Babur's Gardens: An Oasis in Kabul

Like most Tuesday afternoons, I attended "Pashto coffeehour" today where students of the Pashto language can practice their speaking skills with local Afghans and Ostad Rakhmon Inomkhojaev--Senior Specialist of Afghan languages at IU. Since learning of Professor's Inomkhojaev's  upcoming retirement, I've developed a deeper appreciation for these coffeehours and the opportunity to study Pashto--a language I first fell in love with back in 2007. Having a background in Pashto made learning Persian a little less of a hurdle and I'm currently trying to develop my ear for Dari. I've found watching "Voice of America" broadcasts to be the best strategy where I jot down new word I hear, pause the video, and look it up with a dictionary or on google translate. I also get to mess up a lot and confuse the two languages in front of Rakhmon as I try to compartmentalize everything. It's a labor of love though! Along with being incredibly patient, one of Rakhmon's many strengths is Mughal poetics and he loves to discuss the historical sites of Afghanistan. Today he talked about Babur's Gardens in Kabul during coffeehour.

After decades of war and neglect, Babur's gardens have been completely restored thanks to the Aga Khan Foundation who began rebuilding the site in 2002. It receives thousands of visitors every week and has become an oasis for the residents of Kabul to relax, have picnics, and spend time with friends and family. Babur, the founder of the great Mughal Dynasty, is buried there and the site has expanded into an enormous complex of gardens and waterways. His tomb is rendered in white marble with a plaque bearing his last wish:  "If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this." In a lot of ways, Babur's garden has become a type of paradise--at least a weekend escape for city dwellers. Someday I'd like to visit, but in the meantime there are some great videos that document the transformation of the site in English and Dari:

Extra Links:

Aga Khan's Restoration Projects in Afghanistan

More about the History of Bagh-e Babur

Voice of America: Dari

Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region at IUB

Falnama Future

Falnama is a book of omens used by fortune tellers in Iran and Turkey during the 16th and 17th centuries as the approach of the Islamic millennium (year 1000) inspired concern about the future. Individuals seeking insight into the future would engage in a series of purification rituals, turn to a random page in the Falnama, and interpret the text and drawings thereon for good or ill. Falnamas were not only common objects used by fortune tellers, but also appended to copies of the Koran commissioned by rulers and wealthy individuals. Despite its apparent popularity in the ancient world, only four copies of the large "folio" Falnamas are known to remain in existence. Thames & Hudson published a gorgeous book about Falnamas in 2010. 

Here is the link:   http://www.thamesandhudson.com/Falnama/9780500515112

I first encountered Falnamas in an art history course about images of the Prophet Muhammad and was totally captivated by their use of color and provocative imagery-- reminding me of tarot cards. As a new academic year begins, I wonder what the future looks like.  Let's hope it doesn't look like inferno!

Summer Plans

This summer I'll be in Dushanbe, Tajikistan for two months studying Persian through the US State Department's Critical Language Scholarship. Since I've never been to Tajikistan, I've been looking at a lot of photos from the region to get a sense of its landscape and people. So far it looks like an eclectic mix of socialist architecture with traditional marketplaces and citadels. Dushanbe has a lot of Soviet-style monumental architecture and reminds me of what I saw in Russia. The natural scenery is really beautiful (about 95% of the land is mountainous) and I hope to get a chance to see some of the higher mountains outside the capital. Love the photos of suzani textiles and women's clothing!

Dushanbe from above

Khojand

Shahnameh: The Epic of the Persian Kings

A new adaption of Iran's national epic known as the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings by the poet Ferdowsi, was recently published by Quantuck Lane Press with a revised translation. Its 300 illustrations have gotten a lot of attention since some of them took over 40 hours to complete. Using photoshop, the artist Hamid Rahmanian assembled digital collages drawing from several Persian manuscript paintings to combine the best of the best and enliven these stories reflecting Iran's mythical, heroic, and historical ages. The pre-order option is available on amazon.com and should be released sometime in May. Meanwhile, the Shahnameh's website is fun to explore and gives you a good sense of the project's aesthetic. 

