Agricultural Knowledge in New Persian Texts, 1200–1600
How, in what fields, and by which authorities do premodern New Persian agricultural texts stake claims to contain knowledge? How does evidence in manuscripts from 1200–1600 CE support or challenge modern constructions of a stable tradition of Persian agriculture?
Addressing these questions, Riaz Howey’s dissertation project focusses on a reading of the Ās̱ār va Aḥyāʾ, or Vestiges and the Living, a partially surviving agricultural treatise attributed to an elite figure of the Ilkhanid period, Rashīd al-Dīn Fażlullāh Hamadānī (1247–1318). The text is compared with other Persian tracts on agriculture, as well as relevant sources in other languages, investigating how readers, translators and copyists situated their textual practices in this field.
Particular attention is paid to changes in the social, technical and material conditions under which literate agricultural knowledge was performed and reproduced. The project engages with the history of science in the early Islamic World, in Persian-language sources and in the Mongol Empire.
Riaz Howey completed an MA in global history at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2020. At the MPIWG, he is currently also a predoctoral fellow in the Department III working group “Agriculture and the Making of the Sciences.” He is enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of Bonn in the Department of Islamic Studies and Near Eastern Languages.
Image 1: Detail (f.92v) from an illustrated fourteenth century copy of Bīrūnī’s Arabic Chronology of Ancient Nations showing the prophet Bihāfarīd with a man using a spade (© The University of Edinburgh).
Image 2: Fragment of a page (mounted with F1937.39) showing the end of the mulberry section and beginning of the olive section in an illustrated copy of the Persian Nuzhatnāmih-yi ‘alāyī (The Book of Counsel of ‘Alā) of Shahmardān Ibn Abī al-Kheir Rāzī (© Shahmardān Ibn Abī al-Kheir Rāzī, Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, https://asia.si.edu/object/F1937.38/).
Image 3: Fragment of a page (mounted with F1937.38) showing an illustration of an apple tree with two poppy plants with an instruction for a preparation from an illustrated copy of the Persian Nuzhatnāmih-yi ‘alāyī (The Book of Counsel of ‘Alā) of Shahmardān Ibn Abī al-Kheir Rāzī (© Shahmardān Ibn Abī al-Kheir Rāzī, Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, https://asia.si.edu/object/F1937.39/).