Browsing by Author "Lambourn, E."
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Item Embargo Abraham's Luggage(Cambridge University Press, 2018-09-28) Lambourn, E.From a single merchant's list of baggage begins a history that explores the dynamic world of medieval Indian Ocean exchanges. This fresh and innovative perspective on Jewish merchant activity shows how this list was a component of broader trade connections that developed between the Islamic Mediterranean and South Asia in the Middle Ages. Drawing on a close reading of this unique twelfth-century document, found in the Cairo Genizah and written in India by North African merchant Abraham Ben Yiju, Lambourn focuses on the domestic material culture and foods that structured the daily life of such India traders, on land and at sea. This is an exploration of the motivations and difficulties of maintaining homes away from home, and the compromises that inevitably ensued. Abraham's Luggage demonstrates the potential for writing challenging new histories in the accidental survival of apparently ordinary ephemera.Item Embargo Ali Akbar’s red horse – collecting Arab horses in the early modern culture of Empire.(Routledge, 2016-12) Lambourn, E.The Islamicate world has barely featured thus far in the new academic study of collecting, collectors and collections, certainly nowhere in proportion to its vast geographical and temporal extent. My chapter contributes to this nascent bibliography with a study of the relationships between merchant brokers and court collectors in seventeenth century India, as they emerge through the case study of ‘Ali Akbar Isfahani and his provision of ‘jewels and horses’ to the Mughal emperor of India, Shah Jahan. Using ‘Ali Akbar’s career as a case study, this chapter discusses what is known, and not known, about the role of merchants as patrons and brokers, providing in the process a survey of the existing literature. The second part of this chapter addresses is the place of the horse in collections as an animate ‘collectable.' The study of a particular 'red' horse supplied by ‘Ali Akbar to Shah Jahan queries and disrupts some of Asian art’s more established taxonomies and argues for a less object-centric, more holistic view of what was collected, by whom, how and why, in early modern Eurasia.Item Embargo Borrowed Words in an Ocean of Objects: Geniza sources and new cultural histories of the Indian Ocean(Primus Books, 2015-06) Lambourn, E.Historical linguistics has much to offer the discipline of history. While recent work on the prehistory of Indian Ocean contacts has turned to historical linguistics to support research into the early circulation of people, crops and domesticates, linguistic evidence is, on the whole, underexploited, and this in spite of well-established evidence for its validity as a methodology in history. This essay explores the way that even the analysis of single words can contribute to the bigger questions of material and linguistic circulation and hybridity in the medieval Indian Ocean.Item Metadata only Brick, timber and stone: building materials and the construction of islamic architectural history in Gujarat(Brill, 2006) Lambourn, E.Item Metadata only Carving and communities: marble carving for Muslim communities at Khambhāt and around the Indian Ocean rim, late 13th – mid-15th centuries CE)(Freer Galllery of Art, Smithsonian Institute., 2007-06-01) Lambourn, E.Item Metadata only Carving and recarving: Three Rasulid gravestones revisited(2004) Lambourn, E.Item Open Access Chinese porcelain and the material taxonomies of medieval Rabbinic law: encounters with disruptive substances in(ARC Humanities Press, 2016-12) Lambourn, E.; Ackerman-Lieberman, PhilipThis article focuses on a set of legal questions about sini vessels (literally, "Chinese" vessels) sent from the Jewish community in Aden to Fustat (Old Cairo) in the mid-1130s CE and now preserved among the Cairo genius holdings in Cambridge University Library. This is the easiest dated and localised query about the status of sini vessels with respect to the Jewish law of vessels used fr food consumption. Our analysis of these queries suggests that their phrasing and timing can be linked to the contemporaneous appearance in the Yemen of a new type of Chinese ceramic ware, qingbai, which confounded and destabilised the material taxonomies underpinning rabbinic Judaism. Marshalling evidence from contemporary Jewish legal compendia and other writings produced in this milieu, our discussion substantially advances interpretive angles first suggested by S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman to examine the efforts of Adeni Jews to place this Chinese ceramic fabric among already legislated substances, notably the "neighbouring" substances of glass and earthenware, in order to derive clear rules for the proper use and purification of vessels manufactured from it.Item Metadata only ‘A collection of merits…’ architectural influences in the Friday mosque and Kazaruni tomb complex at Cambay in Gujarat(British Academy, 2001-12-01) Lambourn, E.Item Metadata only A Cultural History of the Sea in the Medieval Age (800-1450)(Bloomsbury Academic, 2021-04-22) Lambourn, E.The cultural history of the sea during the Middle Ages is a young and dynamic field. Born only recently in the literary criticism of European sources - and still flourishing there - this innovative volume nevertheless pushes out beyond this European literary heartland to explore the shape and potential of a cultural history of the sea constructed also from global literatures and oral traditions, and from material things. The chapters in this volume bring together the perspectives and expertise of archaeologists, historians and literary historians with a core focus on Afro-Eurasia and its encircling seas. Together these chapters explore topics as diverse as the evolving