Illustrated Ottoman Cosmographies, c. 15501700: The World through Muslim Eyes

(Hardback)

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This book explores the unprecedented Ottoman interest in illustrated cosmographies and their representation of the world and its inhabitants. It analyses fifteen illustrated manuscripts of four cosmographical texts on the Old and New Worlds (in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish) produced in the capital Istanbul and the Ottoman provinces of Egypt, Syria and Baghdad, c. 15501700.
Overall, dozens of richly illustrated cosmographies were copied across the span of six hundred years, from the late thirteenth until the nineteenth century, in different artistic centres and by different political entities in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and India. This study points to an unprecedented and unparalleled production of illustrated cosmographies in the Ottoman period, in particular during the second half of the sixteenth century. It explores the changes introduced into Ottoman cosmographical manuscripts, including representations of holy geography, popular medicine, the dangers of seafaring, Egyptian antiquities, portraits of the Ottoman sultans and depictions of the Orthodox Christian and European.

Author Bio

Bilha Moor is Assistant Professor of Art History at University of Denver, specialising in Islamic Art and Architecture. She completed her PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2011. Prior to her current position, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral fellow of Islamic art at Northwestern University (USA), a Rothschild postdoctoral fellow at SOAS University of London, and a research associate with the Shahnama Project at the University of Cambridge. Her research has been published in Artibus Asiae, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam and Manuscripta Orientalia and she has book chapters in Disliking Others: Loathing, Hostility and Distrust in Pre-Modern Ottoman Lands, ed. Hakan T. Karateke, H. Erdem pa and Helga Anetshofer (Academic Studies Press, 2018) and Shahnama Studies II: The Reception of Firdausi's Shahnama, edited by Charles Melville and Gabrielle van den Berg (Brill, 2012), as well as The Encyclopaedia of the Qur'n Online, edited by Johanna Pink et al. (Brill, forthcoming 2024).