Persian Culture and Heritage

The Art of Achaemenid Persia: Origins and Influences

John Curtis, The British Museum
The Persian Empire that flourished between 550 BC and 331 BC is rightly renowned for its splendid art and architecture, as evidenced particularly at the capital cities of Persepolis, Pasargadae and Susa. The main elements of Achaemenid Persian art and architecture are well known and include columned halls, carved stone reliefs, glazed brick panels, gold and silver vessels with distinctive shapes, and polychrome jewellery. It is remarkable that although the empire was founded only in 550 BC, a full-fledged 'Achaemenid' style had already emerged by the time of Darius (522-486 BC). To achieve this, Persian craftsmen drew their inspiration form many different sources, producing a style that is often describes as eclectic. The strongest influences seem to have been Iranian, Elamite, Assyrian and Egyptian. The lecture considers the impact of each of these influences and how they have been blended together to create a style that is unmistakably Achaemenid Persian.

John Curtis

John Curtis studied Western Asiatic archaeology at the University of London, earning his doctorate with a dissertation on late Assyrian metalwork. Appointed to the staff of the British Museum in 1971, Dr Curtis has served in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities (now known as the Department of the Ancient Near East) as Research Assistant 1971-1974, as Assistant Keeper 1974-1989, and as Keeper from 1989. He has supervised the creation of five new permanent galleries, a number of special exhibitions, and organised the move of the department to one of the finest historical rooms in the British Museum. During his tenure, many important objects have been acquired, two annual lectures have been endowed, and a number of international conferences have been organised. Dr Curtis has participated in excavations throughout the Middle East and - on behalf of the British Museum - has directed excavations at eight different sites in Iraq (including Nimrud). He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2003. A teacher and a frequent lecturer at museums, universities and archaeological societies worldwide, Dr Curtis is also the author or editor of some one hundred articles within his area of specialisation - ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Iran, particularly during the Iron Age (about 1000-330 BC), in addition to over a dozen books which include: Fifty Years of Mesopotamian Discovery (ed.) (1982), Nush-i Jan III: The Small Finds (1984), Bronzeworking Centres of Western Asia c. 1000-539 BC (ed.) (1988), Excavations at Qasrij Cliff and Khirbet Qasrij (1989), Ancient Persia (1989, 2000), Early Mesopotamia and Iran: Contact and Conflict c. 3500-1600 B.C. (ed.) (1993), Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British Museum, with J.E. Reade (eds.) (1995), Later Mesopotamia and Iran: Tribes and Empires 1600-539 B.C. (ed.) (1995), Mesopotamia and Iran in the Persian Period: Conquest and Imperialism 539-331 BC (ed.) (1997), Excavations at Khirbet Khatuniyeh, with Anthony Green (1997), Mesopotamia and Iran in the Parthian and Sasanian Periods: Rejection and Revival c. 238 BC-AD 642 (ed.) (2000) and Ancient Caucasian and Related Material in the British Museum, with Miroslaw Kruszynski (2002).

Persian Fire

In Persian Fire, Tom Holland contents that Achaemenid Persia was the first truly world empire and that, had Cyrus's grandson Xerxes succeeded in his attempted conquest of the Greek mainland in 480, there would not have been much if any 'West' for that shadow to fall over. Tom Holland's non-fiction but - inevitably - slightly fictionalised account of what the Greeks called 'the Median things' (they were incapable of distinguishing the Medes from their southern Iranian cousins and vanquishers) is the first in English addressed to a general readership for more than 30 years. In it, Holland crosses his own Rubicon, from Roman history to Greek, but not only Greek by any means. One of the presentations many attractions is the care lavished on trying to get under the skin of the Persians, especially those of the imperial court and wielding the highest military commands. Indeed, as the title is surely meant to suggest, all attempt is made to see the wars from the Persian just as much as the Greek side.

