The Seljuqs and their Successors presents, by and large, the proceedings of a June 2016 symposium held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibit, “Court and Cosmos: the Great Age of the Seljuqs.” Its chapters range from general surveys of the Seljuq period to technical studies of individual objects. There is something here for anyone with an interest in the Seljuq world: politics, religion, and the remarkable artwork at the center of “Court and Cosmos.” This volume advances the scholarship on the Seljuq world and proposes new methods for future scholarship.
The volume is divided into six parts of unequal length. The introduction contains the editors’ preface and chapters by Carole and Robert Hillenbrand, which outline the broad contours of the period's politics, society, and art. They introduce the main topics of the volume, though there is some inconsistency on the topic of architecture, which the editors identify as a focus of several chapters but is conspicuously absent from Robert Hillenbrand's summary chapter. The disconnect becomes immediately clear in the single chapter of the volume's second part, where Scott Redford discusses the architecture of Anatolian caravanserais and Rum Seljuq support for regional trade. Here, the buildings themselves are our best evidence for a broad economic practice and must be considered, even if they could not be included in the exhibition.
Its focus on buildings might have earned Redford's chapter inclusion in the volume's third part, “Faith, Religion and Architecture.” In its current form, however, this section provides an extended meditation on Seljuq-era religious culture. Deborah Tor surveys the major trends in the religious culture of the period, while Lorenz Korn offers a valuable overview of developments in dome architecture. These two chapters on the social and built aspects of Islam feed nicely into in Yasser Tabbaa's study of the patronage of Nur al-Din Zangi and Badr al-Din Lu'lu’ in Mosul, drawing important attention and documentation to a body of cultural heritage that, since the destruction caused by the Islamic State, will forevermore be studied in reconstruction.
The two chapters of the book's fourth part, “Identities: Rulers and Populace,” advance the discussion of patronage. Roberta Giunta and Viola Allegranzi propose a corpus of Eastern Iranian epigraphy for the Ghaznavid, Qarakhanid, and Seljuq period, laying out a framework for revisiting known material and integrating new evidence. In examining dedicatory and waqf inscriptions from Seljuq-era Anatolian mosques, Patricia Blessing largely follows her 2014 monograph, Rebuilding Anatolia, though here she also features some Armenian inscriptions and buildings that received only passing treatment in her book.
Blessing sketches an image of diverse cultural influences in Anatolia that carries over into Rustam Shukurov's chapter, which opens with the observation that most studies do not capture the entire cultural complexity of Rum. Despite this, Shukurov himself chooses to focus on Greek and Persian elements of regional identity, demonstrating rather than overcoming the challenge of capturing the full complexity of a society run by Turks, in a land housing many Armenians, and on the frontier between the Greco-Roman and Perso-Islamic worlds.
Two chapters on the supra-mundane make up the book's fifth part, “Magic and the Cosmos.” Andrew Peacock describes a gathering of occult texts found in Paris BnF ms. persan 174 to show how astrological and apocalyptic traditions were updated in the wake of the Mongol conquests. The other side of astral science, observational astronomy, is the topic of George Saliba's contribution, which surveys important astronomical developments leading up to the Seljuq period. These created space for a new attitude of skepticism by the “most distinguished” astronomer of the age, Abū al-Fatḥ al-Khāzinī (fl. 1115-30), as he and his contemporaries made many innovations in observational method.
The sixth and final part of the volume, “Objects and Material Culture,” overlaps in the most traditional way with the museum exhibit. Working off a Ghazālī passage, Margaret Graves considers the rich array of objects with animal decoration to ask how such art can be rectified with the famous (and famously misunderstood) Islamic “prohibition” against figural art. Renata Holod's chapter draws on her ongoing engagement with the materials of Erich Schmidt's excavations of Rayy in the late 1930s. Mustering her deep familiarity with the corpus of excavated materials, Holod offers thoughts on the culture and process of their creation. These chapters focus on iconographic theory and artisanal practice rather than the objects themselves, and thus contribute to an understanding of the social role of art in Seljuq Iran.
The final two chapters provide technical descriptions of the recent conservation of two monuments of Seljuq-era artwork. Leslee Michelsen and Stefan Masarovic write about the stucco “Stora panel” in the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha (SW.160.2011). While this panel was not included in the exhibition, the chapter is relevant to other large-format Seljuq-era stucco, including the wall panel lent by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1929-60-1). One of the landmark objects on exhibit in “Court and Cosmos” was a collection of pages from the earliest known copy of The Shahnama, now held in the National Central Library of Florence (Ms. Magl Cl.III.24). Alessandro Sidoti and Mario Vitalone describe in detail the process of conserving the manuscript and stabilizing it for travel to New York and future study. Each of these chapters provides clear documentation of the conservation process for anyone wishing to work with these or comparable objects from the period.
Beyond their individual merits, the chapters of this volume create sustained discussions of architecture (chapters 4-9), hybrid cultural identities (chapters 9-11), manuscripts (chapters 11, 12 and 16), and decorative arts (chapters 13-16). Furthermore, there are important through-lines of practice, craft, method and the social landscape underlying the artistic materials featured in the exhibition. Thus, while few may read the volume in its entirety, there is merit in doing so; a testament to careful editing. However, while this is a handsomely produced book with full-color images of art objects, the maps and figures are at times completely unreadable. To give just one example, on the opening map of the Seljuq Empire (Figure 2.1), only the names of the largest regions can be read, and only if the reader already knows what to look for. The e-book format should allow for higher resolution images, but unfortunately that opportunity has not been taken.
The Seljuqs and their Successors offers something for anyone studying the Seljuq period, of which there are bound to be more given the high visibility of the Met exhibition. The editors, who also designed the exhibition, have curated the knowledge in this volume effectively, save a few questionable decisions, such as the single-chapter Part Two or the poor quality of non-object images. These minor points aside, the volume should help inspire further research in the many fields of inquiry it addresses.