visual representation of the seas in Europe, the Islamic world and the Far East; the development of navigation technologies in the seas around Afro-Eurasia; imaginative projections of the sea in cultures ranging from Maori Aotearoa to Europe; a history of maritime and riverine trade networks across medieval Afro-Eurasia and two novel comparative studies, of islands and shores in Mediterranean and Indian Ocean history, and of the archaeology of fishing and fish eating in the North Atlantic and Swahili worlds. Several of these chapters represent world firsts in their willingness to write across such broad seascapes and temporal ranges. Other chapters narrow their focus to provide case studies and transferrable models of topics such as literary evidence for the lived experiences of Mediterranean sea travelers and conflict at sea in the western Indian Ocean. This volume does not pretend to offer a definitive answer to how a more global cultural history of the sea should be written, it offers not “The” but “A” Cultural History of the Sea for the period between 800 and 1450 CE, shaped as much by the parameters of the series itself as by the vision, curiosity and expertise of its editor and individual contributors. In so doing this volume hopes to open fresh dialogues amongst cultural historians of the sea, and to bring new ideas and questions to the greater numbers of non-specialists just now venturing into this field.Item Embargo Describing a lost camel - Clues for West Asian mercantile networks in South Asian maritime trade (Tenth–Twelfth centuries CE).(Primus Books, 2016-04) Lambourn, E.Item Metadata only Item Metadata only The formation of the Batu Aceh tradition in fifteenth century Samudera-Pasai(Taylor & Francis, 2004-07-01) Lambourn, E.Item Metadata only Item Metadata only India from Aden – Khutba and Muslim Urban Networks in Late Thirteenth-Century India(Lexington Books, 2008) Lambourn, E.Item Embargo India in the ‘India Book’: 12th Century Northern Malabar through Geniza Documents(Archaeopress, 2019-01) Lambourn, E.The publication in 2008 of S.D. Goitein & M.A. Friedman’s “India Book” (India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza ('India Book'). Leiden / Boston, E.J. Brill) is revolutionising the history of the medieval Indian Ocean, or at least the possibilities for that history. This chapter represents a first attempt to integrate the new data from the Genizah documents into the history of the Malabar ports where these Jewish merchants – now referred to as “India traders” - operated. The early 12th century was a period of huge political and economic change and the data from these documents allows us to shed light on a little known period, and one badly represented in indigenous sources.Item Embargo Islam beyond Empires – Mosques and Islamic Landscapes in India and the Indian Ocean(Wiley Blackwell, 2017-08) Lambourn, E.This chapter discusses the mosque architecture of Muslims who lived beyond Islamic polities, beyond the lands of Islam, it focuses in particular on coastal South Asia where many areas were never durably incorporated into Islamic polities and Muslims retained a large degree if community autonomy. Re-situating these mosques within their original social context, the chapter underlines the unique status of mosques in this environment as multifunctional centres of community life; the collaborative, multi-faith social networks that underpinned their construction and maintenance and the consequences of this deep local embededness for the architectural forms and ground plans of such structures.Item Metadata only Khutba and Muslim Networks in the Indian Ocean (Part II) – Timurid and Ottoman Engagements.(Lexington Books, 2011) Lambourn, E.Item Metadata only La production de marbre sculpté à Cambaye au Gujarat et son exportation dans l’Océan Indien (XIIIe - XVe siècles Ap. J. C)(Harrassowitz Verlag and Fundação Oriente, 2003) Lambourn, E.Item Embargo Legal Encounters on the Medieval Globe(ARC Humanities Press, 2017-02-28) Lambourn, E.Law has been a primary locus and vehicle of contact across human history—as a system of ideas embodied in people and enacted on bodies; and also as a material, textual, and sensory “thing.” This volume analyzes a variety of legal encounters ranging from South Asia to South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. The seven essays also explore various material expressions of law that reveal the complexity and intensity of cross-cultural contact in this pivotal era.Item Embargo Material cultures of writing in the Indian Ocean world: a palm leaf letter at the Mamluk court(Routledge India, 2020-11-19) Lambourn, E.This contribution centres on writing technologies in the western Indian Ocean before 1500; more particularly it explores the communicative role of writing supports in long distance, transcultural interactions through a case study from late thirteenth century Mamluk Cairo. The article focuses on Mamluk accounts of the receipt at court of what was ultimately an illegible letter from a Sri Lankan ruler. The embassy left a remarkable literary trace for several generations afterwards, a sign if it were needed that an illegible letter can nevertheless communicate powerfully. The fact that even in the late thirteenth century, after centuries of diplomatic exchanges along the length of the Indian Ocean, a letter might arrive in a language that no one in Cairo could read is a healthy reminder first and foremost of the central importance of envoys and oral missives in diplomatic exchanges at this period. This study also highlights scholarly neglect of the containment of epistolary texts, and more generally any form of writing containment that is not “book” binding in the strictest sense, or related to the containment of written amulets. Like the much neglected envelope, there is ample room for studies of other types of document container.