Tom Holland

Tom Holland received a double first from Cambridge. He has adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for BBC Radio. His scholarly style is perfect to reposition him as a writer of non-fiction as well as fiction. His two best known non-fiction books are Rubicon: the triumph and tragedy of the Roman Republic and Persian Fire. He was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Rubicon and won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History 2004.

From Exile to Transnationalism in the Iranian Artistic Diaspora

Amna Malik, Slade School of Art
In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution the emergence of Iranian artists in western metropolises has been part of a complex cultural politics of exile in which nostalgia and longing have been key tropes. The work of Shirin Neshat is symptomatic of an artistic practice that has emerged from the emotional and political trauma of this rupture. Her films made by a crew of Iranian-Americans are a series of melancholic meditations on an Iran that has vanished and arguably only exists in the nostalgic memories of the Diaspora. If Shirin Neshat's filmic vocabulary finds its textual inspiration in Iranian women writers, its visual form is drawn from European art films as much as contemporary Iranian film, and marks the significance of a visual language that is syncretic. By contrast London based Maria Kheirkhah's sculptures deploy space as a politicised arena within a practice that is deeply conditioned by debates in the west concerning post-colonialism and art practice that draws on the Minimalist sculptures of Mona Hatoum and Rasheed Araeen, who were prominent contributors to the British black arts movement of the 1980s. If Kheirkhah's references to Iranian cultural politics are deliberately oblique, they nonetheless condition her awareness of the need to counter the orientalism of Iran and the Middle East in western representations. Shirana Shahbazi on the other hand is an artist informed by the resurgence of Pierre Restany's nouveau realiste aesthetic in the European contemporary art world. Moving between Switzerland and Iran her practice deftly draws on aspects of everyday life in Iran that is indicative of a younger generation of Iranians in the Diaspora who move with ease between Iran and different parts of the world. In her work Iranian modernity is conditioned by and also reflective about the cultural trans-nationalism that has overtaken the earlier dichotomy of centre-margin in geopolitics. The aim of this paper is to map these differences of generations and geographies of the Diaspora as a constantly shifting cultural terrain that also has the potential to challenge the purist notions of cultural identity in Iran and various western nation-states

Amna Malik

Amna Malik is Lecturer in History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the Slade School of Art, UCL. Her doctoral research was on surrealism and psychoanalysis, since then she has extended her interests to issues of Diaspora based art practices in Europe and the USA. She has written extensively on a number of artists including Shirin Neshat, Steve McQueen and Lorna Simpson. In 2004 she organised a major conference in collaboration with The Freud Museum: Art, Identity and the Unconscious in the Age of Transnationalism and has been writing and publishing papers on psychoanalysis, art practice and the legacy of identity politics. She is currently preparing a book on the subject with a working title On Entanglement: identity politics and art practice reconsidered that will include the work of Shirin Neshat, Kara Walker and Alia Syed amongst others.

'Alexander' and Persia: Film and Reality

Robin Lane Fox, New College, University of Oxford
When Oliver Stone began preparing his new film he turned to Robin Lane Fox for historical advice. However, the horse-mad scholar only agreed on one condition - the director must give him a place on horseback in the front ten of every major cavalry charge by Alexander's cavalrymen to be filmed by Oliver Stone in location. The film director knew he had to leave out many major events in Alexander's restless career. But cleverly, he used Ptolemy, reminiscing and as 'voice-over', who could hint at things the film could not show. And he designed the script as a drama, hung round Alexander's turbulent youth and his present actions, with Ptolemy speaking for the future. These 'parallel stories' are not flashbacks: they are a dramatic, closely woven web, of Oliver Stone's design, whose aim is a powerful drama. Of course, some events had to be brought forward in time or place and merged with similar ones, so as to be all shown on one (expansive!) location. The director knew that he was not making a documentary. He was making an epic drama, but the drama is unusually rooted in history. It has scope, though not the total story. And the major characters have a real dramatic power. These characters are all historical people and broadly they play in their main historical roles--as father, mother, tutor, wife, eunuch, general, and so forth. But they are actors in a drama, not a history book.

