Before archaeology
Subtitle: the meaning of the past in the Islamic pre-modern thought (and after)
By: edited by Leonardo Capezzone
Publisher: Artemide
Published: 2020
Place of publication: Roma
Language: eng
Number of pages: 206
ISBN-13: 9788875753665
Copyright date: 2020
Subjects: Knowledge, Theory of (Islam); Early works to 1800; Historiography; Islamic learning and scholarship; History; Learning and scholarship
Description: "This volume aims to explore some aspects of the multifaceted modalities with which classical and pre-modern Islamic thought (with two final glances at modern and contemporary times) has imagined and narrated the past, entering into a dialogical relation with its questioning nature, developing an intellectual and interpretative attitude to the past from different points of view - literary, historical, philological, political, religious, or at the level of collective imagination -, and articulating a complex discourse on antiquity, its memory and its persistence in the cultural and geographical spaces of the Muslim Near East. From different perspectives and with different approaches, the scholarly contributions here collected investigate how the pre-modern Muslim Near East imagined and gave meaning to a past which emerged in the form of traces (āthār - a word which appears, in the Islamic historiographical tradition, every time the description of the landscape meets the desire or the anxiety of interpreting it in a historical framework) before Western archaeology, since the late 18th century, established the epistemic framework of the scientific knowledge of the past... The essays collected in this volume investigate precisely the ways in which the historic culture of the pre-modern Arabic Islamic world constructed epistemic frameworks in order to understand and narrate the past, utilizing categories and methods (sometimes in conflict with each other) that sought to define the conditions of truth of the historic narrative and to control the conditions of the use of sources"--Introduction.
Notes: "Opere collettanee dell'Atlante del Vicino Oriente antico 1 (OCAVOA-1)"--Page facing title page.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Ptolemy's place names of Mesopotamia : change and persistence / Lamberto Lesti, Cosimo Palagiano; title: Manāzil Sulaymān : Solomonic memory and the Islamic Empire in the early Abbasid Period / Michelina Di Cesare; title: The past before their own past : time, otherness and the remains of pre-Islamic civilizations as seen by medieval Muslim authors / Giovanna Calasso; title: Tradition and re-elaboration of a Shi'ite account on the prophet Idrīs / Laura Bottini; title: Inscriptions and portraits from the past: a fictional temptation in al-Masʻūdī's Murūj al-Dhahab / Leonardo Capezzone; title: The last years of the Sasanid Empire as reflected in the Persian romantic narrative tradition / Paola Orsatti; title: The journey of wisdom : Al-Fārābī on philosophy before the Greeks and the development of  knowledge / Federico Stella; title: Quoting the Shāhnāma in monumental epigraphy : literary culture and legitimisation strategies across the Persianate world (5th/11th-7th/13th C.) / Viola Allegranza; title: The Roman past in 7th/13th-century Ḥamā (Syria) : a brass cast with the portrait of Nero in the treasure of al-Malik al-Manṣūr II / Arianna d'Ottone, Erika Zwierlein-Diehl and Hadrien J. Rambach; title: Beyond recovery towards continuity in the Qajar perception of the past : the case of Āthār-e ʻAjam (Antiquities of the Persians) by Forṣat al-Dowla Shirāzi / Simone Cristoforett; title: The re-Orientalisation of the myth of Adonis in ʻAshtarūt wa-Adūnīs by Ḥabīb Thābit / Arturo Monaco.