An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
My entry for this year’s Old Guard Big Bang! Featuring astrolabes, a mystery, and some fabulous art by the wonderful mific, which you can find on AO3 here. Seriously, go and check out the art, which is so amazing and detailed and atmospheric! Thanks both to mific and to the BB mods, and, while I’m at it, thanks to all the IRL friends who have been listening to me ramble about this story for the last few months!
Summary: It’s 1120, and Yusuf and Nicolò are living in Bukhara, having gone into business together copying books. Everything would be perfect, if only Nicolò could get himself to stop pining over Yusuf. But then Nathaniel ibn Isaac, a Jewish physician from Córdoba, comes to them seeking someone to help him complete a manual for an astrolabe plate he’s invented. Nicolò enjoys the job, until someone starts making attempts on Nathaniel’s life. Now his life, Yusuf and Nicolò’s secret, and their corner of the scholarly community in Bukhara are at risk until they can find the would-be killer.
Reblogging to add that I recently updated this story with a bibliography of sources that can be found online for free. You can find it as chapter 11 of the story, if you want to hop on over to AO3, but if not, I’ve reproduced it here.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert twelfth-century central Asia and wouldn't claim to be—like many a fan, I just find history and historical fiction interesting. Some folks in the comments expressed an interest in learning more about some of the topics in the story, so, I don’t know, I thought I’d put this together in case anyone was looking for resources. I had a lot of fun researching this story, and I hope you find these sources and my DVD-commentary-esque annotations helpful.
Second disclaimer: This bibliography is not complete; I left off anything that would require buying a book or finding it at a library, or anything that’s behind a paywall. Some other works I did not include on the list because they did not meet the criterion of "online for free" but which I consulted in writing this story include Alfarabi's Philosophophy of Aristotle, trans. with an introduction by Muhsin Mahdi; Augustine's Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick; Stephen Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958–1528; Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Historical Sources, ed. Scott C. Levi and Ron Sela; Svat Soucek, A History of Inner Asia; Turko-Mongol Rulers, Cities and City Life, ed. David Durand-Guédy; Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing, ed. Tabish Khair et al.; Seb Falk, The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science; and Nawal Nasrallah, Annals of the Caliphs' Kitchens: Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq's Tenth-Century Baghdadi Cookbook. And let's get real, our old friend Wikipedia was a big help as well.
Astronomy and science
LJS 37 Ikhtiṣār lil-maqālāt min kitāb Uqlīdis. / [اختصار للمقالات من كتاب اقليدس]—an Arabic abridgment of Euclid’s Elements from the early twelfth century that gave me some visual inspiration of what a scientific text from the period might look like!
The Interactive Sky Chart at Sky & Telescope, which was really helpful for me in comparing the constellations present at the same time in Bukhara and Genoa. I make zero claims to having been accurate about what those constellations would have looked like in early July 1120, though!
In this video from the British Museum, curator William Greenwood gives a helpful intro to how to use an astrolabe, which was useful for me because I promptly forgot how to use an astrolabe immediately after every scene I wrote or outlined about astrolabes.
Hossein Zamaniha, “Comparative Study on the Theory of Form and Matter and Its Role in Aristotle and Avicenna's Cosmology.” The ideas in here didn’t really make it into the story—I’m not really conversant enough in philosophy or cosmology to make that work—but I liked imagining Yusuf and Nicolò doing this kind of comparison when trying to figure out their immortality.
Flora Vafea, “Al-Bīrūnī: The Plate of the Eclipses.” This article was key for me in the planning stages, and later when I was trying to figure out the specifics of what Nathaniel was doing. I knew I wanted the story to be a mystery, and I knew I wanted it to have something to do with medieval science, because I’d just finished reading The Light Ages and was on something of a medieval science kick, but this gave me a solid project for Nathaniel, Yusuf, and Nicolò to be working on together.
David A. King and Julio Samsó, “Astronomical Handbooks and Tables from the Islamic World (750-1900): an Interim Report.” Super useful for getting a sense of what a medieval astronomy handbook from the Islamicate world might contain!
Atilla Bir et al., “The Production Guide for the Zarqaliyya (Universal Astrolabe) in the Work of Abu al-Hasan al-Marrakushi”—a great overview of an astrolabe manual by a thirteenth-century astronomer, complete with explanations of how a universal astrolabe works and a lot of diagrams and pictures.
