Mae'n ddweud ymlaen i ddim yn y ddechrau Eirinol i'r ddefnyddio i'r ddefnyddio ar y dyfodol, i'r ddefnyddio'r ddefnyddio, i'r ddefnyddio i'r ddefnyddio sy'n ddiddordeb sy'n ddiddordeb i'r syniadau i'r idea i'r Iran. Felly mae'n ddiddordeb gyda'r genorosu o'r Ffyrddfaith Morol Cymru sy'n ddiddordeb yma.  Rydym wedi swyddfa'n cael ei ffondol ar gael yr ysteig, ac mae'n rhaid i'n datblygiad eich ffordd fwydiol arwyr i fyw i'r gyda Sudaba Ffarmann Ffarmayann oherwydd yr enghraith yma ar fy mwyaf, i'r adegau a'r adegau sydd yn ddiweddol. Rydyn ni'n meddwl dr Charles Melville yn ddigonol, ond weithio ar gyfer yma'r cyfrifolio ar y cyfrifolio. Rydyn ni'n ddweud yma'n meddwl i'r cyfrifolio. Rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r dros yma dr Susan Barbaï i ddod yma'r cyfrifolio ar y prif er mwyn. Yn ymgyrch yn dr Hasan Hakimiyan, rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r cyfrifolio ar y bwysig. Cyfnoddhau'r cyfrifatau mewn LMEI, ond y cyfrifatau arddwyr eisiau yma yn fawr o'u sefydliol. Rwy'n fyddau'r cantau mewn LMEI rwy'n arweithio'r cyfrifatau a byddaf yn hyn ylliannod Ddregol Lluws Hoskin, ac y ddweud o'r wych yn cyfrifatau hwnnw yma, a'r cyfrifatau eraill ar gyfer yr Yraniad Ddeis was one of the reasons why we started this series way back when. It was launched in 2012 and it's now a vibrant hub for events and activities to do with Iran. So if you aren't a member, please look at the website and join, sign up. There are a lot of wonderful events going on this side of Christmas culminating in what looks to be a fascinating evening entitled Bards Apart, a musical performance of the poems of Robert Burns and Harfez. So Nargis Farzad, who will be with us later, I think will be able to tell you more about that. Now just before I hand over to Charles Melville, I want to introduce and launch the latest in our series. It's volume 7, The Coming of the Mongols. I have to say it's been a very long time in production and I'm very grateful to my co-editor David Morgan for his part in bringing out the book. Also I'd like to thank Alex Wright and his team at IB Tourist and Parvis Fozuni for his usual rigour, patience and good humour in producing the camera ready copy. Unfortunately he can't be with us today. So today and tomorrow we'll be looking at 15th century Iran and the Turkotimerid polity. Also of course the great literary, artistic and scientific achievements of that period. We have a wonderful line-up of experts in the field which is why we've extended this year to a day and a half. And on that note I'm going to hand over to Charles. Thank you. Welcome. I know that we don't need an awful lot from me. I'd just like to thank Fatima for inviting me and when she did ask me if I'd be willing to take on running the series, my first thought was a story from my old friend Tom Olson or an idea from my old friend Tom Olson that whenever you receive an email with a question mark at the end, would you be willing to do something? Two red lights should show up on your computer, one N and one O, and you should press these and say no. But of course I failed to do this so I'm happy to say I've accepted to steer the series through to what I hope is the end of the idea of Iran, if not the end of Iran itself. Well, I mean I'm obviously hoping it won't be. This is the whole point we're going to put Iran up there in beautiful colours. I had thought that the series had slightly lost track of the founding idea which is the idea of Iran. I mean we've had lots of nice papers and nice volumes about the history of the region over all the centuries. But not so much focus I thought, a specific focus on what's implied by the idea of Iran. And so I thought it might be helpful just in a rather simplistic way to have a format or a formula to address some of these questions which I put into three different headings. One is what the Iranians themselves think is the idea of their country. Then one is what their contemporaries feel. In other words in the Timoyd period what Timoyd Iranians thought their country was and also what contemporaries from outside Iran thought. And then the third component which has probably been the one most addressed so far is what we think the idea of Iran is. In other words what Western scholarship or the interpretation that we've put on Iran and her history and culture throughout the eras. So with that in mind I've asked our speakers to think specifically about the idea of Iran under one or other of these headings. And of course as time goes on there will be far more of what other people think or outsiders think which is not terribly well documented for the earlier periods. As for the title Turco Tiv Morid in Tometso I'm sure all of you are very familiar with Vladimir Menorsky's beautiful formulation of the Iranian in Tometso which describes the period between the collapse of Arab rule and the beginning of Turkish rule. And it may not seem entirely appropriate to this period because after all Turkish rule didn't end. But I think there is something to be noticed about this period after if you take it roughly from the fall of Baghdad and the collapse of the universal Islamic caliphate until the rise of the Safavids in the early 16th century. We do see a very discrete period it seems to me which is defined perhaps by religion not being at centre stage of state ideology. Of course religion didn't go away but it was essentially a secular state I think. And at the end of this period of course we see the arrival of these empires, the Ottoman, the Safavid and the Moghul empires. And especially in Iran religion once more being the defining plank of state ideology which it certainly wasn't in the period you might call the sort of Chingizid dispensation which really dies out in Iran with the collapse of the Timurids or of course Timurids influence remain very strong. So so much for the general idea of the title. I'm very grateful to all the people I invited to speak to accept immediately. There were so many possible speakers for this period which is one of the richest and most dramatic I think in Persian history. And I hope that we've achieved a balance of some great stars and leaders in the field but also trying to introduce some younger scholars perhaps not quite so well known who are doing some really interesting work to get a sense of progression in the field. And finally as Sarah has already mentioned this is a bit of an innovation this year to have it spread over two days. And I know tomorrow morning is Sunday morning and a lot of people seem to lie in bed till lunch especially in London. So I hope that you won't decide to stay in bed tomorrow morning and we have John Woods the great superstar of Timurid history here deliberately as the last speaker. So if you don't turn up it will be a personal insult to him and to me. So without more ado I'd like to hope you have a very interesting and engaging two days. Thank you very much. In the 15th century and earlier we frequently of course see the pairing of Iran to Iran and Turkantogic which represented once opposition and complementarity. The one in territory in ideology the other of course in culture. These both basically refer to imperial traditions the Persian and then later Perso Islamic tradition and the step tradition. Now in the 15th century both the Caliphate and the United Mongol Empire of course were no more. They had been gone for quite a while so the reality is regional. And this I think does show both in politics and in ideology. So what I want to focus on in this paper is the way that universalist imperial ideologies can accommodate sub-imperial identities and regional claims. Now since this is a conference on the idea of Iran I want to look particularly and towards the end of my paper at Iranian regionalism. And to do this I want to broaden somewhat our view of the holders of Iranian culture. In particular I want to go beyond the Iranian bureaucrats Olima and scholarly classes who usually get most of our attention because they did most of the writing. And say that these are not the only people who are defining Pruso Islamic states craft and identity. What I want then to add to this class is the Iranian regional rulers and elites including military actors. And I'm going to suggest that by including this class in our view of what Iranian means and who the Iranian elite are we get a more comprehensive and perhaps a richer view of what the Pruso Islamic tradition is. So let me then go on to discuss who these other holders of the Iranian tradition are. When looking at the duality of Iran to Iran to a Tajik one of the standard contrast has been the military superiority of the Turks over the more cultured Tajiks. Clearly expressed in many histories which many of us have read which were written for Turkic rulers and an Iranian audience by Tajik Pruso Islamic bureaucrats. Now scholars are increasingly asking to what extent we should believe all the bureaucrats right. This is of course particularly applied to the great Rashida Dean and his version of Mongol history but it I think can be taken as a useful caution for other times as well. And we're also recognizing increasingly I would say the importance of local Iranian rulers and their servitors. And here we're talking a military as well as cultural. So if you look at the local histories you see very active politics not only by the the rulers of these areas but also armies of Iranian soldiers and their commanders also sometimes acting independently. Sometimes these rulers and armies are acting within a larger state Turkomongolian state or a larger Iranian state. Sometimes they are acting on their own in local politics. We have excellent histories of the Caspian regions. Mazandaran Gilan which Charles Melville has worked on recently very fruitfully. Another famous local set of histories is the histories of Seistan worked on by the late Clifford Edmund Bosworth. Farah is another another example of