Winner of the Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award 2009This beautifully illustrated history of Safavid Isfahan (1501-1722) explores the architectural and urban forms and networks of socio-cultural action that reflected a distinctly early-modern and Perso-Shi'i practice of kingship.An immense building campaign, initiated in 1590-91 at the millennial threshold of the Islamic calendar (1000 A.H.), transformed Isfahan from a provincial, medieval, and largely Sunni city into an urban-centered representation of the first Imami Shi'i empire in the history of Islam. The historical process of Shi'ification of Safavid Iran and the deployment of the arts in situating the shifts in the politico-religious agenda of the imperial household informs Sussan Babaie's study of palatial architecture and urban environments of Isfahan and the earlier capitals of Tabriz and Qazvin.Babaie argues that since the Safavid claim presumed the inheritance both of the charisma of the Shi'i Imams and of the aura of royal splendor integral to ancient Persian notions of kingship, a ceremonial regime was gradually devised in which access and proximity to the shah assumed the contours of an institutionalized form of feasting. Talar-palaces, a new typology in Islamic palatial designs, and the urban-spatial articulation of access and proximity are the architectural anchors of this argument. Cast in the comparative light of urban spaces and palace complexes elsewhere and earlier-in the Timurid, Ottoman, and Mughal realms as well as in the early modern European capitals-Safavid Isfahan emerges as the epitome of a new architectural-urban paradigm in the early modern age.

More than five hundred full-color illustrations and reproductions capture a panoramic array of Islamic art and architecture in a study that examines the sources, forms, themes, and symbolism of Islamic artistry, as exemplified in mosques, palaces, landscape architecture, caligraphy, miniature painting, tapestries and textiles, and other artforms.

Household anthologies of seventeenth-century Isfahan collected everyday texts and objects, from portraits, letters, and poems to marriage contracts and talismans. With these family collections, Kathryn Babayan tells a new history of the city at the transformative moment it became a cosmopolitan center of imperial rule. Bringing into view people's lives from a city with no extant state or civic archives, Babayan reimagines the archive of anthologies to recover how residents shaped their communities and crafted their urban, religious, and sexual selves. Babayan highlights eight residents—from king to widow, painter to religious scholar, poet to bureaucrat—who anthologized their city, writing their engagements with friends and family, divulging the many dimensions of the social, cultural, and religious spheres of life in Isfahan. Through them, we see the gestures, manners, and sensibilities of a shared culture that configured their relations and negotiated the lines between friendship and eroticism. These entangled acts of seeing and reading, desiring and writing converge to fashion the refined urban self through the sensual and the sexual—and give us a new and enticing view of the city of Isfahan.

In the seventeenth century, the Persian city of Isfahan was a crossroads of international trade and diplomacy. Manuscript paintings produced within the city’s various cultural, religious, and ethnic groups reveal the vibrant artistic legacy of the Safavid Empire. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Getty Museum, Book Arts of Isfahan offers a fascinating account of the ways in which the artists of Isfahan used their art to record the life around them and at the same time define their own identities within a complex society.

In both decoration and design, the grand buildings and gardens of traditional Persia consistently refer to "paradise." The very word itself refers to a sense of heavenly perfection, derived from an early Iranian term for "the Shah's royal hunting grounds." The fine touches of heaven that lie behind the colorful tiled faç ades of palace pavilions and mosques still shine in this richly illustrated and scholarly work. Enter gardens with intricate fountains and majestic ponds fed by water that is sourced from underground aqueducts dating to the 6th century. From ancient mirrored shrines of Shiraz and geometric gardens of Kashan to the ornate domes of Ispahan, here is a glorious photographic timeline drawn in water, brick, and ceramic ornamentation along the 3,000 years of the region's architecture.