Ptolemy's Almagest, trans. G. J. Toomer—one of the most famous and influential scientific works ever written, and gosh darn is there a lot of really interesting stuff in it. I’m in no position to contextualize it, not knowing enough about the history of science, but I was still really excited to find an English translation of it online.
Aristotle, On the Heavens, trans. J. L. Stocks, The Internet Classics Archive--really interesting philosophical discussion of the composition of celestial bodies.
Book production
Mouse & manuscript—a series of brief lessons on the codicology of manuscripts from the Islamicate world, put together by the Universiteit Leiden and plentifully illustrated with examples!
Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, translated by Franz Rosenthal, on Islamic Philosophy Online—the whole book covers a lot of ground, but I mostly looked at the chapter on book production here.
Shahab Ahmed’s “Mapping the World of a Scholar in sixth/twelfth century Bukhara: Regional Tradition in Medieval Islamic Scholarship as Reflected in a Bibliography,” which is a really interesting article analyzing the intellectual influences of a writer in medieval Bukhara based on a rare example of a bibliography citing his sources—you can get it from Shahab Ahmed’s Academia.edu page here.
Faith & Fable: Islamic Manuscripts from the Cambridge University Library: A lot of this is about the collection itself, but it also has some great visual references as well as introduction to different kinds of scripts, discussion of page layouts, and info on some major medieval authors.
Annemarie Schimmel, “Islamic Calligraphy”—An absolutely gorgeous intro to Islamic calligraphy published in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, with 67 images of calligraphy both on paper and on art objects such as tiles, sword blades, and ceramics.
The Shahnama Project--this could probably also have gone under poetry, but it also offers images of many incredibly beautiful manuscripts. Basically, it's a project at Cambridge cataloguing manuscripts of Ferdowsi's Persian epic Shahnameh, many of which are luxury copies with lavish examples of Persian manuscript illustration.
Bukhara
Bukhara: The Myth and the Achievement, ed. Attilio Petruccioli. I can’t overstate how incredibly helpful this book was or how lucky I felt to find it online. The chapters by Richard Frye, Heinz Gaube, and Firouz Ashrafi were particularly important for me in trying to work out the basic history, layout and water system of the city.
Richard N. Frye in general was a great resource. You can find his translation of Narshakhī’s The History of Bukhara, a book by a tenth-century Sogdian historian, here, and his 1965 book Bukhara: The Medieval Achievement *cough* in places on the internet, but a short and helpful article by him is available open access as part of a special issue of the journal Cahiers d'Asie Centrale: “Early Bukhara”
An Introduction to Uzbekistan, an online module compiled through the Ohio State University. The page on Islamic culture in the medieval period was particularly helpful for me.
“Gateway Cities of Uzbekistan on the Great Silk Roads,” UNESCO Silk Roads Programme, https://en.unesco.org/silkroad/countries-alongside-silk-road-routes/uzbekistan--helpful not only for situating Bukhara among the other cities in what’s now Uzbekistan but also for a more general sense of what a city would look like at this time and place.
Bukhara on Advantour—In addition to descriptions of the city’s attractions, some of which are very old, there’s also a history page, part 9 of which gives a helpful little overview of the 11th-13th centuries.
“Āl-e Borhān,” Encyclopedia Iranica, for background on one of the city of Bukhara's leading spiritual and civic families during the twelfth century.
This history of Bukhara’s Jewish Quarter, which also contains some more general history of the Jewish community in Bukhara up to the present day as well as many images.
“Kalon Minaret,” about one of Arslan Khan Muhammad’s building projects.
Barakatullo Ashurov, “‘Sogdian Christianity’: Evidence from architecture and material culture,” which was helpful for at least giving some idea of the possible presence of a Syriac Christian community in Bukhara in the twelfth century. In retrospect I kind of wish I’d done more with the description of the layout of the church, but hindsight is 20/20.
Food
“A Primer on Medieval Islamic Food” by rhipiduridae: a wonderful, informative and well-organized overview of primary sources, regional differences, and important ingredients of cuisine in the Islamicate world.