this that we know less about. Now these regions remain separate for centuries under sometimes very long lasting dynasties. One can argue that these regions are atypical. They are isolated geographically in some sense thus preserving a tradition which is lost elsewhere. However there nonetheless strategic regions the Caspian after all goes right along that northern route very much traveled by armies and others. And they're active within the larger regional complex. Seistan likewise is connected to Khurasan to Kerman but the road between them. More importantly I think we have to recognize that we know about these regions not only because they had important local rulers but also because they had a local historical tradition and that is chance to some extent. They produced local histories therefore we know about them. So what we need to consider is what exists elsewhere. When we want to look at the Iranian elites the military activities in particular of other regions we see them mostly in times of disorder succession struggles. When you look at these times you see traces of many more local power holders. You can see a useful example in Faroumadi's history in the late 14th century. The continuation of Shaban Karahi describing events after the fall of the Al-Khanid dynasty. And he has local rulers and armies in Qashan, Sabe, Qom, Kerman. You see evidence in the period of Shahrukh right up to the end of important local elites in the armies of those same cities. Qom, Sabe, Qashan, Qashan well into the period of Shahrukh. And here we're talking after all about the central Iranian plateau. These people were militarily active. They had soldiers under them and they were fighting both locally and more widely. We also see Iranian soldiers in the provincial Timurid armies, some of them under their own commanders. Now the Iranians are not in the very top commands usually but they are active. So these people I think must be included in what we consider the Iranian formative elite. Since we are going to include these people we should also then consider some of the practices of Iranian dynasties to consider how different these really are from the practice of Turkic dynasties. Pruso-Islamic administrative practice is often seen as supporting a centralized bureaucratic state whereas the Turkomongolean tradition is seen as having centrifugal tendencies. So then this centralized versus decentralized government has also sometimes been presented as a fault line between the two traditions, Tajik and Turk. Two particular practices are very commonly attributed to Turkic states. One is shared rule among the family with inheritance within a generation and the granting of Apanaugis. These then are seen as a contrast to Pruso-Islamic both Persian and Arabic. I would argue, and I'm not entirely the first one to say this, that although this holds true for centralizing rulers in a larger state where the bureaucrats clearly come in on the centralizing side of things, it is less true when you look at Iranian dynasties themselves. First of all, most Iranian dynasties of the Islamic period like many Arab dynasties did not practice primogeniture. They may have inheritance father to son, but they also frequently pass rule on to brothers and there are plenty of succession struggles. We also see shared rules, sort of regionally shared rules under members of the dynasty. The Bouyids of course in the Abbasid period are an excellent example of this. The Mozaffarids coming in after the Ilhanids. Also if you look at the Caspian, the Syids of Sadi and Aml in the Timurid period. The Cartid dynasty of Herat at the end, Yusi Serachs, the region is semi-separate. I would suggest that although the Turks did indeed have some habits of rule that encouraged fragmentation and regional rule, this does not make them outliers. I am not going to dispute this idea of shared rule, but I am going to dispute the idea that this is something different from what other people did. Also to sum up the sections, say Iranians first of all are important in the political and military picture outside of the bureaucracy. Outside of cities as well as inside of cities and they had habits of rule which are not entirely different from those of the Turkic dynasties. So to go on then to some shared concepts of rule and the question of regionalism and imperialism. It seems clear that the concepts of Iran-Turhan are indeed a shared concept. We see them both in text and in action. And the understanding of the boundary also seems to be shared that is to say it stands at the oxys. Here you are talking mostly about the central oxys above Herat. So there does seem to be an agreement that that is the boundary between Iran and Turan. Now for both the Iranians and the Turkomongolian dynasties, likewise although symbolically the oxys is very important, is not always quite as fully relevant as the east-west divisions, which is what I want to look at here a little while. This well-known that Iran tends to be divided east and west, Khurasan versus central and western Iran, and that will be talked about in other papers I know at this conference. This then also becomes part of the picture for the Turkomongolian rule in the Middle East. It follows very much the same template. One center in the west around Tabriz, which is for western and central Iran, another in Khurasan. Eastern Khurasan then came under the Charadaid Hanate, separate from the Ilhanid dynasty centered largely in western Iran, and the central part of Khurasan was then contested between the two. At the full of the Ilhanate, we see the differences in ideology as well among these regions, and now actually see three regions showing splits in how the step heritage is understood or practiced. In Anatolia, western Iran and west of Iran, you go largely back to the Seljukid Orozmyth of the great Turks for legitimation. In Azerbaijan and central Iran, they looked mostly to the Chinggisid, but very much through the Ilhanids, and in that region they were willing quite soon by about mid-14th century to let go of exclusive Chinggisid right to sovereignty, and to use Khan for other people as well. Khurasan and parts east, however, stuck to a more conservative Chinggisid ideology, in which in fact the Chinggisid still did have the monopoly of actual sovereignty. This division remains through the Timurids, even though Timur and Shahrukh very much combined, united, I should say, the Ilhanid and the Charadaid Hanids. The Khurasanian elite are clearly more fully included in the Timurid top command than are the elites of western Iran and central Iran. Now there are other divisions also that are important at this period for the Timurids and others, and I'm going to go quickly over these, so I'm departing a little bit from the Iran in for a while. Although Timur himself attempted a sort of symbolic recreation of the Mongol Empire, he and his successors also differentiated themselves quite clearly from other parts of the Mongol Empire. First of all they chose the Persianate region as their centre. The eastern Charadaids become the Chete, the robbers, therefore inferior. The Uzbex were uncouth, not as Persianate, not as educated as the Timurids, and the Turkmen were clearly inferior, as not having been part of the Mongol Empire. The other thing that the Timurids used as both his legitimation and his regional identity was the shared history of Iranian Turkic rule. So when Timur assigned Azerbaijan to his son Miransha, he called it the Kingdom of Huligi, thus the Ilhanid, and we often find the Ilhanid as a term for that part of Iran. The southeastern regions of his realm, Ghazna and Kabul, were the realm of Mahmud of Ghazna, thus again going back to a shared history, and to go beyond the Timurids when the Great Biaisid, Yildir Mbiaisid, was heading east to face Timur. He asked the Mamluks for recognition by the Caliph as the heir to the Rumselcher kids. So the recent history is very much part of the world view of what rule means and what a region was. Let's look then finally at Iranian tradition and regional rule.  Local histories often give genealogies of Iranian rulers going back to the Sasanians and back to the Shah Naameh. Many of these are quite grand and we can question their believability. But what is more interesting I think is that a number are also very distinctly regional. So this is local legitimation within a larger Iranian tradition, just as we have seen with the Turks, with the Timurids and others, that there is a local legitimation but it is expressed often within an imperial framework. So the local histories of the Caspian region, several take the story back to Gof Berle, the legendary king of Gilon and Tabaristan. Marashi, writing in the late 15th century, takes the genealogy of the Baruspanids who ruled in Tabaristan, parts of Tabaristan, 11th to 16th centuries, in a continuous line through the Sasanians back to Baruspan ben Gof Berle. He also, because he came from a ruling family, connects his own line to the same genealogy, through the bovandid dynasty also of a similar region in Tabaristan. Here we have in Marashi actually one of our rather rare examples of a voice that is from the local military Iranian elite. So it's a particularly interesting and rich history. In Sestan and Farah, the kings likewise go back to the Sasanian period, actually the beginning with Ardashir as the founder of their main city Sarang. They themselves attach themselves to Khosrow. They also go back to Iranian legend. Here the rather shadowy Ghashasp said to have ruled over Sestan and Zabulistan. Now when we move to less visible local powers in the more central locations, clearly we have a much more difficult time connecting them back. We don't have information on their genealogies, the history simply don't give us those. We have no idea what legitimation they used by and large, because they appear very briefly on the stage. What we do however have is evidence that