Illustrated Ottoman Cosmographies, c. 1550–1700

Bilha Moor is Assistant Professor of Art History at University of Denver, specialising in Islamic Art and Architecture. She completed her PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2011. Prior to her current position, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral fellow of Islamic art at Northwestern University (USA), a Rothschild postdoctoral fellow at SOAS University of London, and a research associate with the Shahnama Project at the University of Cambridge. Her research has been published in Artibus Asiae, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam and Manuscripta Orientalia and she has book chapters in Disliking Others: Loathing, Hostility and Distrust in Pre-Modern Ottoman Lands, ed. Hakan T. Karateke, H. Erdem Çıpa and Helga Anetshofer (Academic Studies Press, 2018) and Shahnama Studies II: The Reception of Firdausi’s Shahnama, edited by Charles Melville and Gabrielle van den Berg (Brill, 2012), as well as The Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān Online, edited by Johanna Pink et al. (Brill, forthcoming 2024).

• List of FiguresTransliteration and AbbreviationsSeries Editor's Foreword​AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Illustrated Cosmographies in Islamic Lands, 1280–c. 18502. Popular Medicine and Holy Geography: Ṭūsī’s ‘Ajā’ib in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century3. Second Solomon: Sultan Süleyman as the World Sovereign in Frontispieces of Qazwīnī’s ‘Ajā’ib, c. 1565–64. Portraits and Genealogies of the Ottoman Sultans in Seventeenth-century Manuscripts of Qazwīnī’s ‘Ajā’ib5. The ‘Other’ in Qazwīnī’s ‘Ajā’ib: The Jew, the Orthodox Christian and the European6. A New Ottoman Cosmography on the Old World: Ibn Zunbul’s Qānūn al-dunyā, 15637. Fauna and People of the New World in Su‘ūdī’s Ḥadīs-i nev, 1583–c. 1600Appendix A: Illustrated Ottoman Cosmographies Discussed by ChapterAppendix B: Frontispieces in ‘Ajā’ib ManuscriptsBibliographyIndex

The main theme of the book, that the iconography of these texts reflects changing views of the world, is well argued by a comparative wide-ranging study both of contemporary European manuscripts and of earlier Islamic ones. The depth and range of the author’s scholarship is extremely impressive.