Basira Mir-Makhamad, et al., “Qarakhanids on the Edge of the Bukhara Oasis: Archaeobotany of Medieval Paykend”—an archaeological study of 9th-century remnants of food found at Paykend, a city near Bukhara that had already been abandoned in the twelfth century. It’s so cool—they found chickpeas, lentils, barley, apricots, and melons, among other traces. You can find it online here.
Uzbek National Cuisine: one of my strategies for thinking about food options was to compare sources on medieval cuisine in the Islamicate world with modern Uzbek cuisine to find places of overlap or similar ingredients…and then think about what I personally thought sounded tasty.
Medicine and philosophy
Metaphysics by Aristotle, trans. W.D Ross, The Internet Classics Archive--The famous Latin commentaries of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus on the Metaphysics don’t come around until the thirteenth century; Nicolò, on the hunt for a philosophical explanation of his immortality, would have encountered it in Arabic translation and the commentaries of al-Fārābī and Ibn Sina (Avicenna).
Ibn Sina, The Metaphysics of the Healing: A Parallel English-Arabic Text, trans. Michael E. Marmura (you have to make an account to check it out from the Internet Archive, but it’s free!). Not actually Ibn Sina’s big medical work, The Canon of Medicine, but rather from The Book of Healing, which covers topics like astronomy and logic.
Poetry
The Mufaḍḍaliyāt: An Anthology of Ancient Arabian Odes, ed. and trans. Charles James Lyall—this is a significant collection of early Arabic poetry compiled in the 8th century CE, and a valuable source of information on pre-Islamic Arabic life and literature.
Ibn Nahwi, “al-Munfarijah (The Poem of Relief)”—I have nothing particularly clever to say about this poem, written by 11th century Sufi sheikh Ibn Nahwi, I just thought it was really beautiful.
Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, The Quatrains of Abu'l-Ala, trans. Ameen F. Rihani—an old-timey translation, like most of the ones one can find online for free, but this one has the advantage of rhyming, which really made this collection of quatrains stand out to me. I’m always super impressed when people can incorporate poetic effects into translations.
Miscellaneous history and visual inspiration
“Central and North Asia, 1000–1400 A.D” of the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a brief and helpful timeline of the various political dynasties in the environs of Bukhara as well as examples of tiles, textiles, and manuscript leaves.
al-ʿIqd al-Farīd (The Unique Necklace) by Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih, translated by Issa J. Boullata—an 9th/10th-century adab book (i.e., a book of culture and references you'd need to be a refined person) that I wish I’d gotten to do more with. It’s got it all: poetry, political thought, history, witty anecdotes, discussions of manners and ethics, the whole enchilada.
Letters of the Crusaders, ed. Dana Carleton Munro--There’s a lot someone could get out of a book like this, but mostly what I used it for was to get a feel for what a letter in this time period might have looked like.
I found names to be a particularly challenging hurtle early on. I ended up doing a lot of surfing across Wikipedia, looking for famous writers, scientists, and politicians from different places in the twelfth century who could lend realistic names to the characters, but finding a name for a Tangut horse merchant from 12th-century Xi Xia was really tricky for me. I eventually found Xiao Luming’s name in Jinbo Shi’s “Tangut Documents of Household Registrations” from the book The Economy of Western Xia: A Study of 11th to 13th Century Tangut Records, available open-access here.
Dilnoza Duturaeva, “The Qarakhanid World,” in Qarakhanid Roads to China: A History of Sino-Turkic Relations—I thought this was a useful general overview of where the Qarakhanids, who ruled Bukhara in 1120 under the Seljuqs, fit into a larger geopolitical context. The whole book is open-access on JSTOR, which is awesome.
Susan Jane Staffa, “Medieval Cairo: A Socio-cultural Study of an Historic Urban Center of the Near East.” This dissertation isn’t about Bukhara, but it was helpful for me in envisioning how a medieval city in the Islamicate world might have run, and answered a key question for me: is it plausible for the purposes of my story for Bukhara to have had police in 1120? I think so.
James W. Allen, “Nishapur: Metalwork of the Early Islamic Period.” This is published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was a great resource for thinking about the kinds of objects you might expect to find in a household around the Bukhara Oasis in the medieval period.
Welp, that's all I can think of! Thank you so much to everyone who's taken the time to read this story, and I hope all the medieval Bukhara enthusiasts out there enjoy this update!
