Appreciating, Collecting, and Meaning of Ancient Objects in the Early and Middle Islamic PeriodStefan Heidemann at the Symposium at the Bard Graduate Center, New York

8 May 2019

On May 9-10, 2019 the Bard Graduate Center hosts a symposium on Antiquarianism in the Islamic World sponsored by the Trehan Research Fund for Islamic Art and Material Culture.

The goal of the conference is to examine antiquarianism in the Islamic world in the same terms and with the same care that has been invested in the study of Western antiquarianism. The symposium is chaired by Peter N. Miller and Abigail Krasner Balbale, who is also one of the Webinar Initative's founders.

Stefan Heidemann, professor for Islamic Studies at Hamburg University and co-founder of the Webinar Initiatie in Islamic Material Culture, will participate in the symposium.

"Appreciating, Collecting, and Meaning of Ancient Objects in the Early and Middle Islamic Period"

Stefan Heidemann

Abstract:

The appreciation of objects of the past includes a number of aspects that are sometimes conflated, and sometimes overlap. A term for the appreciation and collecting of ancient goods did not exist as such in pre-modern Arabic lexicography. But we can identify practices and intellectual and even political interaction with ancient objects. Given the sparseness of sources, we have to take at that stage a wide classifying approach to identify those intellectual activities in which we were most interested in: the study of the past through objects. I will approach this topic less from a literary viewpoint, but from a view point of material culture, where we actually can perceive a reception of historic shapes and artifacts and where the contemporaries transformed their meaning or include them in new meaningful actions. The assumption is that any taking-up of historical shapes in art and architecture, has to be preceded by a some form of comparison between the present and the distant past. Collecting of ancient artefacts may be part of such a process. While the first two of the following fields will be a kind of review to map the field of study, research for this conference is done within the third field.

The first is the ‘useful memory’ in the sense of Jan Assmann. The studied artefacts and the architecture have to be useful visible symbols, resonant within the targeted contemporary society or social group. This resonant effort might be based in part on collecting, but it seems to be mainly based on contemporary visibility of past architecture, still visible and appreciated in the cities of the early and middle Islamic period.

Secondly, comes the use of ancient objects for magical practices, the use of spolia, hieroglyphs, writings on Egyptian artefacts, and reuse of Roman contorniatae. Sources for these practices are texts, but mostly the artefacts themselves, and spoils turned into magical objects as such.

The third field looks for the few traces of a practice more akin to the western understanding of antiquarianism, the appreciation and study of the past through objects and eventually collecting them. This kind of study never became a movement that left its reflection in the literature. On the opposite, this interest in ancient objects is only mentioned by passing within other narratives, never focusing our topic. In general these references to the study of objects are usually imbedded in the akhbār, the collections of information about the past.

The conclusion will concentrate on the third field. How does the study of ancient objects fit into the writing of history?

For further information on the symposium and a livestream of the event, please visit the symposium's website.