Resources and References?

Avaria players share the best links. 🥲 I learn so much cool stuff from this thread!

A very belated thank you for all the links shared as well!

Por Marwa, that calligraphy one is so pretty! It also encourages me to share one of the examples of calligraphy I first looked at. I feel downloading the free pdf is better than attempt to read in google books.

Per the summary ''Almost every major Ottoman calligrapher working in the fifteenth to the early twentieth century is represented in the Sabancı Collection by important examples of calligraphy.'

 https://www.metmuseum.org/met-publications/letters-in-gold-ottoman-calligraphy-from-the-sakip-sabanci-collection-istanbul

That is so gorgeous, pof Ighlaf! <3 Adding a general shout-out to the Met's online collection of publications, a lot of which is free to download! 

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Also, here are some materials I've collected over time about magic, amulets, talismans, and all those interesting things. It's not a whole lot at this point, but figured I might as well share the fun. :)

Arabic and Persian Seals and Amulets in the British Museum - Venetia Porter (& contributors) 
I had saved this PDF a long while ago because I wanted to learn more about what personal and official seals in the Arabic-speaking and Islamic world might look like, and this is a wonderful catalog of all of that! But, as the title states, it also includes a large collection of amulets (starting on page 131). Transcriptions and translations are provided for each object when possible, with helpful introductions and commentary.

Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural - Francesca Leoni (& contributors)
A publication to accompany the Ashmolean Museum's exhibit of the same name from 2016-2017. The photographs of the exhibited objects are SO GORGEOUS!! Oh my goodness.

Medieval Islamic Amulets, Talismans, and Magic - Venetia Porter, Liana Saif, Emilie Savage-Smith
A more academic text, but I thought it was a helpful overview on this subject. I've also noticed over time that Drs. Emilie Savage-Smith, Liana Saif, and Venetia Porter seem to be recurring names in this field - though Venetia Porter seems easy to run into in general!

A sarf talisman from Ghayl Ba Wazir, Hadramawt - Mikhail Rodionov
Another more academic text, but a short and (imo) still interesting read about a specific artifact from Yemen with some B&W photographs.

So this is a little bit lighter of a link, but to my fellow Egypt and/or Amunat nerds - a dive into how hieroglyphics, like much of the ancient world, were so much more colorful than we think! 

This one is also interesting IMO for talking about the process of how to display something like that for modern audiences. Using technology in conjunction with ancient artifacts is something the museum world could push a lot further, and this feels like a perfect example of how to do it right.

And here I go double-posting, but: Jannah asked Kamenes ICly if the ink at al-Mansuri's was made from iron galls or mined, and I immediately launched myself into a Google hole to have an informed answer.

The oldest inks were carbon inks, made from soot in various fashions - they were used everywhere for a long, long time. 

Looking deeper into that, I found this fascinating paper that analyzed ancient Egyptian inks from parchments in the Roman era. I'll paste the bit I found particularly cool:

The general observation is that the ancient Egyptian black and red inks were made from organic and inorganic material, primarily soot and ocher, which was mixed with a binder, typically gum Arabic, and suspended in water, and at times perhaps in other fluids like animal glue, vegetable oil, and vinegar (1–3). The mixture was subsequently dried and pressed into pellets, which would be carried around by the scribe (4, 5) (SI Appendix, Fig. S15). A liquid ink could be prepared by mixing the pellet with a bit of water, when the scribe was ready to write a text using the nib of a reed pen. Thus, like in paints, the colorants employed by the ancient Egyptian scribes in inks can be classified as pigments rather than dyes, since they were always dispersed as solid and practically insoluble particles when applied to the writing surface (6). Although the original and continual employment of ink is in writing, it should be recalled that ink is also used in the delineation of objects by artists. Thus, ink and paint are mutually convertible to each other’s uses and in ancient Egypt the verbs denoting “to write” and “to paint” (sš) were regarded as synonymous (1).

