The Monumental Inscriptions from Early Islamic Iran and Transoxiana

Inscriptions on buildings are a distinctive feature of Islamic architecture, and this book studies the 79 surviving monumental inscriptions in the Iranian world from the first five centuries of the Muslim era (A.D. 622-1106), the period in which all the major trends of monumental epigraphy in the area were set.
These foundation, commemorative, and funerary texts come from the region between Iraq and Soviet Central Asia. Written primarily in Arabic, they embellished architectural monuments and furnishings whose nature implies the construction of major buildings. An extended introduction discusses such general topics as titulature, patronage, and stylistic development. Each text is then presented individually with photographs, drawings, transcriptions, translations and an extensive commentary, which presents the inscription in its larger palaeographic and historical contexts.

Sheila Blair shares the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professorship of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College and the Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair in Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University with her husband and colleague Jonathan Bloom. Author, co-author and editor of dozens of books and hundreds of articles on all aspects of Islamic art, she is particularly interested in the arts of the Mongol period and the uses of writing.

'...collects together secondary material which is scattered and difficult to locate.'
J.M. Rogers, BSOAS, 1992.
'...cette somme de travail patient et érudit qui apporte une contribution notable à l'épigraphie arabe.'
Solange Ory, Bulletin Critique des Annales Islamologiques, 1993.
'...this is a very important work of scholarship which will be of great benefit to a wide range of scholars in different fields of Islamic studies.'
Carole Hillenbrand, Journal of Semitic Studies, 1996.