local identity is very much connected back to the Iranian past. We have quite a lot of this preserved for us in the geography of Hafezeabru. Here of course as in all geographies you have a repetition of earlier geographies, you cannot say that this is new with Hafezeabru, but it is preserved, and thus one can say it is being preserved, it is being passed on, it still exists. Hafezeabru wrote under Shahrukh, a very nice fairly comprehensive geography in which he gives quite a lot of history up to the present. Among the things he includes for many places are descriptions of pre-Islamic organization. He gives that for instance for both Khurasan and Fars. He also will include the foundation myths of cities which were founded in the pre-Islamic period. Esfazari, a bureaucrat, a Khurasanian bureaucrat who wrote in the late 15th century, wrote a treatise on Herat and its region, which includes quite a lot of local lore. Also brings in the Iranian past. Both he and Hafezeabru go back to the Shahnawme as well, both for regions and for specific places. So for instance you have in Hafezeabru a mountain in Ghur, the east of Herat, where Zal was kept apparently by the Simoog, also the location of a fortress built by Khay Khosru after killing Afrasiyab. So why then would the regional loyalty of Iranian leaders matter to us? I'm going to suggest that the existence of this elite of local military and landed elites is politically important as well as culturally important. These are the people through whom regions are ruled on the ground, who come into the regional armies. They are the ones who do or who do not support Turkomongolian and larger Iranian rulers. One of the things we have to recognise here I think is that we know very little. This is a sad thing to say as when you get as far as I am in my academic career of all the years I've spent studying. We know about the big cities, we know about the courts, we do not know much about the other regions but that does not mean they don't matter. These are in fact the people whom one needs to have on one side and we don't know much about them. At the time of conquest or the arrival of a governor, you find very usually a standard phrase that the local powers come to pay their respects. These are not I think only the Olamans, these are in fact these local people and they better come because if they don't you're in trouble. These are also very important in succession struggles of which you have a great number at regular intervals and in rebellions. A notable example here is the rebellion that happened at the end of the reign of Shahrukh in the 1440s. His grandson Mohammad Sultan, governor of Qom and that region began to gather support and to become a certain independence. There's a lot been written about the Iranian notables of Esfahan who supported him but these were not the only ones. One danger was that he was attracting other local rulers of nearby regions. So the regional loyalties and the actions of these Iranian landed military elites do provide another factor which could very strongly influence the outcome of succession struggles or the success of a larger power taking over a region. So in conclusion, I want to suggest that there is more to the definition of Iran and Tehran than to unitary spheres. Both are very much subdivided both by region and by historical consciousness and this comes out sometimes in the writing but also in terms of political actions and that these divisions regional and as I say historical may be just as important as the division between the two. They are important in legitimating rule in the formation of a realm and they come in then together. There's a universal aspect but there's also a local and regional aspect. Likewise I think when we are looking at what worked towards cohesion and centralization and what worked against we need to take into consideration not only Turco-Mongolian concepts of rule but also the regional political traditions of the Iranians as well as those of the Turks. Thank you. The work I made in the last two months I had a great confusion in my mind on this subject. I want to start with a long chapter of the Zafar na meh by Nizamudin Shami narrating the Siege of Aleppo. Nizamudin Shami describes a discussion between two factions rose up among the besieged Mamluks in the town which tried to establish a strategy against Timur and his army. Shami notes that the taking of Bahasna by Timur produced great panic among the Mamluk forces. Timurtash was the Malikal Omara in Aleppo sent a report describing the situation to the Lord of Egypt, Valiye Misr, who mobilized various Mamluk Amirs who reached Aleppo and met to see how they could help Timurtash, governor of the town. The Amirs convened a great assembly. The Malikal of Omara of Damascus, Sudan, joined Timurtash with a great army and together they formed an even stronger one. Shami underlines the psychological attitude of Timurtash who according to the Persian Chronicle was cleverer than the others and showed particular prudence. In a public speech he urged the people not to take reckless decisions and to decide prudently by deliberating intelligently and unanimously coming to a decision. These people who approach us have a king that they perceive to be as fierce as Genghis Khan and they believe to be welcomed by humankind. Sharafodin Ali Asdi added later to Shami's words that Timurtash exhorted the people to include the name of Timur in the Khutbah and in the coinage. Shami then offers a vivid picture of the discussion which opened among the participants. Whatever came to their mind they said openly until they adopted a common strategy and proclaimed, this person Shahs is assisted by God and everywhere he went he conquered. Those who stood up to him and made great efforts against him and the sultans of the entire world finally surrendered to him because it is impossible to oppose such a man. The final suggestion was to yell to the invader. According to Shami, other less experienced people heeded by Sudun reacted vehemently and exalted the value of the Mamluk army which was greater in number had better fortification and more solid fortresses. Here Sudun introduced a very interesting subject, the architectural virtues of the Mamluk buildings as against those of the Timurids. Their castles are mainly made with mud and earth. Our castles and our towns are made of stone and even of steel. According to Sudun, the siege of the Mamluk towns would take the Timurid months and even years. He invited all the participants to consider the difference between Mamluk weapons and those of the Timurids. He exalted the bows from Damascus, Egyptians, words, Arab spears and the shields from Aleppo. Sudun Harang continued and he cited reasons they need not worry about the size of the Timurid army and said that in the Mamluk kingdom there are 60,000 villages and townships registered. And if only one person came from each village, they would prevail over the Timurids. They stay in the desert. We are in castles. The walls of their houses are of skin and ropes. Our castles are of stone and iron. A group of Balanced people invited the assembly to use a certain prudence in war and litigation. The twist in terms of faith are unknown and it could be useless and foolish to oppose the celestial decrees and sacrifice their sons and risk the destruction of their property. The discussion continued with a further call for war from the faction of war supporters. A group of Persians, Jamoati as Ajam, who were famous for their good lifestyle on observing the various opinions in the assembly, proposed their opinion as independent and invited the assembly not to decide with haste and to consider the consequence carefully. But this call was also rejected by the war mongers who even accused the Persians of being spies and plotting secretly to assist the Mongols to invade the kingdom again one day. Here Shammi introduced a typical rhetorical device, intellect loaded at these but time wept for their state and adds that they forbade these good consulors from leaving the town. The defence of the town walls, towers and fortifications was prepared. In the main time the Timurid army slowly advanced into Syrian territory. According to yesterday in a tradition Mongol tactic Timur simulated escape and drew the enemy into an ambush. Shammi gives a slightly different version of the story. The Mamluks were so frightened that they ran away turning their backs and on the Timurid army. Various Mamluks, Amir and infantrymen were killed. The gateway of Aleppo was covered with heaped bodies and the Mamluks cavalry rode over them and ended at the town. The Timurid army were hot on their hails and killed several with arrows and swords and were thrown down by the horses. Having captured Aleppo they took the people prisoners and plundered great quantity of God reaches and textiles. Suddenly Shammi, who reports his personal testimony of the event, noticed that the door of the fortress opened and other valiant soldiers tied together a rope and the end of which was held by some people in the towers. But the sortie was a failure and so on. At the end Timur sent an envoy to the people in the citadel with a suggestion for the imprudent besieged people inviting them to save their lives. He described his military success as a consequence of God's support for him to conquer the world. At this moment Sudun and Timurtash with the caddies, the imams and the town authorities with the keys of the town and those of the treasury opened the gate of the fortress and surrendered to Timur. Who put Sudun and Timurtash in chains and threw them into jail. I introduced here this long passage because it is the representation of a sort of debate on clash of civilization. And probably its insertion in a chapter of Zafarnami of Shammi appears not a casuality but express in a certain way some personal ideas of the same author of the chronicle. The perception of the Timurids