News and Notes from the Turks Archive, 600 to 1600

Notes and additions to the archive, and occasional pieces on seeing this material in person.

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From the archive

The sections of this site are added to as material is worked through. The most recent additions are the object entries, which cover six pieces in six materials, and the expanded chronology.

Recently added

The six object entries are the newest section. Each covers one material, describes how the thing was made and says what has changed about it since, which is usually more than a visitor expects: silver inlay blackens or falls out, bronze corrodes green, glaze crazes, gold wears through and dyes shift. Almost nothing here looks the way it did when it left the workshop.

The chronology has been rewritten around a list of the dates that actually turn the story, from the Orkhon inscriptions of the 730s to the Selimiye at Edirne in 1575, with a note on what the written sources will and will not tell you. The architecture section now separates tilework from calligraphy, because they answer different problems and were done by different trades.

How the archive is organised

The site follows the order of the material rather than the order it was added. Chronology first, because nothing else makes sense without the sequence; then the peoples in turn; then the two thematic sections, architecture and objects, that cut across the whole period. Cross-links run in both directions, so a claim made in general on a dynasty page can be followed to the specific object that supports it, and back again.

Nothing here is presented as final. Attributions shift, dates get revised, and several of the figures in this history are known almost entirely through work that may not be theirs. Where that is the case the text says so.

Where to start

For a first visit, the chronology gives the shape of the thousand years in one page. The peoples and dynasties section takes each stage in turn, from the Uighurs through the Seljuks and Timurids to the Ottomans.

A note on images

Where a specific historical work appears on this site it is a public-domain reproduction and is credited in its caption. Everything else is illustrative: photographs of object types and materials, used to show what a technique or a surface looks like, and not presented as a record of any particular accessioned piece. The distinction is kept deliberately, because a catalogue image and an illustration do different jobs and confusing them is how bad attributions start.

What is not covered here

There is no coverage of the period after 1600, no coverage of the modern republic, and no attempt at a political history. The subject is the material culture of a thousand years, and the political narrative appears only where it explains why an object looks the way it does or why a workshop moved.

On the 2005 exhibition

The background to the archive, what the show contained and how it was arranged, is on the exhibition page, with a room-by-room summary alongside it.