Trees have been an intrinsic part of human lives since the times immemorial. In the Indian context, due importance has been attributed towards the preservation of precious flora and fauna resources, which this land has been bestowed with an ample measure. The present work introduces the readers to the culture of environmental protection which had been initiated and sustained, starting from ancient and traversing through Sultanate and Mughal Period. It minutely details the initiatives undertaken for the development of horticulture during the Mughal period. The work enumerates the contribution of the Mughal kings and nobility in laying out gardens on an exquisite scale. It also focuses on the activities initiated by general public for the preservation of ecology in the geographical areas inhabited by them. Various botanical products and the scientific inventions made in this field find due mention regarding their role in upkeep of the economy and general prosperity of the society. The notable role played by the religious elements of various hues and institutions established by them are the highlights of this work.

Fifty leaves that form the sumptuous Kevorkian Album, one of the world's greatest assemblages of Mughal art. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

The Taj Mahal, built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1592-1666 CE) as a mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal (1593-1631 CE), is considered exceptional in the history of world architecture.This book provides a deeper understanding of the Taj Mahal and its builder by examining its inscriptions within their architectural, historical and biographical contexts. The texts adorning the Taj Mahal comprise verses from twenty-two different chapters of the Qur'an but their meaning and significance escapes most non-Muslim visitors or those unable to read them. This book will be the first dedicated solely to the inscriptions in the monument, providing translations, commentary and interpretation of the texts. As well as offering a unique approach to the study of the building, the book uses the inscriptions to expound the foundational elements of Islam, the faith of Shah Jahan and also what the Taj Mahal still means today.

This book traces the journeys of a stone across the world. From its remote point of origin in the city of Nishapur in eastern Iran, turquoise was traded through India, Central Asia, and the Near East, becoming an object of imperial exchange between the Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman empires. Along this trail unfolds the story of turquoise--a phosphate of aluminum and copper formed in rocks below the surface of the earth--and its discovery and export as a global commodity. In the material culture and imperial regalia of early modern Islamic tributary empires moving from the steppe to the sown, turquoise was a sacred stone and a potent symbol of power projected in vivid color displays. From the empires of Islamic Eurasia, the turquoise trade reached Europe, where the stone was collected as an exotic object from the East. The Eurasian trade lasted into the nineteenth century, when the oldest mines in Iran collapsed and lost Aztec mines in the Americas reopened, unearthing more accessible sources of the stone to rival the Persian blue. Sky Blue Stone recounts the origins, trade, and circulation of a natural object in the context of the history of Islamic Eurasia and global encounters between empire and nature.

This edited collection is an interdisciplinary study of gems in the early modern world. It examines the relations between the art, science, and technology of gems, and it does so against the backdrop of an expanding global trade in gems. The eleven chapters are organised into three parts. The first part sets the scene by describing how gems moved around the early modern world, how they were set in motion, and how they were pulled together in the course of their travels. The second part is about value. It asks why people valued gems, how they determined the value of a given gem, and how the value of a gem was connected to its perceived place of origin. The third part deals with the skills involved in cutting, polishing, and mounting gems, and how these skills were transmitted and articulated by artisans. The common themes of all these chapters are materials, knowledge and global trade. The contributors to this volume focus on the material properties of gems such as their weight and hardness, on the knowledge involved in exchanging them and valuing them, and on the cultural consequences of the expanding trade in gems in Eurasia and the Americas.

This book examines collecting around the world and how women have participated in and formed collections globally. The edited volume builds on recent research and offers a wider lens through which to examine and challenge women’s collecting histories. Spanning from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first (although not organized chronologically) the research herein extends beyond European geographies and across time periods; it brings to light new research on how artificiallia and naturallia were collected, transported, exchanged, and/or displayed beyond Europe. Women, Collecting and Cultures Beyond Europe considers collections as points of contact that forged transcultural connections and knowledge exchange. Some authors focus mainly on collectors and what was collected, while others consider taxonomies, travel, patterns of consumption, migration, markets, and the after life of things. In its broad and interdisciplinary approach, this book amplifies women’s voices, and aims to position their collecting practices toward new transcultural directions, including women’s relation to distinct cultures, customs, and beliefs as well as exposing the challenges women faced when carving a place for themselves within global networks. This study will be of interest to scholars working in collections and collecting, conservation, museum studies, art history, women’s studies, material and visual cultures, Indigenous studies, textile histories, global studies, history of science, social and cultural histories.

The book examines the roles that rare and exotic animals played in the cultural self-fashioning and the political imaging of the Medici court during the family’s reign, first as Dukes of Florence (1532-1569) and subsequently as Grand Dukes of Tuscany (1569-1737). The book opens with an examination of global practices in zoological collecting and cultural uses of animals. The Medici’s activities as collectors of exotic species, the menageries they established and their deployment of animals in the ceremonial life of the court and in their art are examined in relation to this wider global perspective. The book seeks to nuance the myth promoted by the Medici themselves that theirs was the most successful princely serraglio in early modern Europe.

This Festschrift volume is published in Honor of Yaacov Choueka on the occasion of this 75th birthday. The present three-volumes liber amicorum, several years in gestation, honours this outstanding Israeli computer scientist and is dedicated to him and to his scientific endeavours. Yaacov's research has had a major impact not only within the walls of academia, but also in the daily life of lay users of such technology that originated from his research. An especially amazing aspect of the temporal span of his scholarly work is that half a century after his influential research from the early 1960s, a project in which he is currently involved is proving to be a sensation, as will become apparent from what follows. Yaacov Choueka began his research career in the theory of computer science, dealing with basic questions regarding the relation between mathematical logic and automata theory. From formal languages, Yaacov moved to natural languages. He was a founder of natural-language processing in Israel, developing numerous tools for Hebrew. He is best known for his primary role, together with Aviezri Fraenkel, in the development of the Responsa Project, one of the earliest fulltext retrieval systems in the world. More recently, he has headed the Friedberg Genizah Project, which is bringing the treasures of the Cairo Genizah into the Digital Age. This third part of the three-volume set covers a range of topics related to language, ranging from linguistics to applications of computation to language, using linguistic tools. The papers are grouped in topical sections on: natural language processing; representing the lexicon; and neologisation.

This book presents a set of new and innovative essays on landscape and garden culture in precolonial India, with a special focus on the Deccan. Most research to date has concentrated on the comparatively well preserved gardens and built landscapes of the celebrated Mughal empire, giving the impression that they have been lacking in other times and regions. Not only does this volume provide a corrective to such assumptions, it also moves away from traditional art-historical approaches by posing new questions and exploring hitherto neglected source materials. The contributors understand gardens in two related ways: first as real or imagined spaces and manipulated landscapes that are often invested with pronounced semiotic density; and second as congeries of institutions and practices with far-reaching social ramifications for the constitution of elite societies. The essays here present a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of garden culture in precolonial India, and together suggest several new and exciting directions of enquiry for those working in the Deccan, Mughal India, and beyond.