as a nomadic people who live in tents and is stranger to the urban society is well described by the author who probably used this expedient to describe a need an opinion. Timurids were successful in a fatalistic vision of the ineluctability of the Timurid victory. In this frame the presence of the Persian community of Aleppo who invited the governor of Damascus to reconsider his plans appears as an interesting element. The adoption of a Turco Mongolian Lord seemed to be a sort of inescapable faith and the refusal to submit to him coincided to a sort of self-destruction a challenge to God's will. The same conflict with the Mamluks could help us for the understanding of the Persian role. Yasdi, for example, give a negative example when he describes the curious episode of Sultan Hussein grandson of Timur, a prince who had shown his bravery on various occasions but was convinced by a group of Persian seditious men. And by the mob to pass the lines and enter Damascus. Sultan Hussein was received in Cairo as a Sultan and was displayed to the people in the town. He was welcomed by Faraj himself who treated him as an intimate and imagined future victory. Concerned in this example rightly Beatriz Manso notes the attitude of Timur and his followers toward the Persians combining familiarity and contempt led them to constrict the role of Persian bureaucrats. The epithet Tajik mizaj, mizaj Persian natural, is found in the history as an expression of contempt when princes of the royal house misbehave as occasionally happened. The responsibility was quickly ascended to the Persian in their entourage. The influence of these corrupt people was seen as the cause of Amiran Shah's excesses and when he went insane for the failure of Pir Muhammad Ben Umar Shaykh to go in campaign as ordered in 1399 and for the defection of Timur's grandson Sultan Hussein. This is the case. Nevertheless the debate in the 14th century involves a more wide polemic. This was certainly the residual of the Ibn Taymiyan ideas against the Mongols and we could enlist various episodes of harsh criticism against Timur as a barbarian even though this term has no exact equivalent impression. This is the case of the vehement invective pronounced by Borchhanodin of Sivas according to the Basmurasm of Aziz Astarabadi in 1394 who describes Timur's behavior, a consequence of his corruption, a form of heretical hostility against the law and the sharia, a clear expression of his lack of loyalty. The conduct of Timur is for Borchhanodin against the photo vat and the moral vat. For this reason the Muslim people have to go to great lengths to defend themselves against him. How this lack of civilization could be in this case associated to the Turco-Mongolian origins is not clear. Certainly Borchhanodin considered himself an heir of the Persian administrative tradition, even considering himself a member of the Salur ethnic group and writing also in Turkish some poetry. In a chapter of his Persephone, Bert Fragner introduced a persuasive paragraph dedicated to the distinction between the Islamist identity and the Iranian history, defining this double way of interpretation. Fragner introduced a convincing factor in the long debate on the idea of Iran which is today the object of this conference. Timurid period can be considered in this sense a consequence or better a maturation of something which was elaborated in previous period. Certainly one of the main protagonists of this process is the Timurid historiography which is permeated by an idea of Iran even though this idea appears in this later period as a late elaboration and should be not considered as something particularly original. Rather than, in some case, a fossil of previous idea. Moreover, the dichotomy between the identity and the Geshik bebusain appears here particularly useful, combining two factors, apparently in contrast, which certainly had a substantial impact in the idea of Iran. As I demonstrated elsewhere, we can also individuate a pure commongal Geshik bebusain and even others. Turkish presence in the Islamic world is well attested from the 9th century but there is no trace of a Turkish identity. I find a very good distinction. As a social phenomenon, the fact that this Turkish presence is represented only by search, not written in Turkey cannot be considered as a good reason for the exclusion of the Turkish people from this great big game of a Germany's in Persia. Even in other countries, in this sense, two other words can be spent on the various intermezzo, Iranian intermezzo, Turkmen intermezzo, which are a reflection of a real dynastic dimension of Iranian historiography more than a concrete description of the Iranian society. The question is the use of Persian language and perhaps also and the Persian administrative and political experience in the courts of Iran and Central Asia. Certainly, Ghaznavid court represent the main model in that sense, especially during the mode of Ghazna period but even during the reign of the later Ghaznavid Shahs. This model was built to contrast other models like the Karakhanid, one which spent some energies for a demonstration of a Turkish ethnic belonging with the use of language but were aware of the importance of Persian as Yuri Kareff recently demonstrated with various archaeological evidences. The use of Persian in Ghazni even though in a moderate way represents a specific effort, moreover the so-called Ghaznavid player of Persian poets attest of a precise aim together with other confirmed by the presence of Persian verses in the Ghaznavid palaces. How and when this model strongly influenced the Timurid one, this question permit a large part of Timurid historiography where Mahmud appears as a model. This is the case firstly of the Ghazavate Hindustan by Yasodin Ali Yazdi where Mahmud is really the main model is the precursor. Before tracing an history of this phenomenon, I would like to underline the double nature of the assumption of Persian self-representation. From one side we could note the fact that sources are written in great majority in Persian of course. By Persian and generally for a Turkish Persian public, I am convinced as the case of the above mentioned chapter on Aleppo that the mention of Persian or of the Persian civilization allows frequently the authors to introduce some of their own ideas. When Yasodin Ali Yazdi repos the defeat inflicted by the Timurid to the Musafarid Lord Shah Mansur, his old protector of Yasodin Ali Yazdi, this personage appears as a hero who is almost able to fight against Timurid himself in a hand-to-hand combat. Mansur is considered as a brave warrior and compared to Rustam, he appears even stronger than Rustam. Nevertheless, the fate once again appears as the basic element of Timur's success and Shah Mansur was killed. Yasodin Ali Yazdi and Nizamadin Shami introduced precious biographical notes in which are clearly expressed the sense of oddness about Timur in a disguised way, in the same time they built the figure of the Turanian Shah in a typical Iranian way. Using various experience among them the idea of something which is the unavoidability of the fate and in the case of Yasodin Ali Yazdi also the use of the Quranic term Basira that is the deep vision justify all worst deeds of Timur. There is only a few examples in Persian literature of an explicit criticism, real criticism of the Turkish power. Some of them are for example in the work of Masudi Saadi Salman in Ghaznavid period during his life he met various difficulties in his relation with the Ghaznavid aristocracy of his time. He wrote a satirical prose in a part of his long Shah Rasub devoted to the town of Laor in the second half of the 12th century. Masudi Saadi Salman used sarcastic words against the Amir of the court because they had ridiculed him in the Maglis. The same chapter is also dedicated to an incomium of this court secretary, the Persian court secretary and the doctors. This contrastive chapter is in fact resumed that Persian poetry was clearly adopted as something necessary by the Ghaznavid Amir when in any case we're not so interested by the contents of poetry in this case. Rather than by the use of Persian as an instrument for celebrate them. The contrast among the Persian Dabir's doctor and other secretaries of the court with the Turkish Amir is clearly cut and shows the deep division of the society in two parts. The Turkish rudeness is described by various other authors. Certainly in the Chahar Maghaley the allusion to the satirical verse where Mahmood is described as a son of slaves that is a Turk shows a consciousness of the different ways to interpret the Persian literature by the Turk. The same Nesamir Rosi described frequently the Turks even as cultivated figures like Alp Tegin but also as row figures like Sebuq Tegin and finally the same Mahmood. Alp Tegin appears in the Siyasat Name of Nezaman Mulk as a model of good Turk ready for a Persian, ready for a Persian acculturation. We could trace here an history of the Turkish perception by the Persians with other examples. This is the case of the critics made by Rashid Odin to the Turks which include the Mongols and other people of the Iran in this period. Various satirical invectives made by Obaid Zaghanee against the Turks against the Mongols as a rude military element in the society of his time. Moreover it is not the case to return here on the work of various scholars, Jean Ben and recently David Durongedi who perceived this dichotomy in Persian society at the point to describe the history of Saljuq or Ikanid periods as the era of the Persian administrative elite and the Turk-Mongolian military class of governors. How such dichotomy is perceived in Timurid time? Apparently there was a great change and the Persians appear as supporters of the Timurid advance but with a secondary role considering the large debate in the Islamic world on legitimacy. During the 14th century and