Carbon inks were largely passed over by the late medieval period by iron gall ink. (Here's a cool paper describing and analyzing recipes for iron gall inks, written by a 13th-century Andalusian.) But most of the sources on 'medieval inks' take a really Eurocentric perspective, to nobody's surprise. To make iron gall ink you require oak gall nuts, which means you need... a lot of oak trees. I don't think oaks are nearly as common in the Middle East as in Europe, though I know some species exist. And this beautiful-looking book on the inks and paints of the Middle-East (which I am now coveting) gives equal space to both carbon blacks and tannine (aka, based on iron+tannin, like iron gall) blacks.

So I tried to dig deeper to figure out if iron gall ink really took over EVERYWHERE. And I found this amazing book containing various chapters on the history of ink. Chapter 4 taught me that apparently making soot of sufficient quality for good ink was tricky, and that impelled the switch over to iron gall ink. Chapter 7 involves the author replicating Arabic ink recipes from the 600s-1300:

The Ink (ḥibr) of Abū Ṭāhir: It takes two and a half dirham of good gall nuts and the same amount of good gum. They are pulverized in a mortar. Twenty-five dirham of water are poured on it and it is rubbed until it is good and pure, God willing.

God willing. (Apparently God wasn't to the author, whose ink was almost invisible.) 

Most of these recipes are iron-gall based, though one actually involves making black dye from sumac fruits. So I think I can call it - almost certainly the black inks we'd be using ICly are iron gall inks, though it isn't impossible somebody would use/sell carbon inks, especially perhaps in Amunat as an old traditional product. Chapter 10 goes through precise and detailed recipes for different colored inks from a 13th century manuscript, so if anybody ever wants to RP that out in painstaking detail - it's all there, and delightful. 

For example, talking about red cinnabar ink:

Take some red cinnabar, grind it finely, then rinse it with the water of
sour pomegranate seeds, pour water over it and rinse well, and purify it
after leaving it for one hour, until [the suspension] has settled.

Then, grind it either in an impermeable or on a polished permeable stone
slab, add water gradually and grind it until it cannot absorb any more water
and is similar to ḥarīra soup.

Then, add the dissolved gum arabic and pound it vigorously until it is
absorbed into the substance.

If you wish to make it into an ink, pour this on a washed silk wad inside
a glass jar and write with it. If, instead, you want to use this for paints, use
a hair brush to spread it onto the images you wish and then the leaf will
be coloured in a precious red, and you should know this.

You SHOULD know this, apparently.

TIL.

This is some very cool stuff; thank you for sharing! :D

And just to jump in from Avaria's own lore perspective, most of the ink currently available in-game is generally assumed to be produced from oak galls. The gall oak that is native to Ruleska has been widely naturalized in areas throughout the caliphate where it can grow in the wild, which includes stony hillsides in Raziya. And especially fine iron gall ink is an export of southern Irzal/northern Rahoum.

Of course you had already thought about this! Kamenes incorrectly said mined because I didn't do enough research before replying and assumed there would be an Oak Shortage, so I will just have to pretend he never asked where the ink came from.

A few books on hunting and animals that I thought were cool :)

The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History - Thomas Allsen: Part of the synopsis: "From antiquity to the nineteenth century, the royal hunt was a vital component of the political cultures of the Middle East, India, Central Asia, and China. Besides marking elite status, royal hunts functioned as inspection tours and imperial progresses, a means of asserting kingly authority over the countryside." What bits and pieces I've read were really interesting imo! I especially loved how the book is organized by subject matter, so that it brings together information and examples from a wide variety of societies across time under each topic.

The Hunting Book by Gaston Phœbus - Gabriel Bise, J Peter Tallon: An English translation of the 14th-century book/instruction manual "Livre de chasse" written by a French lord who loved hunting. This particular publication is full of gorgeous color illustrations from one of the surviving manuscripts. (Note, this file is image heavy and may be slow to load.)

A Bestiary of Ancient Nubia: A collection of essays from a recently concluded exhibit at the ISAC Museum. The PDF is free to download! From the exhibit brochure: "A Bestiary of Ancient Nubia presents a fascinating panorama of animals in ancient Nubia from the A-Group culture to the medieval period (3800 BCE–900 CE). From the lion to the crocodile, from the ibis to the ibex, from cattle to insects, the exhibition is an original take on the history of the Nubian civilization..."