Here is a video of the process:

Textbooks for Ancient Iranian Languages

One of the most challenging aspects of studying any ancient language is the shortage of teaching materials, textbooks, and dictionaries for students to use. Older forms of Persian (like Pahlavi) certainly has this issue and if you're not familiar with reading linguistic descriptions of grammar, you may be desperate for more simple explanations as to how this language works. As much I loved studying Pahlavi, I struggled with it-- spending up to 5 or 7 hours on 15 lines of text only to come to class with a third or more of it totally wrong. What tripped me up was deciphering the letters. It wasn't until the end of last semester did I discover the textbooks of Prods Oktor Skjærvø-- a Norwegian-born linguist and scholar of Iranian languages at Harvard University (NELC dept). He has written learning materials for Avestan (young and old), Old Persian cuneiform, Middle Persian, and Manichaean Sogdian. All of these publications are free and available for download on his website. The Pahlavi Primer can be downloaded here. Thanks to Dr. Skjærvø for sharing his work with the online community! Here is a short interview with him by Pars Times:

Sassanian Seals

This semester my Middle Persian-Pahlavi language class has decided to finish deciphering a collection of Sassanian seals that was sent to my department for consultation. I'm in charge of providing our group with play-doh in order to 'stamp' the seals which can show us details that are difficult to see on the quartz surface. Many of the seals have Pahlavi inscriptions and our goal is to try to translate them into English. Translating may sound straightforward-- but if anyone has ever looked at the 'modified Imperial Aramaic' alphabet that Pahlavi uses, it's rarely straightforward because the shapes of the letters all look alike and tend to change over time. With play-doh, magnifying glasses, individual reading lights, and an enormous stack of reference books-- we could not look more nerdy. I love it, and below are some examples (from the internet) of what these artifacts look like.

Zoroastrianism: Change and Continuity

Last week the School of Oriental and African Studies in London held the Inaugural Lecture of Zartoshty Professor Almut Hintze, an eminent scholar of the Zoroastrian religion and Indo-Iranian languages. Below is her video-- I suggest starting at 12:30. It's a about an hour long and a good survey of the religion. My favorite part is her discussion of how and why the word 'daeva' became a negative term to describe a class of demons in Zoroastrianism that chose to follow Angra Mainya. The synopsis (at the end of the lecture) was also a nice addition.

Winter in Iran

Some people are surprised to learn that it snows in Iran. It certainly does! :) Especially in Tehran and in the mountains. Here are some photos of winter in Iran:

New Year...New Semester

After taking a month off to finish final exams and celebrate the holidays--I'm back at IU and back to blogging! One of my favorite classes this semester is a directed readings course with Dr. Choksy who is an expert of Ancient Iranian Studies and Zoroastrianism. The topic for the course is Pre-Islamic archaeology and the theme of sacral kingship. Here is an article that he wrote for the The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies about this exact topic: Sacral Kingship in Sasanian Iran. This week I'm reading a detailed archaeological survey of Iran written as a travel guide by Sylvia Matheson in the early 1970s. She travels to each province of the country highlighting the most impressive sites (of the supposed 250,000) and adds several notes about hotels, chaikhanas (tea houses), and transportation. I feel like I'm touring the country with her...but at the same time, I'm reminded how difficult it would be to recreate her path of travel nowadays. Paths of travel, especially disrupted ones, is a theme of another course I'm taking on Nomadic Pastoralism of Eurasia with Dr. Shahrani. Many of the migration patterns of Euraisan nomads as well as Iranian nomads were disrupted with forced settlement for taxation, and pressures to urbanize and modernize. Ideology, perhaps more than anything else, has brought nomadism to an end. Yet connections are forged as scholarship, literature, and art--whether ancient or contemporary, can speak to us across these limitations of space and time. The intense documentation of Matheson's work was perhaps intentional--foreshadowing the rise of the Islamic revolution and the future of Iran's relationship to the West. As I work towards the end of my first year as a PhD student, I appreciate documentation more and more, and nothing seems as esoteric. Happy new year to my blog readers and wishing you many moments worth capturing!

S. Matheson in Iran