the systematic attack against Timur in terms of bad Islamic lore, we should underline that the Persian who were engaged by the Timurid for the elaboration of the imperial chronicles tried systematically a propagandistic re-evaluation of its figure using classical argument. This is the case of the even limited use of the shaname or the exaltation of the concept of Iran and Turan. Other more subtle implications could be detected in Timurid chronicles. If the Anatolian campaign as well as the Mamluk ones were the most ideologically constructed in the main frame of the imperial policy of Timur, the large number of sources on this campaign from opposite sides allows us to identify some stereotype and accusation made both by Timur and against him and in which the term Turkmen in this case plays its part. A few example will clarify this point. On the one hand, as John Woods noted, there is for example Ibn al-Furat who considers Timur as an atabeg of the king of the Tatars that is a chief of Turkmen soldiers who takes order from a Mongol Khan. The Khan is the so-yur-gat-mish, the lord of the cagadai-dolus, the agudate lord of it. On the other hand, we have the Zafar-name of Sharafodin al-ISD where we find a letter by Timur to Bayazid in which the Sultan is accused of being a seaman, a seaman of Turkmen origin. The author further comments in a verse that the Turkmen are far from wisdom. He asked as Herad Turkman Binasib. The use of the derogative term seaman derives probably from the activity of the Ottomans in the Dardanelles and their conquest of the Balkans. But Jurgen Paolo, who approached the question of how the sources, mainly those of the 15th century, could allow one to trace a specific terminology concerning the pastoral nomads and the Turks, the Turkmen, etc. Many focusing on the occurrence of certain terms like Sahran-e-Shin and the Hasham, but for other vaguer words like Turkmen, Turks, Tatars and Mongols was more discreet. As for these terms, Paolo underlines the fact that Turkmen like Turks and Mongols are seen as nomadic no more frequently than Iranian speaking groups and Arabs. In conclusion, the hybrid society of the 15th century show a radical change compared with the early Turkish dynasty of Iran. Now Persians appears as a silent minority, majority, sorry, who collaborate with the political power even though with a nostalgic perception of a golden age of Iranian society. This mythical era is frequently advocated as a model, but in a conventional way. In fact, the priority of the Turkish-Mongol world excludes Persians from any political decision, real political decision. The international game among the main power of the time, including the Ottomans who won in Nicopolis an important battle against the Christian West, the Mamluk power which was protected from Timurid attacks till the end of the 14th century by the charisma of Sultan Barhuk, the two guys who were object of admiration by Timurid himself for the reign of Fyrusha, but expressed later a weak nature during the reign of Muhammud and Maluchan. The same appears even for the reign of the Khadi Burhanedin of Sivas and its inglorious hand. All these Turk-Turkmen kingdoms are considered with a sort of diminuzio capitis as powers where the ancient lord aims were betrayed by the new rulers. In particular, it is the case of the Ottomans and the Tuglaks, which are in the Timurid source the object of a deep criticism. Receiving the Bayleaks leaders from Anatolia who switched sides and joined the Timurid army, Timurid sources considered them Turkmen in a derogative way. Timur gave them a specific status of as lords, governors, generally hachims in the Veloyats of Rome. Sharafudin described this as a lesser evil, the inability of Murad I to conquer the Veloyats of Aiden, Mentecheg and Mian and Karaman produced such a consequence. The Persian historians, in other words, are forced to justify the differences among the various factions of the Turk-Turkmen world exalting the personal charisma of certain lords or the errors made during the past. The Persian model used and justified the Timurid intervention in a world which is pervaded by the Turkish presence. They tried in a certain way to furnish a hierarchy of powers in that context, which was defined in Turkmen lairde reaseb by Mustafa Ali Effendi. A userful definition re-employed recently by Shahin Mustafaev, who underlined the perpetuation of it in the Akko Yulu period, for example. It is not a case that Tursun Bay, who frequently quotes words by word, the work of Sharafudin Ali as the, in his chronicle where he exalts the deed of Mehmed II, uses this argument. Establishing the new year for the lord of his time for the orders of his time and using exactly the same Persian propaganda. Thank you. I've been toiling in the garden of Timurid painting. For a significant number of years, decades, it's actually just now a momentously significant number of decades. I've thanked various people. Last and foremost, I would be unspeakably remiss not to thank my late and much-loved spouse to whose memory I dedicate this presentation, as always and without whom. For it was he who suggested that I step eastward from my study of Franco Flemish illuminated manuscripts in the 14th and 15th centuries and enter the Timurid Garden. Many decades have passed since he made that suggestion. The garden flourishes like all living things it needs continuous tending. For one thing, it's grown, not uncontrollably but greatly. Much work has been done since 1967 and the issues that now animate our study within the broader confines of the subject have naturally altered in that half century. Consider this. The program of a meeting in 1991 focusing on Timurid material culture and its legacy probably organized in the wake of the Sackler Galleries. Timur and the Prinsley Vision sponsored, as you can see, by the Royal Asiatic Society and held in the building across the way more than a quarter of a century ago. The program for our meeting today is rather different, not particularly visual perhaps. Yet I'm certain that none of our distinguished colleagues, historians and literary colleagues alike would question that there is an immensely important visual aspect to the Turco-Timurid century in these lands. Architecture, of course, is one. This is the way to Gaza Gaw, a photograph of 1971. Architecture, of course, is one of the important visual aspects of the 15th century buildings of whatever scale and function provided the physical setting in which Timurids and Turkmens rulers and subjects lived and worked. As with the arts of the book, this material has been much studied in recent decades, its content as well as its engines, the economic and social processes that shaped it, and the many persons who sponsored it, designed, built, decorated it with glazed tiles on portals, internal facades, domes and minarets. All of this is now fairly well documented and better understood. New discoveries, including here-to-forth unrecognized Timurid constructions, for example in Fars province, like the fortress at Marge and the Hanara at Bidahwyd, may now be fitted with little difficulty into a chronology of type, of place, of sponsor. And Timurid summer can will shortly appear before us. The Timurid book offers a peculiarly different view with the 15th century visual arts in the eastern world. At their finest, these volumes are supreme examples of the taste for the intricate, as Maria Subtelni so well expressed it more than two decades ago. But they almost always function as a carrier of another paramount Timurid art texts of all kinds, especially of Belletre. This is in some contra distinction to other small, intricately patterned Timurid objects such as Ulubeg's beautiful little wooden casket. It's finely carved ornament that's the casket on the lower left and a number of drawings from the Topkapur albums all around it. These designs are clearly the forerunners of what happens on so many objects, including the non illustrative arts of the Timurid book. In fact, it's really impossible to separate the literary arts of this period from the arts that went into the making of a fine Timurid volume. Such aspects of volumes include paper, the fine writing transcribed on that paper, the painted and gilded ornament that adorns so many pages in these manuscripts. There are bindings. This is from a selection of poetry by Jami. It's quite late. We'll see others that are earlier. And then, of course, the illustrations that have long been the means for so long now almost the sole feature by which the history of the art of the book in the 15th century has been established. My brief for this meeting was to discuss the, quote, reflection of the Timurid era, unquote, in the arts of the book made in that era. For all the obvious reasons, especially space and time, it seemed right to limit my focus to the best 15th century Eastern books since their look in good part really does define one aspect of the idea of Timurid, Iran, if we dare to use that term. And one more cautionary note seems to happen to all of us. My treatment of the subject as expressed in my abstract has changed since I composed it some months ago. We'll get there. Digging now fairly deeply into the Timurid garden, it's clear that the landscape and its layout have quite changed in the last half century. One reason is naturally the sheer passage of time and our accumulated knowledge of the material. Another is an appreciation of 15th century painting styles other than the classical, a taste I shared, if not with my beloved husband, with my maetre B.W. Robinson. Robbie, as he liked to be called, Dwany, of the study of Persian painting and not just in the English speaking world. Still another reason is the identification and the subsequently revised estimation of the manuscripts created under, for, by, choose your word, the Turkmen dynasties both black and white. By the later 1960s, colleagues in the Topkapur