A new series of lectures at the AIIT begins next Friday 26 October. All are welcome. Lectures begin at 5.30pm, refreshments from 5pm. Unless otherwise indicated, lectures are held at: Ancient India & Iran Trust 23 Brooklands Avenue Cambridge CB2 8BG 26 October: Cambridge Festival of Ideas. Christine van Ruymbeke, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Cambridge; Ancient India and Iran Trust. Literary Criticism and the Pendulum of Taste: The Reception of the Anvar-e Sohayli BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL for this event via the Festival of Ideas website 9 November: …
Feasting on the Shahnameh
Amongst the manuscripts we hold at the Trust is Abolqasem Ferdawsi’s tenth-century epic Persian poem, the Shahnameh, copied in Samarkand in 1604. When I first applied for the Administrator post, this felt like an added reason to work here, as my name derives from that of Manizheh, the daughter of King Afrasyab and the heroine of the love story ‘Bizhan and Manizheh’ told in the Shahnameh. That this story was housed here reinforced the personal affinity I have always felt with the Trust. However, while I was aware of my …
Ottoman Explorations of the Nile and Evliya Çelebi
The trust library was delighted to receive as a gift the newly published Ottoman Explorations of the Nile : Evliya Çelebi’s ‘Matchless Pearl These Reports of the Nile’ map and his accounds of the Nile and the Horn of Africa in The Book of Travels by Robert Dankoff, Nuran Tezcan and Michael D. Sheridan. This is a new, revised and expanded English edition of the 2010 Turkish publication, which first contextualises Çelebi’s elaborate map of the Nile and his account of his Nile journeys in Volume 10 of his Seyahatname …
Lahore symposium booklet now available
We are pleased to make available the summaries of talks given at the symposium The History of Lahore and the Preservation of its Historic Buildings, held in Cambridge in October 2017 and organised by AIIT trustee Sir Nicholas Barrington and Dr Abdul Majid Sheikh. The booklet provides informal summaries of the talks as drafted by the speakers themselves, together with pictures of the main monuments discussed. It is planned that an academic volume of the proceedings will be published by the British Association for South Asian Studies, probably in 2020. …
Studies in the Chronology of the Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan
On Friday 25 May we celebrated the publication of Studies in the Chronology of the Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan by our Chairman Nicholas Sims-Williams and François de Blois. Following the presentation of the book, Joe Cribb, AIIT trustee and former Keeper of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, gave an exciting lecture ‘Constructing Kushan chronology: Bactria and Gandhara 1st-4th century AD’. More than 150 documents in Bactrian, the chief administrative language of pre-Islamic Afghanistan, have come to light during the last twenty-five years. These documents include letters, legal …