which was built in 1453. The researchers described how the architects there had created overlapping patterns with girih tiles at two sizes to produce nearly perfect quasi-crystalline patterns.

In the report, Mr. Lu and Dr. Steinhardt said the examples they had studied so far “fall just short of being perfect quasi crystals; there may be more interesting examples yet to be discovered.”

In a separate article in Science, some experts in the math of crystals questioned if the findings were an entirely new insight. In particular, Emil Makovicky of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark said the new report failed to give sufficient credit to an analysis he published in 1992 of mosaic patterns on a tomb in Iran.

Mr. Lu and Dr. Steinhardt said they regretted what they called a misunderstanding. They pointed out that the length of their report was strictly enforced by journal editors, but it did include two footnotes to Dr. Makovicky’s research. None of the referees or editors who reviewed the paper, Dr. Steinhardt said, asked for more attention to the previous research.

Although their work had some elements in common with Dr. Makovicky’s, Dr. Steinhardt said in an interview that their research dealt with not one but a “whole sweep of tilings” interpreted through a few hundred examples.

The article quoted two other experts, Dov Levine and Joshua Socolar, physicists at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and Duke University, respectively, as agreeing that Dr. Makovicky deserved more credit. But, the article noted, they said the Lu-Steinhardt research had “generated interesting and testable hypotheses.”