Traveling Gardens: Khorasan and Mesopotamia, 8th-12th c.

This research project aims to examine the extent to which historical, cultural, political, and commercial connections between the seat of the Abbasid caliphate in Lower Mesopotamia and the powerful eastern region of Khorasan (now divided between modern Iran, Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan) led to an exchange and/or modification in concepts of palace gardens at the heart of pre-Mongol Western Asia. As built environments, gardens probably more than any other human construction, depend on the physical geography of the land, and thus are strongly affected by the surrounding landscape, climate and topography. This fact suggests that the gardens generally should have followed indigenous horticultural and architectural traditions. But in royal gardens cultural exchanges, as well as geography, influenced the ways in which the wealth and sophistication of the monarch was expressed. Several examples of cross-cultural impacts in garden design have already been traced in scholarship, but thus far there has not been a larger contextual study of gardens built during the early Islamic period, for which there is little physical evidence. In fact, our current understanding of gardens in this period is dominated by widely accepted assumptions and hypotheses based on physical evidence of ancient gardens, which have been excavated to some extent, and much later gardens, which have been partly preserved. Travelling Gardens will rectify this gap by bringing together contemporary textual sources and the remaining archaeological evidence pertaining to palace gardens of medieval Khurasan and Lower Mesopotamia. It intends to achieve three main objectives. First, it examines the geopolitical configuration of the Abbasid caliphate with its dense networks of exchange, and encounters between Khorasan and Lower Mesopotamia. Second, it investigates specific formal and functional features of palace gardens in Khorasan, regarding their environmental, architectural, and transregional contexts. Third, it offers a comparative and anthropological analysis of these gardens features with those in Lower Mesopotamia (illuminated by the principal investigator in her previous work), focusing on cultural interactions between these two regions and their respective geographical characteristics. Based on these royal gardens, which nevertheless strongly depend on their physical, cultural, and human geography, Travelling Gardens provides a unique lens through which to gain new insights into cultural and material exchanges within the Abbasid Caliphate. Furthermore, it fills a significant gap in the global history of garden architecture and sheds new light on various factors that affected the design and function of these highly representational built environments.