Library, Phyllis Ciamann, Nzerintanindu, and then Robbie were making us all recognize the extraordinary quality of the court sponsored manuscripts made for these princes, as they were also readying us to reconsider the extensive commercial book making industry in later 15th century Shiraz, one of whose essential features was the adoption of the Turkmen illustrative mode at its simplest, and it is very simple. A fourth reason is the belated recognition that the remarkable arts of the book in the 15th century in Iranian lands include far more than its illustrations. Illustrations were really what the beginning scholars in our field worked in. The attitude is inherent in the titles of Yvan Stiwkin's pioneering series of systematic surveys published between 1928 and 1977. Virtually all of them begin Le peinture des manuscrits. Especially now is their illumination, as you may appreciate from the image still before us, along with bindings and sometimes even paper. All of these things count very much in our estimation of the arts of the book. This picture will not tell you, but the remainder of the manuscript from which this comes, it's made I think in 1478, is copied on Chinese paper with gold-drawn landscapes, and there are other manuscripts of this period in which the paper is quite astonishing. Often Chinese, often colored. Looking at something the other day in the British Library, I picked up one manuscript. The little, we'll see it on my list, made in Shemachach, a manuscript that isn't more than this big. And it's so heavy because the paper is glazed Chinese paper. The paper is coated with kale and it's so much heavier than any other kind of thing. It's partly why we need to look at the real things. In any case, we look at illumination in a way we didn't. First-men illumination is particularly an astonishingly different, as you see from what's on the screen still. And so I'm going to quote myself in a conversation in the later 1970s in Robert Skelton's office in the V&A, to the effect that illumination would surely provide a key to unlocking some of our problems in understanding the development of the Persian art of the book, particularly its painting. And of course, it's Elaine Wright who has now helped us focus on the non-illustrative components of these fine 15th century manuscripts. Her look of the book makes us truly aware that, henceforth, we must always take the non-illustrative features of any fine book into any account of the arts of the Eastern manuscript. A fifth reason, equally self-evident, is the more recent entry into the Timurid Garden of so many younger, better-equipped, better-trained scholars. Passion, careful thinking, and their sheer hard work along with time all combine to alter the way we now examine, evaluate, interpret the stuff of our study from what had seemed important in, say, as late as 1991. One fundamental change is embodied in the very nomenclature of the period, as well as the title of this 13th idea of Iran. I have to say that it's not euphonious. So when, henceforth, I say Timurid, you must understand that I also am aware that it's Turkmen as well. Just as we may no longer ignore the significant Turkmen components in the arts of 15th century Eastern book, even if there is still some imbalance in the way we still recognize them or fail to recognize them. That was my original list. It was to demonstrate the theme by looking in brief at the components of these ten superb manuscripts dated or dateable, made throughout the century and thus spanning it. Not that such an examination wouldn't shed much light on it. It's a good way to go through the course of the century. I banded that plan for reasons that seemed smart less than three weeks ago, but let me start with the list nonetheless. My intention was that it cover the century of the Turkotimurid Intermezzo. It begins with a celebrated late 14th century copy of some mathnafys of the poet known as Hwadju Kermony, made not for a Timurid or a Turkmen patron, but for Sultan Ahmad Jalair, Turkomongol by descent and one of the most sophisticated bibliophiles of the age, ruling serially from Ardabil, Tabriz, and then Baghdad from 1382 to his death in 1410. The survey ends, close to the end of the century, with a copy of the celebrated poem, a celebrated copy of the celebrated poem of the mystical poet Farideh Din Atar. An equally celebrated volume begun in Herat at the circle of the last Timurid ruler, Sultan Hussein Baikara, but left unfinished for more than a century. The ebru around it is, of course, later, probably the gold spattering is, doesn't seem to be the wildestly splendid, most splendid of images, but I think the two vertical panels on the lower level are much later than the illumination above it. In other words, it's one of those many manuscripts that was not finished at the time that it was begun and so it has a complex history. Some in this audience looking at this list will, of course, see lacunae. You see that the manuscripts, the numbers could have been doubled, trebled, quadrupled, and they were a selection only. Those who know the subject well will have observed that the manuscript from which comes the beautiful image used on the announcement and the program for this meeting is not there. It's, of course, a celebrated hamsa of Nezami, one painting bearing the date 900, 1494, 5, and a number with a number of illustrations considered to be the work of Kamala Din Besad. It's not even on my list, nor is this. This is later Timuridza Farnam and made for Sultan Hussein Baikara. Choices, choices, as my late father used to lament. Nonetheless, all of these manuscripts represent in all of the essential ways the arts of the 15th century Eastern book, and so I'm going to run through some of the things that they all suggest together. To begin with, they're virtually all made at the behest of princely patrons, Jaleirid, Timurid, Turkman, sponsored, commissioned, ordered, choose your verb, but all connected in one way or another with a person of rank and means, well educated with exacting standards who all as well shared that Timurid taste for the intricate. They were made in a number of different and significant centers. The majority, of course, in Harat, big red letters. We need to keep in mind, however, that Samarkand, just under the X of Transoxiana, and Tabriz, and Shemacha, which is on the list, is probably under Kubachi. Shiraz, Isfahan are also places where many of these manuscripts were made. They contain works composed in Arabic, that's part of an Arabic Quran made for Shah Rukh on the left, in Eastern Turkish. I seem to have missed that one. Oh no, that's on the right. The mother tongue of many of the princes of 15th century Iran and in Persian, of course, in the center. The language of the educated class to which most of these patrons belonged by birth, by education, by both. These manuscripts were transcribed in both Arabic and in Uighur scripts by some of the finest calligrapher anywhere in the Muslim world. On the left is a work of Azhar. At a time when a fine calligraphic hand was a cultural desideratum, and when demonstrated by princes such as Baisungur, such calligraphic skill called forth notable comments of approbation, the panel is the end of the inscription on the entrance portal of the mosque of Gauharshad in Mashhad. Baisungur designed it. I think the date is 821, 1418. In content, all these books are both religious and secular in literary genre. They are prose and poetry. There is the Quran. I also have to say, and I have to say that I'm pleased that I discovered it. It's in Detroit, the city in which I grew up, and it looks very normal at this point, but it too has pages of that extraordinarily colored paper. I just didn't know quite how to get colored pictures from the website onto a PowerPoint. Take my word for it or look on the website. It's just fantastically colored. There is this equally celebrated manuscript that only recently came to light, the Najal Faradis, an Eastern Turkish religious work, prose of great simplicity is the text, but with a fervently proselytising purpose. This is not the Paris Miraginame. It's not quite the same text. This is a later copy made for Sultan Abu Said, and the Turkish at the very top is obviously a translation probably made in Istanbul for those who did not read Uygur. There are, of course, volumes of the most important and most beloved works of Persian poetry. Verdo si shauna me. This is a photograph taken live in the Gulistan Palace Library, again by the person who's not here, taken, I think, in 1959. There are, of course, works by Nizami. This is the famous Hamza of Five Princes, and it is a Turkmen production to begin with. There are other texts, of course, Quadru Kermani, Sadi, Atar and Jami, Amir Khosrho, Delavi, Hafez, and others who don't figure on my list, but they should. In particular, Mir Ali-Shir, Ali-Shir Navoyi's. This is one picture from the last of his Hamza. The picture was recently identified as an idealized meeting of Jami presenting Ali-Shir to the shade of Nizami. It's, as I said, one of the last pictures in Navoyi's own Hamza that I think was probably made for a son of Sultan Hussein. All of these manuscripts, moreover, are, of course, gorgeously ornamented, and they would have been splendidly bound in addition to the pictures within them. One more, Timurid Binding. This is made for Ibrahim Sultan Enshiraz. In any case, one should also comment that the observation in a recent related scholarly gathering suggests that Timurid Bindings are among the most fragile components of such a volume, fragile in the sense of their physical connection to the text block they surround. They tend often not to have survived, and when Alice and Ota was providing me with pictures of binding, she said, early Timurid Bindings are hard because so few of them exist. All right. All these characteristics, patron, place, content, language, script, ornament of