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This brilliant, vivid and impressionistic series of sketches, formed during her 1892 stay in Persia, is Gertrude Bell's first published work. Infused with a distinctive orientalism, 'Persian Pictures' is an evocative, virtuosic meditation, moving sinuously between Persia's heroic, complex, mythical past and its present decline; the public face of Tehran and the otherworldly 'secret, mysterious life of the East', the lives of its women, its enclosed, quasi-medieval gardens; from the bustling cities to the lonely wastelands of Khorasan. Bell's documentation of Muharram – the month of mourning for Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed – and Ramadan, display a mind finely attuned to the differences and similarities between Islam and Christianity, East and West. 'Persian Pictures' is both travelogue and meditation, an elegiac and beautifully observed account of a spellbinding land.
List of Illustrations; Introduction; Preface; 1. An Eastern City; 2. The Tower of Silence; 3. In Praise of Gardens; 4. The King of Merchants; 5. The Imam Hussein; 6. The Shadow of Death; 7. Dwellers in Tents; 8. Three Noble Ladies; 9. The Treasure of the King; 10. Sheikh Hassan; 11. A Persian Host; 12. A Stage and a Half; 13. A Bridle-Path; 14. Two Palaces; 15. The Month of Fasting; 16. Requiescant in Pace; 17. The City of King Prusias; 18. Shops and Shopkeepers; 19. A Murray of the First Century; 20. Travelling Companions