Robin Lane Fox

Robin Lane-Fox has been Fellow and Tutor at the University of Oxford's New College in Ancient History since 1977 and University Reader in Ancient History since 1990. His books and articles include major works on Alexander the Great and the relation between the pagan and early Christian religions of the Roman Empire. He has taught Greek and Latin literature, Greek and Roman history and early Islamic history in which he held an Oxford Research Fellowship. He is perhaps best known for his books The Search for Alexander and Alexander the Great: A Biography.

Islamic Art in Iran: The Sasanian Heritage

The art of the classical tradition, broadly interpreted as incorporating Greek, Roman, early Christian and Byzantine art, has long been recognized as a major influence on the formation of Islamic art. Yet alongside this prolonged and well-documented encounter with the art of the Mediterranean world one may trace a continued but much less studied interaction with the cultures of the ancient Near East - notably that of that of Sasanian Iran, itself rooted in the Parthian, Achaemenid and Babylonian past. The lecture will seek to trace the transition from Sasanian to Islamic modes through examples taken from textiles, metalwork and ceramics, using iconographic changes as a diagnostic tool. It will show how, as Iran's imperial past metamorphosed from remembered history into myth, key images of kingship gradually lost their much of their meaning as they were reshaped for a more popular audience. Yet these pre-Islamic themes turned out to have an extraordinarily tenacious life of their own and somehow managed even to re-invent themselves, as they were transposed into new and unpredictable contexts. The 10th-century "Iranian intermezzo" (to borrow Minorsky's phrase) provided the appropriate political and literary environment for this resurgence and Islamization of Sasanian themes.

Robert Hillenbrand

Robert Hillenbrand is Professor of Islamic Art at the University of Edinburgh. He was educated at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford. He has been teaching at the Department of Fine Art, University of Edinburgh, since 1971 and in 1989 was awarded the Chair of Islamic Art at the university. His scholarly interests focus on Islamic architecture, painting and iconography, with particular reference to Iran and to Umayyad Syria. In addition to his more than 100 articles on aspects of Islamic art and architecture, Robert Hillenbrand has also published Imperial Images in Persian Painting, Islamic Architecture in North Africa (co-author), Islamic Art and Architecture and the prize-winning Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning which was translated into Persian in 1998.

Posters in the World of Iranian Graphic Arts

Peter Chelkowski, New York University
The world of Iranian graphic arts, the second half of the twentieth century belongs to posters. Between the Second World War and the Iranian Revolution, posters were used primarily for commercial purposes: to advertise domestic and foreign goods and products; to advertise cultural events such as movies, theatrical productions, festivals, concerts, exhibitions, and conferences; and to promote tourism. With the passage of time, posters were increasingly used for political purposes: to commemorate historical events such as the 2500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, 50 years of Pahlavi reign, or the implementation of the White Revolution. Through these posters, the artists -- both photographers and graphic designers -- tried to convey the stability of Iran and its bright future. However the heyday of Iranian posters was the period of the Iranian Revolution and defensive war against Iraqi aggression. Posters were used to stimulate the spirit of revolutionary and war preparedness and sacrifice. These posters overshadow even those of the 1917 Russian revolution and Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution. They are a further proof that posters constitute the most revolutionary genre of graphic arts.

Peter Chelkowski

Peter Chelkowski, New York University, specialises in modern art and literature and the role of Islam in the modern world. He talks about the political and cultural role of poster art for the identity of modern Iran. His academic background is a multi-cultural, multi-disciplined one. After moving to London from Cracow he studied Islamic Middle Eastern History and Culture at SOAS and then went to Tehran University to study Persian Literature. His scholarly interests range from the many and varied uses of the language itself to the role of Islam in architecture and the relation of art to society. In his graduate courses dealing with Islam in the contemporary world, he is primarily concerned with rectifying Western misconceptions of Islam both as a religion and in its various cultural forms.