This book surveys how humans across Eurasia depicted their knowledge of the heavens over a period of nearly 4,000 years. Frequently focusing on enigmatic objects, the authors present a wide variety of objects – through text and pictures – from tombs, churches, temples, caves, museums, libraries and even a bathroom. Analyzing and contextualizing the objects and their astral imageries, the authors narrate what the producers and users of these images knew about the heavens and how they shaped their relationships to them through the objects presented. Among the images treated in the chapters we find planetary and celestial deities (Egypt, Rome, India, Japan), the seven-day-week (Rome, Tibet, Japan), constellations and zodiacal signs (Mesopotamia, the Islamic world, Europe), the Sun and the Moon (Sasanian Iran, northern China, Islamic Iraq), scholars, muses and globes (ancient Greece), power and politics (Rome, Italy), and a dancing goat (Iran).
Les mer
Offers a unique exploration of a broad variety of material objects with astral imagery

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9788869774256
Publisert
2024-02-29
Utgiver
Vendor
Mimesis International
Høyde
240 mm
Bredde
170 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
750

Om bidragsyterne

Rana Brentjes is an art historian, a curator, and a historian of contemporary German History. She is currently the Digital Content Curator of the research project “Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She co-edited the Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies (2023) and co-authored “The scientific environment in Samarkand around Ulugh Beg and the Zīj-i Gūrgānī” in Commentaires du fac-simile du Livre des étoiles fixes d’‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī _Manuscrit BnF Arabe 5036 edited by Anna Caiozzo. In her current work she edits and develops the VoH Database, presents its research potential at workshops and conferences, and works on publishing some of those results. Sonja Brentjes is a historian of science focusing on the histories of mathematics, mapmaking, institutions, translations, travels, and astral imagery in Islamicate societies, the medieval Mediterranean, and early modern Occidental Europe. She co-founded and developped the research project “Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, which she headed from 2016 to 2021. Her latest publications include edited volumes in cooperation with other colleagues on Narratives on Translation across Eurasian and Africa (2022) and the Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies (2023), as well as articles on the Book of the Images of the Fixed Stars by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (903–986). Stamatina Mastorakou is leading the research group “Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She is a historian of science working on the history of astral knowledge and its material culture. Having earned her PhD in Hellenistic astronomy from Imperial College, London, she has taught and conducted research in Athens, London, New York, and Zurich. She spe¬cializes on Aratus’ Phaenomena and her current work focuses on how ancient astronomical knowledge was intricately shaped through poetry, art, and politics. Dagmar Schäfer is a German-based sinologist and director of Department III at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her monograph The Crafting of the 10,000 Things (UCP, 2011) won the History of Science Society: Pfizer Award in 2012 and the ASAS: Joseph Levenson Prize (Pre-1900) in 2013. In 2020 she was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. She is currently researching the historical dynamic of concept formation.