all kinds, both abstract and pictorial, do go some way toward defining the look of the Timurid book, if primarily at its highest level of production. There's an obvious corollary, quality, both of material, and the skills of those who executed that I think must be added to the cast of defining characteristics, because simply means often a sure quality. This is not always the case. I'd suggest then that yet another set of features might help us define the look of the Timurid book. These would be size, and scale, shape, and proportion. Of course, this is hardly unique to the characteristics of a fine Timurid volume. They also define architecture as we're going to hear next. I would just say, having recently been lucky enough to have been in the registan in Samarkand, how differently one feels walking into the Ulubeg building than in the other two buildings. It's a Timurid building, and its proportions are different, and it feels differently from the other buildings on the square. That said, however, let me now focus on the handwritten and usually handheld manuscript and make several observations. One aspect of the look of the book in the 15th century in Iran is that even closed, they really do have a specific look. So when one unfolds the flap, turns back the cover, and opens the volume, I think that it's immediately clear that even a single page of a good 15th century book displays a proportional layout that is specific to and typical of this period. In Timurid volumes, the height of the ruling, the jadwal, enclosing the rectangle, apparent or implied of the written surface, has a very particular numerical relationship to the width of the unmargined folio in its original size. This may not be quite the same number, but somehow manipulated, reduced by tens and fives, the measurements reveal a discernibly proportional relationship of folio size to written surface. Long ago, I thought I could express it as a simple ratio. So Shahruf's large Culliati Tori hee, large, folio size of 422 by 315 mm, it's pretty big, displays a ratio again of the original folio to written surface of 4 to 3. This is exactly the same ratio as are found in the few original pages of the Garrett Zaffarnoma, which we know was made in 872. There are only two original folios left in the manuscript, the rest of it was re-margined, but when I played around with this at the time I was working on my thesis, I found that these, I looked at the appendix in preparing this. The Zaffarnoma is about half as small, half the size in height at least, as the Culliati Tori hee, and yet the proportions of folio size and written surface are really the same. I suggest that the same proportional aesthetic is shared by a great many tumored volumes more than almost any of us are ever likely to see, measure and find our notes on. Without carrying this exercise any further here and now, I would say that with some experience one can usually tell much about a good tumored volume even from its cover, irrespective of its size and the number of folios and therefore the bulk that it will take up like this. I have to say I have not studied the finer, the princely or courtly Turkman volumes from this point of view, I could not possibly venture to comment, but I have also observed that no matter the size of a commercial Turkman volume, that's made in Shiraz in the second half of the 15th century, its shape and its proportions really, that is when it hasn't been re-margined, are really different from contemporary tumored volumes and eventually the same features, particular proportion of size and shape goes far toward defining the shape of the classical Shiraz 16th century volume with or without illustrations, its ratio of folio to written surface I long ago found to be five to three. Of course there are many other features in addition to written surface in the original size of a page that comprise proportionality. We won't even talk about calligraphy, I'm not capable of doing that, but it does go without saying that this notion of a proportional relationship of all parts to the whole is not limited to the 15th century fine or otherwise. Our late colleague and dear friend Sharia had systematically examined all these features in the study of an early 17th century copy of a historical text made in Shiraz and he reported a similar interlocking and proportional structure. A student of mine in the 1970s was fascinated with these inherent possibilities and he started to examine a much more important manuscript from our point of view and from this aspect, the Cairo Bustan, unfortunately the law ultimately reclaimed his attention rather than the history of Iranian painting. So the extent to which these physical characteristics really do define all of the 15th century volumes in the east of whatever text, quality and size is still open to examination. I can only say that in my experience it seems to hold true for some of the finer 15th century Timurid volumes historical as well as Bellet, illustrated or not, large or small. I'm not going to speak exactly about the topic announced in the programme because in June 2017 I was given an enormous opportunity to work at the National State Archive in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and I would like to show you some images that I found in the archive concerning the topics we've been dealing on size, scale, shape and proportion in Timurid architecture. So what do we know about the monuments we analyse and how accurate is our knowledge. So the heuristic analysis that I'm going to offer today is meant to provide new inquiries and raise new questions that I probably won't be able to answer. So I would like to start with an image that characterises probably best what I found out. I've worked with the archives of mostly false scholars. These are Vasily Vyafkin, archaeologist who worked in Summercant at the turn of the 20th century. Buristasipkin, architect, the guy on the image that I started my presentation with, who was in charge of the architectural monuments in Summercant until his death in the 1950s and who dedicated his life to restoration practices. He worked at Guriamir and also the Samanit Mausoleum in Bohara. And the other two scholars that are probably your most familiar with these names, these are Mikhail Masom and Galina Pugachenkova, whose works have been very, I mean the basic sources for non-Soviet scholars to study central Asian monuments due to access, you know, to the sources and due to access to archives. And I would like to compare what I found out in the archives of Vyafkin and the Sipkin to what has been published by Masom and Pugachenkova regarding the Timurid dynastic mausoleum of Guriamir. This is Guriamir in Summercant, as we see him today, an incredibly important building, not only for Timurid history but also for the study of Islamic architecture in general and for its influences later on on Google architecture. However, what we see today is hardly what we know from the material sources we have of Guriamir and, namely, this is the photography we use. Guriamir has been important for local religious practices that have been prohibited during the Soviet period but still the importance of the locality, the importance of the building as a place for pilgrimage has remained. Also, Guriamir has been portrayed in tourist brochures as something worth visiting and numerous foreign tourists flood Summercant nowadays to admire Guriamir. But what they see is something different from what might have been built. So this is the only photograph that we have of Guriamir from around 1868, 1872. It was published in an album called the Turkestanski album initiated by the general Kaufmann in Summercant, the Russian general. These images are available on the website of the Library of Congress. You are probably all familiar with them. What I want to focus today is the fact that Guriamir has been analysed as a complete work of art in which we have the octagon, the actual mausoleum, with a very tall drum and a dome. We have a courtyard facade and we have what is the remains of a main entrance portal. These are the plans that were published in the Turkestanski album. As I mentioned, the mausoleum, the octagon, the entrance portal, the courtyard facade. This is one of the earliest pictures of the entrance portal that has been severely damaged but nowadays has been heavily restored. Before I continue with the actual architecture of the monument, I was busy in my research with finding out why was Guriamir built the way it has been built. So I would like to suggest something that also hasn't been published and afterwards if we have time for questions I would like to hear from you what you think about this suggestion. I think that Guriamir, this is the map of summer camp from Google Earth. This is Guriamir to the southwest of the city. I think that the monument was built there as a sort of a spiritual axis combining two other monuments built before Guriamir. These were the mausoleum of Nurul Dimbosir that was situated here, what used to be the citadel of summer camp. This is Ruhabad, the burial place of another Sufi saint, Burhan Adin Sagarji, Guriamir. Here at the bottom we have Aksarai, a very small mausoleum that has been analysed as something that has been built prior to Guriamir by Bartolt and Vyatkin, but Gurtenkuver has proved that actually it was built in the second part of the 15th century. The relevance between these is that we have a sacred geography of the city and a mausoleum is not built at a random place, so the site is carefully selected. With Nurul Dimbosir the mausoleum was built during the Timuridin period, so most likely also during the reign of Timur himself. What I'm talking about is that these three mausoleums, the name with which it is known, Ruhabad and Guriamir were built, or at least Guriamir initiated during the reign of Timur himself. So the mausoleum was built, as I said, in the citadel and the bones of the saint were brought back from outside the citadel because he had lived at the end of the 13th century. The building has been very poorly recorded because it was destroyed, it was destroyed exactly by General von Kaufmann during the siege of Samarkand. This is an image from the Turkestanski album, but also this book, this is the Samaria and this is a translation by Wyselowski. There was an earlier translation by Vatkin, but I have never had access to it, so I'm using this translation, I have the book. So this is what we have of the mausoleum. Before the Russians blew it up, they drew its plans. So we see here that we have the double dome that is so characteristic of Guriamir, and we have a relatively small mausoleum. It was about eight metres, a square shape, and it was erected most likely after Timur created the citadel and the citadel was created between 1371 and 72. So the mausoleum was so well built that there were two attempts to destroy it because the first attempt to destroy it was in July 1880 and they needed 3.5 pounds of gunpowder, they did not succeed.  