300 x 240 mm, paperback, 52 pages, 30 colour illustrations
PRICE: £20.00
ISBN: 978 0 953942 29 9
Customers in the US or Canada, CLICK HERE
For more than a thousand years, the paths of the Silk Road joined the distant empires of East Asia and the Mediterranean, forming a complex web of trade, pilgrimage and intellectual exchange between China, Central Asia, Persia, Tibet, India, the Near East and Europe.
Interest in the cultures of the Silk Road was renewed in the end of the nineteenth century. In 1907 Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943) made one of the most sensational archaeological finds of all time: at the Mogao Caves, also known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, near Dunhuang, he discovered a library containing thousands of both religious and secular manuscripts dating from the fifth to the eleventh centuries. Most such documents have ended up in institutions like the British Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale and other national libraries in India, China and Japan.
In keeping with the diversity of the Dunhuang discoveries, this book consists of examples of manuscripts in Chinese, Khotanese, Bactrian, Gandhari, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Syriac, Hebrew and Arabic. The material provides a sense of the fruitful exchanges as well as bitter struggles in these regions over the centuries.
The selection consists of Qur’ans, illustrated Islamic manuscripts and scientific and religious manuscripts. All are handsomely illustrated and fully discussed. The manuscripts are from all parts of the Islamic world and represent the finest achievements of the form. More
Produced for the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie, this book traces the development of the early Ottoman style under influence from their neighbours; the impact of the patronage of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror; and the development of the ‘classical’ style under his successor Bayezid II. A catalogue section provides beautiful illustrations of 41 masterpieces of bookbinding; with technical appendices, bibliography, concordance and index. More
This catalogue discusses and illustrates a wide variety of Chinese books, dating from the sixth to the nineteenth century -- some very rare. More
Around 1800, an anonymous engraver in Sharanakula, a small temple place on the southern coast of Orissa, illustrated a palm-leaf anthology of love poems. The one hundred Sanskrit quatrains, which are said to be the work of the 7th-century poet Amaru, describe the behaviour of enamoured couples, their longing for each other, the lovers’ anxieties, their ecstatic joy as well as their doubts and sorrows. More
Given the status of the Qur‘an as the eternal and uncreated word of Allah, the art of the pen became the focus of an extraordinary energy in the Muslim world. Ink and Gold charts the development of Islamic calligraphy – the noblest, most stylized and original of the Islamic arts – over a period of some 1200 years, from its beginnings in the Arabian Peninsula. More
Illuminator, painter, scribe, clerk, teacher, doctor of theology, restorer and binder, Mesrop was one of the greatest Armenian artists of his and following generations. He was prolific, working for at least forty-two years in Sos (New Julfa) from 1608 to 1651. This book will be the first serious study of the forty-six of his manuscripts that have survived. The focus of the book, however, is The Four Gospels, one of the few manuscripts painted entirely by Mesrop’s hand and one of the most extensively illuminated in his oeuvre. More