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Semester 1

The Arts in the Age of the Great Caliphs 650-1250 (HIAR10165)

Subject

History of Art

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

3

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Visiting students must have completed 3 History of Art courses at grade B or above, and please note that we will not consider History courses unrelated to Art, or practical Art courses, towards these pre-requisites. We will only consider University/College level courses. Please see Additional Restrictions below.

Course Summary

The course explores the architecture and arts of the period from roughly 650-1250, from the construction of Islam's first great monument, the Dome of the Rock, to the Mongol invasions and the Sack of Baghdad. The course is structured as a series of two-hour seminars, focusing each week on individual monuments and objects representing a variety of functions and media.

Course Description

This course considers the monuments and arts of the major imperial dynasties of the early and medieval Islamic empire. Our focus is the period from roughly 650, with the establishment of the Umayyad dynasty and the construction of the Dome of the Rock, to the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth-century and the infamous Sack of Baghdad. The course is organized around the cosmopolitan courts of the four early imperial dynasties (the 'great caliphates') and their allies and vassals, from North Africa to Central Asia. The emphasis of the course is on exploring the rise of Islamic art out of Antiquity and the astonishing development of an international Islamic visual language within a context of medieval global networks. Close attention will be paid to architecture and works across a range of media, and we will ask what these vibrant material and visual expressions reveal about early and medieval Islamic societies. We will consider a variety of themes, such as connections to Antiquity, visual culture as a means of self-fashioning, interchanges with non-Muslim polities, conceptions of earthly sovereignty, man's relationship with the divine, women and gender, the connections between the arts and other spheres of cultural production, etc.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 50%, Coursework 50%, Practical Exam 0%

Additional Restrictions

Unless you are nominated on a History of Art exchange agreement, visiting students are only permitted to enrol in one 3rd year History of Art course each, per semester, before the start of the relevant semester’s welcome period – and spaces on each course are limited so cannot be guaranteed for any student. Enrolment in a second course from this group will depend on whether there are still spaces available in the September Welcome Period, and cannot be guaranteed. It is NOT appropriate for students to contact staff within this subject area to ask for an exception to be made; all enquiries to enrol in these courses must be made through the CAHSS Visiting Student Office. This is due to the extremely limited number of spaces available in this very popular subject area.

view the timetable and further details for this course