It was destroyed not because of any particular religious purposes, so this was at least the official discourse, but because it stood in the way of the military. This was supposed to be the Samarkand citadel occupied by General Konstantin Petrovic from Kaufmann. We have also this photograph that I have not been able to date based on which Westchagin created this painting. And what is interesting is that the mausoleum was exactly in the main street that transformed the registan in front of the Tilecary madras to the direction of the citadel. Another painting, so this is the mausoleum and this is Registan Square. What is characteristic of Samarkand from the time that we have photographs? Because I based my research on photographic images as I think that they are the most accurate visual description of the monuments. And I understand that it's very difficult to construct architectural examples in terms of size, scale, shape and propulsion based on textural resources. But I would like to show that this is Ruchabad and in the early years of photography in Samarkand in the mid of the 19th century, the fabric of the city was very dense. So the attitude towards these monuments was such that they were part of the daily living of the people. And these monuments were not, of course there were no laws for protection, but they were incorporated in the living quarters. And as you can see here, so this is between Ruchabad, the mausoleum that was built for the Sagarji who actually died in China, but the bones were brought to Samarkand by his son Abu Saeed, who by the way also kind of convinced Timur to build the mausoleum of Noel de Basir in the citadel. So Ruchabad is the second mausoleum in this kind of sacred urban line. And it was, there was this gate between Ruchabad and what later would be Guri Amir. So this gate, we have a description of the gate actually in the text by Mutribi, which is from 1627. But there was a gate between coming from Ruchabad towards Guri Amir, which is not the entrance portal. So in this sense, we can rely on the sources, but it's very difficult to pinpoint the exact urban location. So about the densely populated area between Ruchabad and Guri Amir, this was also perhaps due to the fact of getting a blessing, no living to an important saint is quite important. This is how the gate looks nowadays. What is also very interesting and is not really mentioned in the descriptions of Ruchabad was that there was a house. Actually Ruchabad was built very close to an old market that used to exist until the 17th century. And similar to the fact that we have at Registan Square a huge marketplace and there was a house to the south of the Uchbet Madrasa, also in Ruchabad there was a house on the other side of the market. These are plants that I have from the archive of Ruchabad. Again very modest mausoleum, square in shape with four arched recesses for intersecting axes with a single dome, with an octagonal transition zone, no existence of the drum that we see in Guri Amir. So this is what I think might have left from the market between Ruchabad and Guri Amir. This is a market for logs, for wooden logs. And this photograph is probably from the beginning of the 20th century or the late 19th century. And we can see that there is a combination of living, of trading. So these mausoleums are actually living in the fabric of the city and we should not regard them as something static. This whole idea of regarding architecture as a monument was adopted during the Soviet period in terms of architectural policies for preservation. But also in the Islamic world the architectural monument, in particular one that is related to a saint, in particular one that is a mazar, is not a static element in the urban landscape and we should not study them as such. So also of the urban fabric very close to the walls of Guri Amir, we have descriptions to the west. Houses were really built onto the walls of the octagon. And this painting by Vereshchagin is a very clear example of the expansion of the housing. Now I would like to go back to the history of Guri Amir itself. So this is a photograph from the Timurid Museum in Tashkent. And it reflects actually the idea of Soviet scholars of how the ensemble might have looked like. So we have the main entrance portal of the complex and before Guri Amir was built, we have the complex of Muhammad Sultan of Timur's air presumptive who died in 1403. And according to the sources we know that Timur commissioned the mausoleum for him. And afterwards he was buried himself there. But there is no indication of the urban surroundings and this is something like a quote taken out of context. So also there is no indication here what I'm going to talk about. Additions to the complex that were done not by Timur but were done during the time of Ulugbeg. And when we talk about the importance of Timurid architecture for the development of Islamic architecture, always in the works of some of the scholars, we've underlined the fact that Timur legitimized his rule through the monumentality of his buildings. But if we really look in summer camps at the mausoleums that I showed, if you look at Guri Amir, apart from the Bibi Hanou Mosque, that could not have been built during the life of Timur and was most likely completed during the reign of Ulugbeg, there is not a single building that is monumental. You know, we are talking now about size, scale, shape and proportion. And this monumentality is something that simply cannot be seen in summer camps. At least I don't see it in summer camps. The Bibi Hanou Mosque, if we trust Clavijo, is that when Timur was not satisfied with the entrance portal and he asked for it to be lowered, he was throwing meat in the pit and the pit had to be dug in order to put stronger foundations. And Timur left summer camps on the 27th of November, 1404, and he died in Otterer. And it's impossible that a massive monument of building as Bibi Hanou could have been completed within this limited amount of space and also with winter coming very early in that November. So, one of the most architectural plans, early ones we have of Guri Amir, is by Veselowski published in this huge monumental edition on Machete Samarkanda from 1905. And what we see in this plan is the octagon. This is the actual mausoleum. And you enter it here from the courtyard, which was the south end of the courtyard, and we have the two minarets. So, this minaret collapsed in 1868 and this one collapsed in 1903. What is very important about this plan, and this is the only plan that I think is accurate, of all the plans that have been drawn afterwards, and I'll explain why. Because the measurements were provided in meters and such. And if you really analyse it, the Guri Amir is not symmetrical between the two minarets. There is a difference. This, the axis of the courtyard is not symmetrical between the two minarets. And also the shape of the octagon. We always consider the octagon to be with ideal size, so we have eight sides. But if you look at these sides, you see that they are not equal. Also what we see here is this wall that is at an angle. And this is the eastern gallery that was built by Ulugbeg in 1424. In all later plans, this wall would be straightened, and I'll show you some images of what actually happened there. But when we analysed the sources, in particular Yasti, who was not in summer camp at the time when Guri Amir was built, we know that the Mosulium was built to the south of the Sufa. And of course you can interpret the word Sufa as being an elevation, or as being something, a platform. But it might have been actually used as the south Iwan of the courtyard of the complex of Muhammad Sultan. And the archaeological excavations that were done by Vatkin and by Zasipkin confirmed that parts of this southern Iwan of the courtyard were demolished so that the wall of the octagon could be placed against it. So we are talking about a complete courtyard that existed there. And regarding the two minarets which are now have been restored after 1996, there was a huge discussion on how many minarets were there in the courtyard. So Mutribi, who wrote his text for Jahangir in 1627, said that there were three minarets. Well, there were four minarets, as is logical, in each corner of the courtyard. But Vatkin, who excavated at Guri Amir in the 1920s, thought that the other pair of two minarets would be to the south. Simple because of this idea that the Mosulium was built to the south of the Sufa. So he started digging for the minarets behind the actual Mosulium. But these minarets were part of the initial complex and these two have survived most likely because they were in a way supported by the walls of the new Mosulium. And the other two minarets on the other side of the courtyard did not have the supporting wall that might have acted as mattresses.